Plagiarism: Unethical, or a Really Good Idea?

So many people who write are hung up on being completely "original," and this makes them shy away from using the work of other writers who've had much more luck receiving acceptance in the literary world. Of course, this is the worst oversight a struggling writer could make, and for a number of reasons.

For one thing, "borrowing" someone else's words is not the same as "stealing." It is one thing to "steal" another person's spouse, and in the military this is often considered justification for homicide. Usually, a person contemptuously referred to as a "plagiarist" freely gives back to the world the words he has borrowed from another writer; if he just wrote the words down in a notebook and never tried to publish them, it would be a much more wicked deed, for it would show his intellectual greed and selfishness more clearly.

For another thing, Derrida was right: words are just symbols strung together to provide a linguistic sign post for others to decipher and process. What a person "gets" from a piece of writing is much more important than how that piece of writing came to be and by whom it was created; therefore, "borrowing" is a sharp tool that can be used efficaciously to carve a point of view, and should be employed at every turn by writers of every subject without the awful stigma attached to "plagiarism."

On the other hand, in high school and college, students are encouraged to paraphrase rather than copy word for word from their research sources. But paraphrasing often destroys the integrity of the original work, especially when carried out by amateurs. Obviously, a man of B.F. Skinner's esteem and credentials would much rather see his work intact than butchered and misinterpreted by a freshman psych major, whether he is given credit for being the author of the words or not.

Often, there just isn't time to write stories from scratch. This makes borrowing even more sensible. Since there are really only four stories in the world, the average person will usually not have much of anything better or original to say about the human condition. It would be an embarrassment to try topping Solzhenitsyn when writing about the inhumanity of forced labor camps, or trying to write more passionately about orphanages and slums than Dickens.

Intellectual properties attorneys are the bane of any artist's existence. They snoop and nit-pick and try to find fault with every word borrowed from another writer, and for what? In order to rob the world of literature that they weren't talented enough to create themselves, of course.

These people are just frustrated novelists and playwrights and journalists who didn't have the patience to pay their dues, or thought producing ad copy was "beneath" them, or were too prissy to embrace a life of squalor that every true artist must live before he's respected and, later, borrowed from himself. If you ever find yourself in court on charges of plagiarism, make sure your own attorney points this out to the judge and jury, because they probably never will have thought of it that way before.

Rest assured, you'll score some points with this line of reasoning.

After a few brushes with the law, you may decide that borrowing from the work of other writers just isn't for you, and that's okay. But you'll never feel as confident about your writing again.