
Do Great Writers Really Steal? - d99kris
https://lithub.com/do-great-writers-really-steal-on-plagiarism-and-publishing/
======
Nasrudith
There is also the fact that ideas are easy and thus cheap - good execution is
hard and thus expensive. Look at grand successes that are essentially
formulaic and others which take interesting concepts and squander them.

I have found some B-movies have 'moments of potential' or shockingly
intelligent concepts hinted at that are quickly lost or go nowhere. One can
often dig up obscure precursors to a concept - and find that there is a good
reason that it remained obscure that they weren't very good even when
released.

~~~
wtetzner
I heard a story that Jim Butcher wrote Codex Alera to prove that a good author
can write a good book from a bad idea.

~~~
pauljburke
[http://www.fantasyliterature.com/author-interviews/jim-
butch...](http://www.fantasyliterature.com/author-interviews/jim-butcher/)

technically two bad ideas.

~~~
Nasrudith
Adding bad ideas together ironically can create good concepts. Realistic
bueracracy story centered on a bueracrat and say story set in heaven both
would be boring separately. A harried angelic bueracrat trying to keep up with
an endless stream of weird requests from "good people" throughout history,
deal with people wanting to meet their ancestors, descendants, and famed
figures and keeping them happy when they would get along terribly from
differing values or finding out they were condemned to hell? Already a comedy
with surprising depth in an elevator pitch.

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briga
I think great art develops through a sort of evolutionary process. Everyone is
influenced by the writer's they admire and so the good ideas get replicated.
But good ideas by themselves aren't enough to attract an audience, so authors
have to creatively combine and mutate those ideas. Harold Bloom called this
the "anxiety of influence". The ideas they copy might be stolen, but the ways
they combine those ideas might not be.

~~~
jonhendry18
This gets into what Picasso meant by "Good artists copy, great artists steal".

I take that as meaning that a great artist _makes the material wholly their
own_ through transformation, while a good artist merely alters the original
which remains identifiable.

~~~
Hasknewbie
Fun fact: Picasso never said that.

[https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/06/artists-
steal/](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/06/artists-steal/)

~~~
jonhendry18
Ah. Looks like the closest real statement came from Eliot.

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Hasknewbie
"Then again, sometimes ideas simply stick with you and resurface unknowingly.
I have no doubt that every author has inadvertently thought of an idea that
was actually something they read about years ago"

This. Especially on topics where the work is based predominently on a
concise/small core idea, such a tune in music. I once had musician friends
psyched that they were writing a song based on a really cool riff, only to
discover later that said riff was in a track they had heard a decade ago, and
that had stuck in a corner of someone's head. They had copied by accident. And
they found that out by accident, too, and might very well have ended up
pushing a track that would have had them getting called plagiarists.

~~~
teddyh
This happened perhaps most famously in 1971:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Sweet_Lord#Copyright_infrin...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Sweet_Lord#Copyright_infringement_suit)

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marcelluspye
>Agents and editors do not hold onto manuscripts to pillage for ideas (and if
they did they would do so with a proven commodity like James Patterson and not
an untested debut author.)

I would guess that big name authors would have the reputation to fight back
against that kind of thing. Whereas no one is going to believe the little guy.

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bdowling
For those interested in the court's opinion, which includes summaries of the
works in question, you can find it here[0].

[0] [https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-
yor...](https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-
york/nysdce/1:2017cv06984/480492/26/)

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curiousgal
" _Creativity is the art of concealing your sources_ "

~~~
pcunite
And I might add ...

 _" Creativity is the art of forgetting your sources"_

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tomxor
> Green thinks this scenario is so unlikely to occur twice that he hired a
> sports analytics firm to determine the odds were a mere “1-in-8 sextillion.”

The fact this plaintiff implicitly argued the probability of fictional and
non-fictional events are equal, made me realise that perhaps the seemingly
moronic arguments we hear about from litigation in the technical world aren't
all down to incompetence in reasoning about technology - just incompetence in
reasoning about reality in general, but I guess people will say anything when
they believe the opposition is wrong regardless of the implications of their
insane reasoning.

~~~
whatshisface
Lawyers don't argue for the truth they fight for their clients. It has to be
that way because court is an adversarial situation, so if one lawyer was
arguing for the truth like a scientist and the other was being underhanded the
underhanded one would have an advantage.

