Hey everyone! I’m here yet again for another post on another weekend. I hope you guys are excited for another piece of writing advice. This one I think is one of the most contested things I hear in the writing world so don’t take my opinion on this for law. I’ve heard published authors have a disagreement over this but I think what I’m going to write today is one of the most widely accepted truths about this topic. So without further ado,
Ten Writing Commandments: Inspired Not Plagiarized
In school all growing up the kind of writing you do the most often is typically some sort of essay type writing. You write on a certain topic and you have a purpose in writing. This is the case for any kind of writing you do. Even fictional writing generally has a topic and a purpose. However, the one difference between fictional and essay writing is that when you write an essay you have to explain where every little bit of evidence comes from. You have to cite where all of your work originates and if you don’t then you get docked points because you plagiarized.
Plagiarism is something that I was terrified of when I was growing up because I had some serious teachers in the 4th or 5th grade who basically told me that it didn’t matter how old I was, if I plagiarized anything from anyone that I would go to jail. Little did I knew as I grew that while this is true for essay writing this isn’t always true for fictional writing, except in the cases that it was. Confusing right? Let me try to untangle this dilemma.
Technically once a book is published it belongs to either the author who published it or the company that helped the author publish it, depending on what their contract was. (Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong since I have never been published). Because of this, anything written and published with the intent of making money that is directly and obviously plagiarized from the work can be prosecuted against by either the author of their company unless said writing has been approved by one or the other or whoever owns the intellectual copyright to that particular material.
However, people who post their writing online and don’t make any profit have a 100% chance of being plagiarized unless otherwise stated. Lots of young writers are so excited to share their stories with others (often growing up believing that plagiarizing of any kind can send you to jail) post their stories online. Sometime later they find someone else posting almost exactly their book with a few characters deleted and a couple name changes a tweak to the writing style. The young writer calls them out, claiming plagiarism. Although this is true, said young writer can not do anything because they didn’t technically claim intellectual copyright.
Granted, there are a few websites such as Wattpad, which when you sign an agreement with them, they place your writing under intellectual copyright. This is one of the reasons that Wattpad has been and is so popular. They protect the writer and the writer’s ideas for them. This is perfect.
But the controversy in plagiarism related to fictional writing lies in the fact that some writing is seen as plagiarism by some writers while others see it as inspiration. I’m going to explain what I believe the difference is.
Plagiarism is generally defined as “the practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own.” I think this extends to taking whole chapters, dialogues, or conversations and placing them in one’s own story. I do not believe this applies to public domain writing prompts. If you place a public domain writing prompt in your story, there is nothing wrong with that. Copy and pasting an interesting dialogue from someone else’s book into your own is plagiarism and is wrong.
Inspiration is defined as, “the process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, especially to do something creative.” You can be inspired by someone’s work. General concepts that you enjoyed in a story that could transfer easily to different genres can be used in your story when you read it somewhere else because a general concept is not owned by anyone. For example, in my book that I’ve been working on for several years there is a gladiator arc. This is not unique to my story. Even the twist that its an alien gladiator rink is not necessarily unique to my story. However, this concept is not copyrighted by any particular writer because it doesn’t belong to anyone. This is gaining inspiration from someone’s work not plagiarizing.
The fourth writing commandment is Inspired not Plagiarized.
You never plagiarize another writer’s work. That is wrong and disrespectful. Being inspired by someone else’s work is good and in some cases actually praises the writers work from which you are gaining inspiration. Being inspired by another’s writing is not wrong. In fact there is no way for you to not have some elements that other writers have in their books. Mark Twain explains it best when he says, “There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages.”
So when you’re writing feel free to be inspired by others and their writing. Be inspired by history and culture. But do not plagiarize things from other writers. It’s disrespectful to that writer and their story.
I hope that this post helped this week. I do know that this topic is sometimes controversial in the writing world and I’ve heard a whole bunch of different opinions on it. Keep in mind that this is my opinion on the subject and you can choose to agree or disagree with it but please keep in mind that the only disagreements allowed in the comments are kind and tolerant. If I find any sort of hate speech or rude disagreement I will remove them. Thank you guys so much for tuning into this weeks post. Next week we’ll cover the 5th writing commandment. Have a good weekend and remember,
Get Up, Get Writing, and Get Published. See you next week!
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