What’s a book you wish you could plagiarize?
I hate plagiarism. I’m a high school English teacher and I consider plagiarism to be among the worst things one can do academically and, for it being unbelievably lazy and, it infuriates me.
Hbomberguy just put out an incredibly detailed YouTube video surrounding plagiarism and it made me consider my own writing.
I get an emotion sometimes where I feel an intense jealousy for the writing choices of others and I find myself wishing I could have had that idea first. I want to know your examples and if you’ve ever felt that.
Some instances of me feeling that emotion:
The ending of Dance, Dance by Haruki Murakami literally made me cry. So tense, so impactful, I loved it.
The twist at the end of Mrs. Dalloway surrounding Septimus was so good I instantly called a friend and told them.
I wish I could have written One Art by Elizabeth Bishop. It’s heartbreaking in such a quiet, subtle way. It’s got the same feeling as the Thoreau quote where he talks about how men often lead lives of quiet desperation and die with a song still in them.
Let me know what you think!
by BurnerMcNeverPost
5 Comments
I wish I could plagiarize This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. As someone with autism, I can have a lot of trouble writing fluid dialogue/social interaction in my short stories. Half of this book is made up of letters with flowing language that combines scifi, fantasy, and romantic subtext. It’s a little different since it’s not directly back and forth dialogue between characters, but I love it. It’s also a wonderful example of world building. There’s a lot of scifi and fantasy terminology that makes sense in-universe, but the reader has little or no context for. The focus of the story is the main characters’ relationship, so you don’t get a lot of direct explanations. Different chapters just add more and more context to some of these ideas. I know that it’s a pretty simple concept in storytelling to “show not tell”, but this book felt like it did it perfectly.
Sorry for the long rant! I just really loved that book🤣
That would be like me wanting to be that person or someone I’m not. I’m not a writer. I enjoy other people’s work, art, musings. Like I love Carlos Santana and his music, style and creative process. But I don’t wanna be him.
I just want to be Mary Roach. Doing really interesting research into odd topics and writing funny books about all of it? I totally wish that was my life.
Don’t you think it’s kinda weird to be envious (which is what you are, you’re not jealous) of a writer?
Sort of, not really. My writing is a continuous evolution based on what I read. My stories constantly adapt to that evolution.
So if there is something I read that I want to ‘plagiarize’, then I adapt my story, if possible, to accommodate that desire.
Original work does not exist. All of it is plagiarized from other works and adapted to their own.
After all, picasso famously said, ‘good artists borrow, great artists steal’.