Kwakigra

I think stealing is highly underrated in the writing community. Everyone loves a good thief but the bad thieves get all the attention, spoiling the reputation of all. I honestly think that being a good thief makes for a better writer and encourage everyone to steal prodigiously but tactfully.

Bad thieves belong in literary jail. Aside from the obvious consequence of potentially getting sued for copyright infringement, the far worse crime of bad thievery is against art itself. Bad thieves steal without even understanding the value of what it is they stole, so their attempt to fence it for their own profit is fraud and often makes the reader feel defrauded. No one likes a cheap counterfeit of something they actually value. Worse still, the inferior knockoff could become more popular than the original, diluting and perverting it into a commodity to be kicked around rather than an honest expression of humanity that it was originally. Stealing incompetently is harmful to the writer, the reader, and to literature. A good thief, on the other hand, gets away clean and is even lauded for their efforts.

There are two ways to get away with stealing ideas for your story:

1. The reader couldn’t know you stole the idea unless you told them.
2. The reader suspects or knows that you stole the idea and are pleased that you did.

The key to getting away with ideas you don’t want people to know you stole is to launder them. A dirty idea sticks out like a sore thumb in a different story. It’s jarring to read about a character or event which was written for another story and airdropped into yours. A whole dirty story just sucks because it can only ever be an inferior counterfeit of the original.

To launder stolen ideas, you have to make it look like you came up with it yourself and it was something you would have come up with. If you want to steal an idea for your story in the first place, it probably actually is something you would have come up with but didn’t. You have to strip away everything that attaches that idea to its original source and replace it with your own context.

Let’s say I wanted to steal Jack Sparrow for my story. That’s a pretty high stakes gambit, being one of the most recognizable characters in pop fiction and also owned by one of the most litigious companies in the world. I could drop a thinly veiled Jack Sparrow in my story and get my shit wrecked legally and critically, or I could keep what I need from the idea and get rid of the hard evidence. I want a character like Jack Sparrow in my story to serve a similar purpose that he served in the movies. I don’t need his name, his appearance, his gender, his profession, his style of dress, his dialect, any of his actions, or other dead weight. What I need of this character for my story is a swaggering liar who appears fully incompetent but is oddly successful. The reason I want a character like this in my story is because I believe he would make a good foil for my characters and could take my story in interesting directions because of the kinds of decisions I think he would make.

For the sake of this example, I’m taking him for my high fantasy setting. My Jaithe Arrow is an elven woman working as a mercenary captain who behaves a lot like Jack Sparrow. I don’t know what the movie writers were thinking about why Jack did what he did, but I do know why my Jaithe behaves the way she does. My interpretation of that character, as all audience interpretations of that character, is unique to my experience and personality and I can build on what appealed to me about the character. My story is not The Pirates of the Caribbean, so my Jaithe Arrow is going to be involved in and reacting to an entirely different set of circumstances. Ultimately, the character may remind the reader of Jack Sparrow, but the character is clearly not Jack Sparrow just inserted into a story he wasn’t made for.

This could bleed over into the second category. I’ve often heard “Firefly” referred to as “The Han Solo Show” with total fondness. There is probably a lot of Han Solo in the character of Malcolm Reynolds, and fans of one character are likely fans of the other. When fans make this connection, it’s because they liked that someone made a show about a character like Han Solo even if it wasn’t produced by Lucasfilm. Anything that may have been stolen is totally clean. Firefly is not like Star Wars and although the two characters are similar in many ways they each fit uniquely into their own respective stories.

The thing that I like most about the second way to get away with stealing is that most ideas you can steal are actually free. Anything that actually happened we have record of is free from earliest history to current events. Anything you experienced or heard about happening is free. Science is free. Philosophy is free. Esoterica is free. Any creative works in the public domain are free. With some possible stipulations, much open source content is free for you to use. The thing about taking all these free ideas is that readers often like learning about real things. I don’t think a single person was upset that much of what occurred in the Song of Ice and Fire series was stolen from actual history. I do know many people who really appreciate that he stole those events from the pages of history books, in fact. Even if you cobble your whole story together with these kinds of stolen ideas, it will probably read as more deep than cheap.

There is nothing ethically wrong about adapting ideas of other people to your own work. In fact, it’s basically impossible to create anything completely original. Even if you did, it would be at best an interesting novelty rather than something readers would find relatable. The originality of a given writer is how their mind processes their experience and presents it to readers. The same idea presented by two different people in completely different ways can appeal to vastly different audiences. Oftentimes, an idea will never reach an audience unless a writer uses their creativity to bridge the gap from a different audience to the next, and that’s almost always a good thing.

Many writers would not consider what I advocated for here to be stealing. I wrote this for anyone who might have. Writers appropriate ideas like this constantly whether consciously or not because we are human creatures in communication with one another. If you come across any idea that you would like in your writing, you can actually have it. Take it and make it yours. By the time you’re done adjusting it for your own purposes it’ll be as original as anything else. Get stealing!

