Do Great Writers Really Steal? | Hacker News Reader

Do Great Writers Really Steal?

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58 pointsd99kris33 comments

There is also the fact that ideas are easy and thus cheap - good execution is hard and thus expensive. Look at grand successes that are essentially formulaic and others which take interesting concepts and squander them.

I have found some B-movies have 'moments of potential' or shockingly intelligent concepts hinted at that are quickly lost or go nowhere. One can often dig up obscure precursors to a concept - and find that there is a good reason that it remained obscure that they weren't very good even when released.

I heard a story that Jim Butcher wrote Codex Alera to prove that a good author can write a good book from a bad idea.

http://www.fantasyliterature.com/author-interviews/jim-butch...

technically two bad ideas.

Adding bad ideas together ironically can create good concepts. Realistic bueracracy story centered on a bueracrat and say story set in heaven both would be boring separately. A harried angelic bueracrat trying to keep up with an endless stream of weird requests from "good people" throughout history, deal with people wanting to meet their ancestors, descendants, and famed figures and keeping them happy when they would get along terribly from differing values or finding out they were condemned to hell? Already a comedy with surprising depth in an elevator pitch.

I think great art develops through a sort of evolutionary process. Everyone is influenced by the writer's they admire and so the good ideas get replicated. But good ideas by themselves aren't enough to attract an audience, so authors have to creatively combine and mutate those ideas. Harold Bloom called this the "anxiety of influence". The ideas they copy might be stolen, but the ways they combine those ideas might not be.

Questlove from The Roots recently published a really good book on creativity (Creative Quest) where he goes into exactly those points in detail. He doesn't see himself as a terribly creative drummer, but he knows so much about other drummers and can replicate and merge their styles so well that it seems extremely creative to the listener, because the listener doesn't know these different styles. Then he goes on to say that this happens with all artists, especially now where Twitter etc. keep on exposing you to all kinds of ideas and sets from other artists. The artist moves from creator to curator.

I believe it's very similar in some corners of literature, and it's not a new phenomenon. Think of Umberto Eco's novels, he was extremely widely read including some obscure niches (medieval philosophy) which influenced plots and motifs etc. in his novels (think Baudolino, or imagine The Name Of The Rose without Borges' influence!)

This gets into what Picasso meant by "Good artists copy, great artists steal".

I take that as meaning that a great artist makes the material wholly their own through transformation, while a good artist merely alters the original which remains identifiable.

Fun fact: Picasso never said that.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/06/artists-steal/

Ah. Looks like the closest real statement came from Eliot.

"Then again, sometimes ideas simply stick with you and resurface unknowingly. I have no doubt that every author has inadvertently thought of an idea that was actually something they read about years ago"

This. Especially on topics where the work is based predominently on a concise/small core idea, such a tune in music. I once had musician friends psyched that they were writing a song based on a really cool riff, only to discover later that said riff was in a track they had heard a decade ago, and that had stuck in a corner of someone's head. They had copied by accident. And they found that out by accident, too, and might very well have ended up pushing a track that would have had them getting called plagiarists.

This happened perhaps most famously in 1971:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Sweet_Lord#Copyright_infrin...

>Agents and editors do not hold onto manuscripts to pillage for ideas (and if they did they would do so with a proven commodity like James Patterson and not an untested debut author.)

I would guess that big name authors would have the reputation to fight back against that kind of thing. Whereas no one is going to believe the little guy.

For those interested in the court's opinion, which includes summaries of the works in question, you can find it here[0].

[0] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-yor...

"Creativity is the art of concealing your sources"

And I might add ...

"Creativity is the art of forgetting your sources"

> Green thinks this scenario is so unlikely to occur twice that he hired a sports analytics firm to determine the odds were a mere “1-in-8 sextillion.”

The fact this plaintiff implicitly argued the probability of fictional and non-fictional events are equal, made me realise that perhaps the seemingly moronic arguments we hear about from litigation in the technical world aren't all down to incompetence in reasoning about technology - just incompetence in reasoning about reality in general, but I guess people will say anything when they believe the opposition is wrong regardless of the implications of their insane reasoning.

