This is a bit of a continuation of my post last month (already?!?) about borrowing ideas and reshaping them to fit.

I found a magnificent description of something. I’d love to do a near copy-paste, since the source is long (nineteen hundred years or so) out of copyright. No one will know, right?

Alas, I have a conscience, and stealing chunks of text even from someone dead over a thousand years is still theft. Too, the material has been cited by so many academics over the past hundred years that someone will catch me. Using the material straight would also raise the question among readers of “how did no one find this before, when you have clearly said that everyone in the county/parish/district knows everyone else’s business?” A great deal of filing, reworking, and considering how to catch the sense but not the exact wording will be needed for me to use this nugget of intriguing information in the WIP.

However, I can take the material, adjust some things, and use it almost as is in a very different story. Remember, I’m the Worlds Second Laziest Writer. There, the description will blend in nicely, so long as I do sufficient filing that it fits smoothly, and is in my own words. It will be a small part of a larger whole, a place that is noted by the protagonist as one of several, to be avoided or visited as the cycle of seasons or faith dictate.

Catching the sense of the material but not the plain text is my goal for both books. The mood as well as the actual wording is the critical thing. It would be the same if I was reading The Sea Around Us, or The Outermost House, and found descriptions of the seashore that fit the story and caught the mood and details that the story needed. My task would be, and is, to reread the passages, sifting out what gives them the feeling I want to mimic, and which details are too precise, which turns of phrase cannot be reused. Once I’ve done that homework, things should be clearer. Then I rebuild the moment in my own words.

We all do that, just not entirely with full awareness that we are doing it. What details from history, or fairy tales and legends, or personal observation do we writers incorporate into the story? Larry McMurtry took history, looked at place, and rewove it into Lonesome Dove, and The Last Picture Show, among other things. David Drake has done it with American history and military history, with more success at some times than at others. Stealing from operas, Norse mythology, Chinese mythology, Irish folklore, Eastern European and other history, I suspect we all can name an author or two without too much effort. It’s part of our common coin, all the stories that have accumulated over the thousands of years that humans have been telling stories.

So, back to the description I want to steal, ah, emulate. The dark stillness, how people and wildlife avoid the place, the shadows that linger when sun ought to shine, the great discomfort the observer and author both report …. Those are fair game for duplicating, perhaps even the sort of place (pond, or grove of trees, or rock formation, or rolling grassland with one strange stone lurking among the verdant herbs and grasses.) The exact words? No. Will I give credit in the end notes? Yes, because that’s just what I do. I’m too academic not to.