: Re: Is it plagiarism to use something from a nonfiction work and put it into fiction? I was reading about this Japanese dance style written by a man who taught it. He said that the style was

@Annie587

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Plagiarism is an academic violation that applies to scholarly papers. It doesn't apply to works of fiction.

The whole point of a scholarly paper is that you're presenting something that you claim is a new and original idea or discovery. If you copied it from someone else, then your paper is a fraud. Of course you may use ideas from others and build on them, hence, footnotes to distinguish what is yours and what is someone else's, and when someone else's, whose.

But if you talk about a scientific discovery or a cultural phenomenon in a work of fiction, readers do not normally assume that you invented it. Indeed, it's very common to write fiction centered on some new cultural phenomenon. Science fiction often centers around a new scientific discovery.

Note the difference between plagiarism and copyright violation. If you read an interesting book about dance and copy sections of that book word for word into your novel, that might be copyright violation. (Depending on how much you copied it might be considered "fair use".) But if you copy the ideas and put them in your own words, there is no issue.

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