Yes, it’s true. But what’s the Picasso quote? “Good artists copy; great artists steal.”
I’m not a great artist. But I do steal.
The biggest example will smack you in the face if you read any five random pages in PETER AND THE VAMPIRES.
Peter’s best friend is a troublemaking, short little kid next door. He’s got a big mouth, he has snappy one-liners, and he comes up with some very strange theories about the world.
And his name is Dill.
As far as I know, there’s only one other Dill in all of literature: the troublemaking, short little kid who lives near Scout in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD.
(Okay, only during the summers when he’s visiting his aunt, but you get the idea.)
When I was creating the Peter stories – mostly through daydreaming – I decided that he should have a best friend who lived next door, and “he should be exactly like that kid Dill in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD.” I hadn’t read the book in over 15 years, but Dill’s character is my favorite thing in it. And there are a TON of things to like in that novel.
So I set about finding a name for Peter’s best friend. Tom, Joe, Bobby, no…too ‘normal.’ I think I ran through about 100 of them when I just decided to keep ‘Dill’ in as a placeholder as I wrote the first story, and then I’d rename him later.
After his first five pages, he was cemented in my memory forever as ‘Dill.’ There was no going back.
By the way, guess where Peter’s name came from? As a kid, my hero was Spiderman. Peter Parker. In fact, I overheard my mother tell another woman, “We had to be careful of what we named him, because if we named him ‘Peter,’ he’d have initials he’d get teased about in school. P.P. – pee-pee.”
I remember thinking, “Dang it, I’d put up with a ton of pee-pee jokes if I got to have the same name as Peter Parker!”
When your last name is Pillsbury, you have to have a high tolerance for jokes about Pop ‘n Fresh and getting poked in the belly. And going “We-heee!”
I spent four or five years bemoaning the fact that I was named ‘Darren’ instead of ‘Peter.’
So of course my hero’s name was predestined.
What else has been stolen? In the first story, PETER AND THE DEAD MEN, there’s a portion where they invade the inner sanctum of a group of…wait for it…dead men. They look in a mirror and notice that the 13 charred skeletons are sitting behind them.
That’s ripped off from some fairy tale I read as a kid about a woman who goes to a church one night, she’s the only person there, and when she turns around in the front row, the entire congregation is filled with grinning skeletons who chase her out of the church.
PETER AND THE MANNEQUINS is based on a SPIDERMAN cartoon I saw as a kid that freaked the living daylights out of me.
(And no, I did not rip PETER AND THE CHANGELING off from some television show. I didn’t find out that the plots were very similar until I was halfway through the story and googled ‘changeling’ for research.)
It’s not a big deal. Any fans out there of Quentin Tarantino’s RESERVOIR DOGS? You should see the Hong Kong movie CITY ON FIRE. Basically he lifts the entire movie.
Yet Tarantino’s is waaaaaay better – largely because he builds more interesting characters, and takes what is a cop-out in the Hong Kong film and turns it into a heart-stopping showpiece of an ending.
James Joyce stole the entire plot of ULYSSES from some Greek guy.
There was this guy, too, named Will something, who stole the plots for 36 of his 37 plays from history or other authors.
So really, as long as your intent is to create something of original artistic intent, stealing is inevitable. I’ll close with a quote from T.S. Eliot (whom I have to admit I thought said the Picasso quote above – maybe one of them stole it from the other):
“One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.”
Yeah. What he said.
