Stealing Ideas

 

The beginning of my train wreck of a second novel.

Write what you know. Everyone says that. In my fiction, I use anecdotes from personal experience. Unfortunately, I haven't lived a life like Hemingway, so my experiences are not as glamorous¹, although I think if you are paying attention you can create interesting stories out of the mundane.

The other thing to do is steal ideas and experiences. Obviously don't copy and paste, which is plagiarism. But you can steal themes and ideas, and you can even steal anecdotes from current events or the biography of another person. I think you can also create variations on existing themes. Writers have been doing this for millennia.

One of my personal axioms is to not be ashamed to steal an idea as long as it is a good idea. This applies to all aspects of life including writing.

The challenge is to come up with unique themes and ideas, or at least to write something good on rarely visited themes and ideas. The more you read and try to write the more you realize how difficult this is.

Footnotes

1 Between the ages of about sixteen and twenty I was around some pretty sketchy people. The high school I attended was full of violence, drugs, and other crimes. The year after I graduated they got a permanent police presence. Then I dropped out of college at nineteen and worked for about seven months in a factory that employed people right out of prison. Many anecdotes could follow but I'll save them for my novels.