What is holding you back?

I understand why people live with peeling wallpaper and ancient kitchens with drawers that jam and stick. It takes courage to venture beyond the planning stage. Once a renovation starts, there is no turning back. The old bathroom gets ripped out, but what looked good on paper may not proceed according to plan. Electricians, plumbers, and builders come into the mix. They each have an opinion and they often contradict each other. Maybe it’s easier to live with the crack in the bathtub and the toilet that flushes away 13 litres / 4 gallons of potable water with each use.

Word count: 327                                                                                          Reading time: 1-2 minutes

Is an unknown result the reason some people fail to finish the big artistic projects they start? How many outlines of stories have I scribbled into my notebooks over the years? I love that playful stage. So I write the first scene. It’s satisfying to see the characters come to life, say and do things exactly the way I expected.

Deep into a manuscript, I often find that a story is not unfolding the way I expected. The electrician arrives on the scene and says that my protagonist has no spark. No one is getting a charge from her. The plumber informs me that my throughline is jammed and needs to be reworked. I need to rip out half of what I’ve written.

Sometimes the weaknesses are beyond repair. Better tear the old house down and salvage the parts. Other times I just need to pull out the rotted wall and replace it with something  more substantial. The urge to destroy is also a creative urge according to Picasso.  So really, when unexpected obstacles pop up in the narrative, isn’t that the time to muster the creative courage and smash what needs fixing?

Do you avoid writing your great novel because you know hard it’s going to be? Or do you have the perseverance to get through the project, so you lay out your blueprint and get started?

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Photo from Wikimedia Commons: Bedroom and sitting room of the White House during the Renovation 2/27/1650 by Abbie Rowe from the US National Archives & Records Administration

Are you a thief?

Walt Disney’s Cinderella was based on a fairy tale collected by the brothers Grimm. Marissa Meyer’s wonderful adaptation of the same story, Cinder, made the New York Times bestseller list in 2012.

Word count: 305           Reading time: 1-2 minutes

I bet Cinderella, as published by the brothers Grimm in 1812, was only one of many versions being told by the oral storytellers of the day.

‘Filter any single incident through another set of eyes, it becomes a different story’ Ellen Hopkins, Flirting with the Monster.

Helen Fielding watched the 1995 BBC drama, Pride and Prejudice, and re-worked the plot into her classic novel Bridget Jones’s Diary. She even based the BJD romantic lead on Colin Firth who played Mr. Darcy to Jennifer Ehle’s Elizabeth Bennet. In doing so Fielding created a mini-industry that just keeps paying and paying.

Picasso said it best: art is theft. But there is good theft and bad theft, and writer Holly Lisle gives some hints here: How to (legally and ethically) steal ideas on the difference between the two. Austin Kleon offers more guidance in his book Steal Like an Artist:

Good theft: honours, studies, credits, transforms, and remixes. It takes from many sources, not just one.

Bad theft: degrades, skims, plagiarizes, imitates, and rips off. It takes only from one source.

David Bowie said, “The only art I’ll ever study is stuff that I can steal from,” and most of the time, that’s how I pick my reading list. I lift ideas from other writers and if my remix is detected, I hope I've done justice to the original work. 

Have you stolen any good ideas or techniques lately? Have you read an author that made you break out in goosebumps and if so, did you do something to honour that experience? How do you stop your admiration of someone’s work from slipping into plagiarism?