FEATURED | Blog

Never Plagiarize, but Thieve, Perceive and Retrieve

Before I turned to writing I was a landscape architect and my theory about truly learning the craft included visiting every site I could access that had been designed by a famous name. And I didn’t want their latest work, I craved the older works that might show me how they fared in their later life. By this, I hoped to learn to design landscapes that would survive the test of time.

You see, a landscape is a growing thing and time will expose its strengths and weaknesses. The weaknesses fascinated me. The fussy stuff, the small plantings that overgrew, the walkways that created worn paths across lawns because they looked great on paper but weren’t where people actually walked.

What worked was mostly land forms—the shaping of contours and groves of trees. So I thieved, perceived and retrieved what made a landscape great and avoided using what didn’t.

If you think that’s a long way ‘round to successful writing, keep it in mind as you read. The fussy details in a novel may not age well, nor will the pretentious flower beds of over-spoken dialogue. In my reading, I am ruthless with the page, always with a yellow marker at my side to highlight sentences and paragraphs that make me smile with delight and love the man or woman who wrote them. If writing is more craft than schooling (and I believe it is), then reading well and widely is the apprenticeship.

Be rough and tough with your library and it will serve you well.

RECENT POSTS…

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE…

Visiting the Page

I got to thinking this morning what it means to me to be a writer and whether what it means for you is all that far different. Who are we writers? Why do we bother, when some 5,000 books a day are published and millions of blogs as well? The chances of being heard in...

E-books and the Concept of a Book

I ran across an interesting video the other day, Brian Felson’s conversation with book designer Joel Friedlander. The title was How eBooks Do Violence to the Concept of a Book and it wasn’t as confrontational as you might think. Felson is the CEO of Bookbaby and they...

Writing is a Craft

And like other crafts, there are lots of ways to approach it. I’ll tell you mine and maybe it’ll be a help to you…and maybe not. For one thing, I treat writer’s block as if it was a myth, which I think it is. Staring at a blank page is just taking yourself too...

Mike Wallace Died last Sunday at Age Ninety-three

That’s fact and incontrovertible, announced to us from every page and media source. It’s taken me these five days or so to get my thoughts together sufficiently to comment. Mike was a lion among journalist-commentators and brought to his trade a new paradigm. Not only...