Lawyers don't argue for the truth they fight for their clients. It has to be that way because court is an adversarial situation, so if one lawyer was arguing for the truth like a scientist and the other was being underhanded the underhanded one would have an advantage.

> if one lawyer was arguing for the truth like a scientist and the other was being underhanded the underhanded one would have an advantage.

It's not about truth, trying to shill clearly flawed reasoning like this shows they really think very little of the ability of the system, you don't need facts or "truth" to see how their argument is broken by abstractly reasoning about it yourself.

Putting forward arguments where the opposition disproves them by revealing something that gives a more complete picture is one thing because the original argument without extended context was valid... but throwing complete - neatly packaged fallacies at the wall until one sticks because those evaluating it are stupid enough to miss it is really quite low.

We should be able to ponder on the same ideas in different ways. That's how literature and culture flourished. We think that copyright and patents helped that because we confound the actual natural progress of technology and society with the appearance of these concepts during that progress and end up thinking that it was these concessions that fueled such progress. Instead, they just popped up when things started to gain vast momentum worldwide.

A few thoughts without having read the linked essay, which does not interest me.

Writers all write and work differently. Great writers develop their own, good style or take time to craft it carefully into their works, "lesser" writers are satisfied with perfecting their skills and a certain artistic base level. Most of those "lesser" writers could probably write works of much higher quality if they wanted to, because the literary quality of a work depends to a large extent on the amount of time and care devoted to it. (There are bad habits, though.) Writing is mostly handcraft. It also depends on the genre, if you don't intend to write a work of high literary quality - for which there is a very small market and not much income -, then it's unlikely that the end result will have that quality.

I don't believe that any writer consciously steals from anyone, not even the crappiest pulp fiction novelist would want do that, because it takes all the fun out of the writing.

Writing is always about humans and there are only so many themes, so at a coarse look it might seem as if there is some stealing, but that is only a coarse and superficial look.

There are no 'great' anything. Short of royalty and inherited wealth, there is just hustle, hard work and plain luck. Every great was just a regular guy or girl who persevered and got better at his craft, until chance or connections pulled him out of that pool of 'good' and into the rarefied, socially defined and self-fulfilling category of 'great'. Outright stealing might or might not be part of that journey - it's a risky individual choice driven by morals and desperation, not a recipe.

I can't help but suspect that the difference between, for example, good sprinters and great sprinters is not simply that Usain Bolt knew a guy who could get him some solid publicity to get his name out there as a great sprinter.

Usain Bolt is a good example. He had good genes from a young age (1.96m at 15), then made the national junior team where he had the opportunity to train professionally and be singled out by the government as the most promising rising star, with special attention and resources to allow him to develop. Then he worked his way to a world champion.

So it's exactly the same luck - nurture - dedication pattern. Of course, genes are how luck manifests for athletes, while knowing a radio DJ might be the singer's chance.

It still doesn't mean there was anything magical about Bolt or his training regime, or that his rise to 'greatness' was pre-ordained. He didn't have 'great' genes, he had good genes and he did everything right, avoided accidents etc. Just like other athletes, but his unique genes-training combination turn out to be the lucky one.

It sounds like you've redefined great for yourself such that it doesn't exist. Most other people still have a working definition of great.

Well, the difference is a few hundredths of a second. Ever heard of Tyson Gay? Second fastest man in history.

So he's another great sprinter? He's a great sprinter, without the publicity. Second fastest man in history certainly sounds like a great sprinter. If that's just "good", then I think we're working on different definitions of "good" and "great".

My point is that nobody knows who he is. So he's not considered to be one of the greats.

Since story ideas are not copyrightable, why was Harlan Ellison so successful suing people for supposedly stealing his ideas?

He was patent trolling before it was cool.

You can sue anybody for anything. There are ways to win even a bullshit case.

Harlan Ellison also had the right mix of "successful enough that he actually worked on a lot of projects and had scripts and proposals taken seriously" and "difficult enough to work with that he occasionally walked away from or was kicked off of projects".

That's not to say anything about whether any or all of his complaints had merit, but the baseline plausibility that they did is just orders of magnitude higher than if I made such a claim.

“The ugly fact is books are made out of books, the novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.”

(Cormac McCarthy)

Romeo and Juliet was cribbed from a number of older tales.

you write like what you read

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