The Art of the Steal: How to Iterate on Inspiration

(Image credit: Mr.TinDC)

Envy is an ugly thing, but we’ve all felt it. Sometimes, when we encounter a story so amazing, we have to get up on our feet and shout “I wish I had done that!” That feeling can be crushing and inspiring all at once, but it's not too late. “Originality” is overrated. No author got anywhere without borrowing an idea or two, but the thing to remember is that inspiration is easy, execution is hard. 

The key to being more than just a copycat is letting your inspiration inform your own idea. It's okay to wear your inspirations on your sleeve, but what if you want to take things up a notch? A common piece of advice writers give and receive is to make that borrowed idea your own, to execute on it in a way only you could. But what does that really look like? What if I don’t know my strengths, or what makes my writing distinct from others’? 

Think of it like building a Lego set with your own pieces. You’re attempting to build something, and previous stories, like a set of instructions, provide clear ways of successfully going about it. The bricks that make this possible come included, tropes and archetypes and the like, but where you come in is replacing those pieces with bricks of your own. From the tub in the basement. We all have one. Your Lego set might look a lot like someone else’s, but since you built it with your own pieces, it's yours now. 

Another example comes from fantasy and sci-fi, which share many tropes between them. Aesthetically, they’re completely different, but their genetic genre makeup makes them cousins at least. Is it entirely novel to place a knight-like character in a sci-fi setting? Not while Jedi are around, but sometimes the goal isn’t to be entirely original, only to produce an original effect. Inspiration is cheap. Your new idea might be 95% made up of other, cobbled together ideas from every which place, but that remaining 5% is valid. That 5% can be the difference between Aragorn and Ned Stark, Moses and Superman. 

So there you have it. Airtight, bullet-proof writing advice. I’m not telling you to go out and gratuitously steal the ideas of others, but I’m also not not telling you to do that. Ultimately, the buck stops here. It's up to you to make those inspirations into innovations.