: Re: Originality of Writing I have been writing a book, and often times I feel like a lot of the elements in my story are just Freudian slips. I'm not plagiarizing or anything, but sometimes I

@BetL639

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Embrace what you cannot avoid. All writers are the products of what they read, seasoned with small dashes of what they care about or have experienced in the real world. None of us can escape it and I would venture that there is little reason to try.

Even the authors we love are victim to this recipe. Their writing borrows from the talents of those authors whom they admired and enjoyed.

This is not an act of theft. It is a process of immitation and enhancement. It cannot be theft, because writing is many-faceted and hard. What you write while thinking about another's scenes, is not a plagaristic duplication of their work (unless of course, you copy their work word for word). Your writing will be weaker than theirs in some ways (immitation) and could be stronger than theirs in others (enhancement). It will never be the same.

Quite often, I deliberately steal from the writers I love. I have a bookcase behind me and the top shelf is full of fictions which I have reread so often that their stories are hollow to me now. Each of these novels is full of earmarked pages and scribbled margin notes. They are my pirates booty of stolen treasures, each crafted by a more talented writer than I.

Whenever I get stuck in my writing, (for me that's usually fighting scenes, love scenes and scenes that are emotionally dark) I will sacrifice some of my writing time and just read one of these masterworks. Using my page folds and notes, I can usually find a scene that is similar to what I'm trying to write. Just by reading through the scene, perhaps including a few pages before and after, I remind myself of my favorite techniques for handling this particular writing challenge.

These stories are so old and warn out for me that I don't get caught up in their story telling. Instead, I'm free to pay attention to their word choice, their sentence length and their metre. By drinking in the structure of another author's hand, I'm usually able to find my best voice for the scene I need to write.

This technique has gotten me through those horrible times when without it, nothing I wrote seemed to work at all.

Is it thievery? probably.
Plagerism? no.
Does it help me write my stories in the manner I want the written? definitely.

I wouldn't spend much time worrying about your originality. There is very little opportunity for originality left. Instead, invest that time in reading. Fill your mind with beautifully written scenes and masterfully crafted characters. Then steal everything that is worth taking from them, and pour it into your craft.

Your readers will thank you for it, and if you are lucky, someday they will steal a few scenes from you.

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