They say imitation is the highest form of flattery. But when it comes to ripping off a fellow writer, if you aren’t breaking the law, you’re at the very least being unethical. 

But any good writer should always be taking in the words of other writers—to learn, to be inspired, to know what people are buying at the bookstore these days. If you have an agent who suggests that maybe it would be a good idea to come up with an idea for romantasy because of how well they’re selling these days, is that ripping off someone else? What if your favorite writer in the whole world is Stephen King, and you write monster stories set in your own home state? How much fiddling around with text does it take to go from plagiarism to paraphrasing to just inspiration? 

While critics and readers might call certain books knockoffs of something else, for you as a writer, it’s actually pretty straightforward to draw the line between inspiration and imitation. 

Big Picture

When it comes to big picture ideas—like genre, setting, and story tropes—you are not in danger of stealing anyone’s style. If you were, well, literally every writer would be guilty. Even when you look to classic novels that are credited with “inventing” a genre, you can point to where they drew inspiration and what texts and traditions they were in conversation with. 

If you do go to look at those classic, genre-founding books, you’ll likely also find that there is debate about whether or not that book should be the one getting credit for founding the genre. That’s because a truly original idea is pretty rare. To call back to the example of Stephen King, he might be famous for writing books set in his home state of Maine, but he’s far from the only author who writes about what he knows.

If The Shining is your favorite novel of all time and you simply must write your own haunted hotel novel but every time you sit down to work you feel like an imposter, make that picture bigger. You are far from the only person who was inspired to write by one particular book. Read other haunted hotel books! Maybe break out into haunted apartment buildings, haunted schools, who knows—maybe there’s a haunted chicken coop book out there. At the very least, you’ll get a sense of how we can all play with the same toys and still come up with our own game. And you’ll likely find more literary heroes to join King in your heart. 

Little Picture

If it’s hard to be a true copycat on big-picture ideas, it’s just as easy to be a thief when you zoom in. 

There is no circumstance under which you should be using another writer’s text to make your own. Period. It’s one thing to come across a way of saying something, a metaphor or an interesting turn of phrase. It’s another thing to say to yourself, “I liked how Stephen King described how the hotel in The Shining looked, so I’m going to copy and paste it into my document and fiddle with it just a little.”

If you’re reading over your own work and feeling like it’s lackluster, you need a fresh set of eyes. If a friend reads your writing, do they also feel like it falls flat? If so, why? Do they feel like you don’t describe the world around your characters? Do your characters all talk like each other? Do they have identifiable goals and motivations? 

Those are the lines of thinking that will lift up your limp prose. Copying someone else, on a line-by-line level, wouldn’t do anything to improve your work, even if it weren’t inappropriate (and illegal!). Get specific about the problems with your work and go back into your plot and characters to set it right. Then your own unique style will flourish. 

Be Sincere

There is also a healthy, robust tradition of just writing something to honor your favorite books and writers. It’s always an option, and if you want to be really by the numbers about it, “My manuscript is an homage to Insert Major Classic Here” is a pretty evergreen way to market a manuscript as a lesser known author. 

But the block that some writers might be feeling when it comes to taking this approach is that writing an homage, a retelling, even a satire, has to be rooted in a deep, open love for your source material. And not just that but also enough belief in yourself that your interpretation of that work deserves to be taken seriously.

It takes a lot of courage to put your book out in the world, to tell people they should spend their valuable time reading it. You’re not comparing yourself to the great authors of the world by doing your own retelling; you’re sharing your love for the story and expanding on it the way countless others have done. 

Find More Favorites

The deeper your well of inspiration, the more favorite writers you have, and the more stories you invite into your mind, the less you’ll sound like any single one of them. And the more you think about why you love what you do—and even why you don’t love what you don’t—the more your own voice will develop. Soon it won’t even occur to you that anyone could possibly mistake a page of your words for a reproduction of anyone else. 

Chelsea Ennen is a writer living in Brooklyn with her husband and her dog. When not writing or reading, she is a fiber and textile artist who sews, knits, crochets, weaves, and spins.