Inspiration strikes! Your muse has finally appeared and blessed you with a story, fully formed! It's so vivid in your mind. It's engaging, impactful, expressive, and beautiful. All you need to do now is put pen to paper and move it from nine o'clock to three o'clock.

You look at the blank document and suddenly anxiety floods you. Where to begin? How to begin? You write out a few sentences hoping to echo the grandiosity of what you have in mind. They suck. Obviously. These pathetic sentences are unbecoming of the story you have in mind. You crumple the page and toss it aside.

Clearly, you think, this is a story so deep that it requires intricate planning. You grab a second page and now your ideas flow out. A governmental system here, a character dynamic there, even a summary of the ending chapter. Now you have traction! This must be the way!

Weeks later, you have a binder of disjointed notes and not one page of story. The project has expanded exponentially and your expectations for yourself have risen accordingly. The story is essentially flawless, and it's yours. Why the hell can't you write it then!?

Cliche, trite, messy, plain, boring, inconsistent, unreadable. That's what those few paragraphs you've managed to get down have been. The shocking disparity between how the story goes in your mind and this childish attempt at storytelling is causing massive cognitive dissonance. Now when you look at the page with every intention to give it another try, you know whatever you end up with is going to be crap. Screw it. You decide to keep worldbuilding and hope that one day your plan will be so perfect the story will come naturally. Maybe.

This has been a dramatization of why I stopped writing for almost a decade and I'm sure I'm not the only one who has experienced this trap. This is called perfectionism which has affected me in other ways as well. I'm still very miffed that this tendency of mine kept me from engaging in one of my favorite activities for so long. Fortunately I've finally accepted that the reason my writing hasn't been up to my own standards was that I haven't been honing my craft. That was it. Simple.

I'm now no longer embarrassed by what I write, just a little embarrassed that I stopped myself from engaging in the art for what in hindsight seem like very silly reasons. I still write many things that I'm not satisfied with and probably always will. Instead of regarding this as somehow a personal failure, I can now ask myself why I'm not satisfied with it. The answers to my own questions here have informed the direction I take my writing stylistically and conceptually. I discovered that it was not actually a problem that my prose looks vastly different than that of many of my favorite authors. I'm not them and I'm not doing the same thing that they are doing even though we're all technically writing. I used to regard writing as somehow needing to conform to the proper academic style such as the neoclassical paradigm of the plastic arts in eighteenth century France, but in reality there isn't one aside from basic standards of formatting and readability (which are not hard rules themselves if you know them well enough to subvert them).

The most powerful thing however is that I'm now writing only because I want to do it, and practicing writing only because I want a better story to read from myself. The only way to be a better writer is to write, and the only way I can write is if I want to do it. When you really care about what you're writing you can see its potential through the mess of your initial attempts and you have the opportunity to bring it closer to your vision, or in my case, go in a completely different direction from the original idea. It really is what you make of it.

Whether it's a few hundred words or a few thousand, any amount of writing of any kind is better than no writing of any kind. The epic can wait. Until then you can write episodes, short stories, essays on topics you're interested in, and whatever else your fleeting desires pop into your mind. Even writing comments on Beehaw is something. If you want to write, write!

I've been writing much more consistently over the last few years after a years-long hiatus starting in college. Basically, I dropped all my useless expectations of what my writing should be and started to pay a lot more attention to my own writing sensibilities. I've been leaning into the way I like to write without regard to anything else. I have a career elsewhere which I'd like to stay in so the only audience I have to care about is myself so I can go as niche as I want.

Here are some of my quirks:

• My descriptions tend to be functional or absent. I will describe features of characters and settings only as necessary and leave to the imagination whatever I can. This keeps the action and dialogue moving at breakneck pace.

• While editing, when I think something is too explicit I often make it more vague. For example, a character might describe how and why a problem is happening and I will change it so that they are only mentioning their experience of the problem and obfuscating things they wouldn't want to emphasize.

• I'll write pages of notes detailing some system or concept only to hint at it briefly in the narrative. This is to imply consistency while being relevant and fast. Also, mystery is fun.

• I spend a loooot of time re-reading and adjusting the last few thousand words. I wrote it specifically so I would like it, so it's a lot of fun to go back and make it so I like it more. I enjoy editing as much as writing.

• I cut a lot of material when it's not working for me or if it starts to clutter things up. Whenever I cut something, I put it on a separate document. Sometimes I find somewhere else to insert it where it would make more sense. Sometimes I note why I deleted it to give me an idea of what I want instead.

• I love stealing from history. Characters, concepts, social constructs, belief systems, politics, etc. It's all there free to take and adapt.

• I make up a lot of stuff on the spot, then go back and add it in so it seems like I planned ro include it from the beginning.

• My outline is only a suggestion.

What are your quirks?