~~~
tomxor
> if one lawyer was arguing for the truth like a scientist and the other was
> being underhanded the underhanded one would have an advantage.

It's not about truth, trying to shill clearly flawed reasoning like this shows
they really think very little of the ability of the system, you don't need
facts or "truth" to see how their argument is broken by abstractly reasoning
about it yourself.

Putting forward arguments where the opposition disproves them by revealing
something that gives a more complete picture is one thing because the original
argument without extended context was valid... but throwing complete - neatly
packaged fallacies at the wall until one sticks because those evaluating it
are stupid enough to miss it is really quite low.

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gkya
We should be able to ponder on the same ideas in different ways. That's how
literature and culture flourished. We think that copyright and patents helped
that because we confound the actual natural progress of technology and society
with the appearance of these concepts during that progress and end up thinking
that it was these concessions that fueled such progress. Instead, they just
popped up when things started to gain vast momentum worldwide.

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JohnStrangeII
A few thoughts without having read the linked essay, which does not interest
me.

Writers all write and work differently. Great writers develop their own, good
style or take time to craft it carefully into their works, "lesser" writers
are satisfied with perfecting their skills and a certain artistic base level.
Most of those "lesser" writers could probably write works of much higher
quality if they wanted to, because the literary quality of a work depends to a
large extent on the amount of time and care devoted to it. (There are bad
habits, though.) Writing is mostly handcraft. It also depends on the genre, if
you don't intend to write a work of high literary quality - for which there is
a very small market and not much income -, then it's unlikely that the end
result will have that quality.

I don't believe that any writer consciously steals from anyone, not even the
crappiest pulp fiction novelist would want do that, because it takes all the
fun out of the writing.

Writing is always about humans and there are only so many themes, so at a
coarse look it might seem as if there is some stealing, but that is only a
coarse and superficial look.

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bumholio
There are no 'great' anything. Short of royalty and inherited wealth, there is
just hustle, hard work and plain luck. Every great was just a regular guy or
girl who persevered and got better at his craft, until chance or connections
pulled him out of that pool of 'good' and into the rarefied, socially defined
and self-fulfilling category of 'great'. Outright stealing might or might not
be part of that journey - it's a risky individual choice driven by morals and
desperation, not a recipe.

~~~
EliRivers
I can't help but suspect that the difference between, for example, good
sprinters and great sprinters is not simply that Usain Bolt knew a guy who
could get him some solid publicity to get his name out there as a great
sprinter.

~~~
batteryhorse
Well, the difference is a few hundredths of a second. Ever heard of Tyson Gay?
Second fastest man in history.

~~~
EliRivers
So he's another great sprinter? He's a great sprinter, without the publicity.
Second fastest man in history certainly sounds like a great sprinter. If
that's just "good", then I think we're working on different definitions of
"good" and "great".

~~~
batteryhorse
My point is that nobody knows who he is. So he's not considered to be one of
the greats.

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skookumchuck
Since story ideas are not copyrightable, why was Harlan Ellison so successful
suing people for supposedly stealing his ideas?

~~~
jstarfish
He was patent trolling before it was cool.

You can sue anybody for anything. There are ways to win even a bullshit case.

~~~
saalweachter
Harlan Ellison also had the right mix of "successful enough that he actually
worked on a lot of projects and had scripts and proposals taken seriously" and
"difficult enough to work with that he occasionally walked away from or was
kicked off of projects".

That's not to say anything about whether any or all of his complaints had
merit, but the baseline plausibility that they did is just orders of magnitude
higher than if _I_ made such a claim.

------
krylon
“The ugly fact is books are made out of books, the novel depends for its life
on the novels that have been written.”

(Cormac McCarthy)

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skookumchuck
Romeo and Juliet was cribbed from a number of older tales.

------
jlebrech
you write like what you read

