“To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity and creative strength.” Lawrence Clark Powell, noted author, literary critic, bibliographer and librarian at UCLA for many years. (born 1906-died 2001).
We all have these qualities to one degree or another. The secret is to tap into the well-spring of inspiration present at some level in everyone’s heart. Any experience can be a writing prompt. In a recent writing workshop, a professor of English and creative writing suggested that a writer be conscious of our literary forbears. The title of the workshop was “Writing with Allusion, (i.e. an indirect reference to something), Beg, Borrow or Steal,” It is no sin to use ideas or methods employed by those who have trod the path of creativity in the past. He showed how all writers do it to some extent or another. When we use a name or reference a character from mythology or Scripture, we are using the literary device of allusion. He gave this as an example of “begging” from the wellspring of recognizable words that embody a concept which is succinct and universally understood.
Whether we are aware of it or not, there are a finite number of plot concepts that recur throughout literature. Writers “borrow” these ideas and incorporate them into their works of fiction. Going as far back as the Epic of Gilgamesh, written thousands of years ago in ancient Mesopotamia, writers have built on the plot line of a heroic figure surviving against insuperable odds.
The word “steal” would tend to give us pause. The word implies flagrant plagiarism. Plagiarism, however, as everyone knows, is the wholesale copying verbatim from another’s work and claiming it as our own. When the professor demonstrated what he meant, he used fragments of poetry and asked the class to employ the same meter and pattern but change the words. Although he gave the prompts as an exercise in poetry, he made the point that this method may apply to all forms of writing. The professor cited T. S. Eliot who copied shamelessly from other poets in composing the “Wasteland” and created a timeless piece of literature.
Finally, to quote Isaac Newton: “If I have seen farther than others, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants.”
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