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I would suggest a five foot / five minute rule.
Set up a table and chair at least five feet from your word processor and put the source book on it. Sit down at that chair and read for at least five minutes. This is usually enough for you to absorb the focus of the subject matter, the style of word choice and the overall feel of the source.
Then walk slowly to your word processor, leaving the source book behind. Write in your own words for at least five minutes, preferably much longer. Allow what you absorbed from the source to influence your work, but keep the work your own. Never deliberately steal words. Even if the source author said something exactly the way you want to say it, repeating those perfect words in your head as your race back to the word processor is cheating. Worse than that, it is the worst kind of theft. Plagiarism is a scary legalish word, but the truth of the matter goes deeper than that. As authors, our greatest creations are our words. When one steal another's art, it's more like kidnapping than petty theft.
The idea behind this technique is that you are trying to extract the style and content of a source without stealing exact words. I use this technique when trying to write certain types of scenes which I am not naturally good at. I have yellow highlighted and labeled sections in a shelf full of favorite books, which handle particular scene types artistically. When the need arises, I step away from the keyboard, sit down in my reading chair and submerge myself in another author's excellence. When I eventually return to the keyboard, I'm usually much better prepared and at least momentarily more skilled for the crafting of that challenging scene. Used in this way, abstract mimicry becomes an effective tool rather than a deplorable crime.
Keep Writing!
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