...great artists steal

[mmcirvin]

Anil Dash points to a typically brilliant Malcolm Gladwell essay about the stigma of plagiarism and whether it might be overdone (he's musing about a playwright who ripped off material from an article he wrote).

Of course, we were just musing here along similar lines, not about outright plagiarism but about the lesser sin of cliché, and when it isn't a sin at all: the use of derivative material in the movies and how the best creative works can nevertheless make those appropriations their own.

I was just thinking of another example in The Incredibles. One plot element in the movie, the villain's plan to play hero by creating a ready-made enemy who will take a dive, is one that's been used many times before: for instance, in Dreamworks' recent CGI-animated movie Shark Tale and in, if I recall correctly, the CGI-centric fantasy movie Dragonheart. But in The Incredibles, while this twist is one of the weaker elements, it doesn't particularly sour the whole thing. I think this is not so much because of the way it's executed as because the movie doesn't lean on this detail very hard as a central novelty; it's there because it fits well with other elements that work better (such as character motivations and action sequences).

With well-worn ideas and plot devices, I think that's the key: you can use them as long as you don't ask them to support more of the weight of your art than they will bear. If you keep them happy, readers will accept a lot in the name of story expedience; it's only when you direct the reader's high expectations to the overdone bits that there's trouble. The higher-concept your work is, the better the concepts have to be.

As I've said before, one of the things that inhibits me the most when writing (apart from my job, which is pretty demanding lately) is a compulsion to be startlingly original on every page, which is of course impossible unless you write only two-page stories and write them once every five years. What I have to convince myself is that when the writing reminds me of something else, the remedy is not to stop but to add more. In the first draft, at least.

Comments

[dumplechan.livejournal.com]

...the villain's plan to play hero by creating a ready-made enemy who will take a dive...

My favorite variant of this comes from the issue of the Tick. An obscure hero (The Running Man, who is "as fast as ten fast men") hires a villain (The Red Scare: "Lenin was keen!") to beat up, so as to become famous.

And yes, it happened in Dragonheart.

[partiallyclips.livejournal.com]

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. No man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it. Where is the master who could have taught Shakspeare? Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? Every great man is an unique. The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow. If anybody will tell me whom the great man imitates in the original crisis when he performs a great act, I will tell him who else than himself can teach him. Shakspeare will never be made by the study of Shakspeare. Do that which is assigned thee and thou canst not hope too much or dare too much.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

At first i thought you'd given us a bad URL, but it's The New Yorker's error; i click on the 'print version' whenever available, and in this case, it goes to the print version of a wholly different article. Losers.