Where does inspiration end and plagiarism begin?

[notamidget92]

I remember reading things on author's websites and I see constantly that they were all inspired by someone. And it's noticeable in the way they write. It's not that they are copying someone else's style, more like taking their favorite parts of it and fine tuning it to fit their own personality.

But where does inspiration end and the hazard of plagiarizing begin? I never had the chance to ask my creative writing teacher but I'm sure that if I had she wouldn't have been a very helpful source of information-it was always just "look it up". But I would really like to know what other people's opinion on this are.

[Ian P. Johnson]

If you're directly copying an author's words, or copying most of the words and putting new ones in, that's plagiarism.

If you're copying an author's style for purposes of comedic effect, that's parody.

If you're copying an author's style because you're writing an original story set in that world, that's pastiche.

Anything else can just be chalked up to "inspiration" (a nebulous term, at best: the writers that inspire me most of all are Neil Gaiman, Joss Whedon, and Roger Waters, but nothing I've written in the last year or so is particularly Gaimanesque/Whedonian/Floyderiffic).

[Ian P. Johnson]

Oh, and PS: if your teacher's response to any question about writing was always "look it up", she must not have been a very good teacher.

[tnh]

If you can truly duplicate someone else's style or characteristic inventions, you're doing well.

I know three rules. The first is that copyright covers the specific configuration of words used to tell the story. You can copyright your version of Cinderella, but not all versions of Cinderella.

The second rule is to imitate more than one writer. Doing so is an excellent writing exercise for the more advanced student. You can learn about things like Zelazny's judicious choice of concrete details, John Scalzi's command of paragraph transitions, and how artificial Heinlein's natural-looking dialogue really is. It will also keep you from sounding like you're imitating a single identifiable writer, which is just tacky.

The third rule is to steal from the best.