The Art of Ripping Off

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that all authors steal from each other. That’s art, really; you build on what’s gone before, chronicling the changes in society and human understanding by taking a work and playing with it from your own unique perspective. It’s only stealing if you don’t transform it somehow, if you don’t add to it.

That’s writing 101: Good writer’s steal. The thing is, the first stage of transforming something into your own unique work is very similar to simply ripping someone off.

The Green-Eyed Monster

The creative process is 99% driven by jealousy. The other 1% is a combination of things, including greed, the pure joy of creativity, and fear of monsters, but mostly it’s jealousy. Writers are the most jealous creatures in the world. Publish a book to acclaim? We hate you, because our books are smarter. Publish a book to great sales? We hate you, because people clearly lack the taste and wisdom to choose our books over yours. Writers may smile when they shake your hand, but we are black holes of hatred and jealousy.

When we read a book that’s really, really good—or really, really popular, or, god help us, both—we instantly start mining it for bits we can steal. And if the book really grabs us as something great, our first attempts at replicating it will be very, very close to simply ripping the book off.

And that’s okay.

Writing a pastiche of something else is a great way to figure out its secrets. Writing a story that is essentially someone else’s story with a few flourishes is like taking an engine apart and then putting it back together to learn how it works. At the end, you’ll have a small pile of parts left over—mysterious and ominous. But the engine, maybe, still runs despite that. It’s mysterious, but when that happens, you’ve taken your first step to owning the ideas and making them your own.

You keep taking it apart and putting it back together again. Parts get left over. If the story still runs, you put in new parts of your own to replace them. Repeat. Eventually, you’ve got a story that hums and purrs and there’s so many of your parts in there it’s no longer something you ripped off, it’s something you transformed.

That’s how it’s done. Although, please don’t take the word “parts” too literally.