: Re: What is the best way to use your favorite authors as inspiration without plagiarism? I am a big fan of certain authors' writing styles and stories and I am convinced that when I sit down

@Annie587

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The difference between copyright violation, plagiarism, and inspiration is a range and not three distinct points.

Obviously -- I think this is obvious anyway -- if you copy somebody else's story word for word and put your own title and by-line on it, that's copyright violation.

If you take somebody else's story and make just enough changes to avoid copyright law -- like you go through and rewrite all the text in your own words while not changing the plot or characters in any way -- that's unimaginative, if not plagiarism.

But we all get ideas from others.

I often hear people criticize a story as "just a copy" of some other story based on the thinnest of similarities. Like any movie that presents the same incident from two different points of view seems to inevitably be called a rip-off of Roshomon. I've heard stories called copies of Romeo and Juliet despite having no discernible similarity other than also being a love story. Etc.

So yeah, I've seen movies where it appears that someone took the script for some other movie that made a ton of money and just went through doing search-and-replace with a word processor to change the names of all the characters and places, then shuffled a few scenes around, added a couple of car chases and explosions, and made their own movie.

But I've also read plenty of books that borrow ideas from each other but then explore them in different ways. Just because two books are both about, say, time travel doesn't mean that they are the same story. There are lots of things you can do with that idea. Etc.

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