Ras: The Art of Stealing

“Good artists copy, great artists steal.” Picasso

What did the Great Pablo have in mind? Was it anything more than his love of shocking the bourgeoisie? Surely Picasso himself was one of the most “original” artists of all time.

As writers, we know that plagiarism – lifting another author’s words without quote marks – is very bad, downright evil, one of the worst sins you can commit. Dante reserved the 43rd circle of hell for the Non-Attributors.

Still, in the visual arts, there is a long tradition of apprentice painters learning their craft by copying masterpieces. And in literature examples of creative borrowing are famous and numerous. Shakespeare appropriated characters and plot lines from Holinshed’s Chronicles and Plutarch. James Joyce used Homer’s Odyssey as his trot for Ulysses. A few years back Jane Smiley transplanted the story of King Lear to an Iowa farm in her novel A Thousand Acres and nobody dinged her for pillaging Shakespeare.

So when is it forbidden and when is it OK – even essential – and to make use of another writer’s material? The plagiarism police on university Web sites will lay the rules out in restrictive detail for you, but for me it’s simple: You don’t lift somebody else’s words without quotes, but anything else is a fair game, or fair use, as we say in the copyright biz. Writers have always gotten ideas from other writers and they always will.

For the beginner, there is a literary equivalent of copying masterpieces. Some years ago a New Yorker short story by the Irish writer William Trevor touched some deep emotion in me. It was an understated story of a recently widowed woman living her quiet life alone in her house. Not much happens in the way of plot.

The situation and the mood of Trevor’s story set my imagination going. I picked up the story’s core idea – the daily round of life in an empty house for the survivor of a long marriage, the poignant to-and-fro of familiarity and absence. In my version the protagonist was a man in his 70s modeled on my grandfather, who actually lived alone for about five years after my grandmother died.

While Trevor’s story was the starting point, I think anyone reading the two stories side by side would have trouble detecting more than a distant kinship. Picasso might say I started out to steal Trevor’s story, but before long it was my grandfather’s story and then the story’s own needs and the protagonist I’d invented took over.

My point here is that plots, characters, and emotions triggered by other stories are a terrific way to get started. Some writers work best within a framework; most work best when their imagination is juiced up. Whatever it takes to get the juices flowing – use it.

By the way, for a profound discussion of the distinction between borrowing and stealing, see Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.