Steal Like an Artist

Today, I would like to introduce a concept that my AP English teacher likes to call “Stealing Like An Artist”.

In truth, when he talks about “stealing like an artist” he’s really reminding us to cite every single thing we ever add to an essay… ever. However, I’m stealing his phrase and using it for my own purposes, which coincidentally related to what I’m talking about.

I want to air out the dirty laundry right now. I am not talking about plagiarism.

Plagiarism is, in a simple phrase, no cool.

If there is anyone among my audience that hasn’t had their head bashed in hundreds upon hundreds of times by their English teachers about what plagiarism is and to never do it, plagiarism is when an creator, typically an author of some sort, uses someone else’s ideas or concepts or characters or what not and passes them off as their own.

It’d be like me writing a book about a girl named Beth and her best friend Marie who find out that they have magical powers and have to go to a school to learn how to control their powers where they attend classes every day and learn how to do magic and find out that they're destined to fight an evil wizard who's trying to take over the magical world.

The saddest part is that I actually did try to write that book in the 3^rd grade. Marie could breathe under water. I don’t remember anything about Beth which is funny considering she was the character based off me.

Does this mean that you will never be able to write a book about a teenager discovering they have magical powers?

Of course not. It’s certainly hasn't stopped someone yet.

Does this mean you will never be able to write a book about said teenager going off to learn how to control their magical powers?

No, probably not.

Does this mean you will never be able to write a book about said teenager going off to a magical school to learn magic from a wise old man and perhaps fight off a Dark Lord?

… yeah. Unless you are severely clever and tactful, which would be extremely hard.

This being said, are there still authors who write very similar novels? Yes. Many people have accused Suzanne Collins of plagiarizing Koushun Takami’s Battle Royale for her novel Hunger Games. Both novels are about a dystopian world where teenagers are placed in an area of some sort with lots of weapons and told to kill each other until there’s only one survivor. She claims that she had never even heard of Battle Royale until after her book was published.

Is this true?

I think only Collins herself knows. A lot of people think that she’s lying. I’m personally inclined to believe her. There have been more than enough times in my life where I’ve come up with some idea or done some project that I think is completely original only to find out that someone else has come up with the same thing.

It happens. Especially in writing.

It’s one of the biggest problems that any creators face. Trying to create something new.

I’m not going to claim that everything’s been written, every genre created, every character flaw explored. I’m sure people thought that when some crazy English lady named Mary Shelly wrote about a scientist named Frankenstein that used electricity to create life, a monster named after himself, and the science fiction genre.

However I am going to venture to say, and I’m sure many Literature professors would agree with me, that there are only a handful of stories that have ever been told and will continue to be told as long as humans exist to tell or listen to them.

Some people will tell you that there are only two stories, some four, some thirty-six.

Explaining all of these is a post for another day though.

So, if every story has been written… what are we supposed to do?

That’s the fun part that ties in with stealing like an artist.

Literally almost any major plot device you can come up with has been used before, even if you don't know it. Whether by the Greeks, a French writer in the 18^th century, Shakespeare, or in past ten years.

So basically no matter what you write you’re stealing from someone else.

The trick is doing it well enough that no one cares.

You can do this by mixing and matching plots and devices and character traits and such. That’s one of the best ways to create a character in my opinion; mixing and matching character traits until they become a real person. Take a plot device here, a plot twist there.

Then, perhaps most importantly, you put your own flair on it. Whatever it is that makes you different, your idea different, your novel different. That’s what really makes a story unique. That’s the part that you’re really selling to an agent, or an editor, or readers. That is the answer to their question, “why should I read your book and not one of the thousands of others?”

I will quote myself in this regard. “All the good plots have been taken. So be discrete when you steal.”