100 ways to improve your writing - Gary Provost 2019

Steal
Nine ways to save time and energy

Be a literary pack rat. Brighten up your story with a metaphor you read in the Sunday paper. Make a point with an anecdote you heard at the barbershop. Let a character tell a joke you heard in a bar. But steal small, not big, and don’t steal from just one source. Someone once said that if you steal from one writer, it’s called plagiarism, but if you steal from several, it’s called research. So steal from everybody, but steal only a sentence or a phrase at a time. If you use much more than that, you must get permission and then give credit. Here are two examples of acceptable, honorable ways to steal.

Whenever people ask me what I did for a living before I became a writer, I reply, “I did all those crummy jobs that would someday look so glamorous on the back of a book jacket.” It’s a cute line, one of many I use often in order to keep myself constantly surrounded by an aura of cleverness. But I didn’t invent the line. I read it twenty years ago in a TV Guide article by Merle Miller, and I’ve used it ever since, rarely giving Miller credit for the line.

The previous paragraph shows two examples of acceptable literary theft. The first is Miller’s line, which the paragraph is about. The other is the paragraph itself. It’s the opening paragraph for an article I wrote in Writer’s Digest (April 1983) called “Do Editors Steal?” I stole it from myself.

Thanks to the Internet, it is very difficult to get away with stealing any significant amount of material or phrases. There are now plagiarism checkers available for free online, and people use them.