Maybe it's like taffy pulling?

I might be onto something here, but I'm not really sure yet.

Dear Writer,

I talked a little bit about Neil Gaiman’s writing in this week’s free letter, and I find myself really interested in talking about that more, because I’m trying to figure out how I might do what he does in my work.

Not necessarily pulling from old folk tales, although I love that, but pulling the thing I’m fascinated with through its context, and bringing that context into my story, where I recontextualize it, making something new and old at the same time.

That might not make sense. Let me go a little deeper into what I’m talking about. I’m still thinking this through. It is a bit under baked at the moment.

First, I love Oscar Wilde’s throwaway quip, “Talent borrows. Genius steals.” Most writers are terrified of that idea, Because Plagiarism.

Look, I know people who have been legit plagiarized, and it sucks and it’s wrong. But plagiarizing is actually copying and pasting someone else’s work and selling it as your own. That’s not what I’m talking about, but the fear of “accidentally plagiarizing,” which you cannot accidentally do, is so rampant among writers that I think we need to talk about it a bit.

The only way you can accidentally plagiarize is if you have a photographic memory, and if you have a photographic memory, you cannot accidentally plagiarize because you have a photographic memory, which means you also remember where you read the thing.

So, if you do not fully intend to plagiarize, stop worrying about it. You can't do it.

Now, are there resonances you can pull from existing material that you don’t mean to? Sure. I have a moment in a book where one character shoots another with a tranquilizer, and the shot character looks down at his gut and says, “You bloody bitch,” which is resonant of a moment from the “Doppelgangland” episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Did I realize that before the book was published? No. Is it plagiarism? No. Because it’s an entirely different story with entirely different characters and that one resonant moment is not a big deal. That’s the kind of thing you can and will do accidentally, and it’s not a crime.

I once had someone reach out to me and ask if it was okay if their main character hit a man breaking into their house with a frying pan, because Jennifer Crusie had done that in Agnes and the Hitman.

Yeah. It’s okay. Jen wasn’t the first to do that, either.

Okay. So, now that we’re over (I hope) our fear of accidentally plagiarizing, I want to talk about Neil Gaiman, and William Shakespeare, both of whom have made a career of taking existing stories and reframing them into something new and there is nothing wrong with that. As a matter of fact, there is something so incredibly right about it that I’ve been thinking about how to describe what they do properly for the past couple of months.

I think of it as pulling, kind of like taffy*. Like… stories are made of meaning, right? The richer the meaning, the more resonant the psychology from which that meaning sprang, the more we return to those stories, and retell them. I kind of imagine it as a cave, and the floor is kind of a thick membrane. You reach in, you pull out a chunk of meaning, expressed in an ancient story like Little Red Riding Hood or the Beldam, and you drag it through the membrane, which is made of pieces of other stories, bits of meaning from the years, and you get a mix of meaning as you pull it out. Then you work it into a context that speaks to your era of human history, create more meaning with it, and as readers take that in, it goes back into this well of meaning.

That’s a sacred endeavor. It’s important. It’s not only not wrong to do it, it’s part of our job as storytellers, as meaning-makers.

I’m still a little fuzzy on this idea. I don't quite have it down yet, but it feels right, the more I think about it. If I ever get the chance to talk to Neil, I’ll ask him about it.

In the meantime, a lot of us are avoiding that well because we feel like everything we do has to be original, has to have a twist. We’re worshipping at the wrong altar when we fetishize the surprise. Not to say that there isn’t a distinct pleasure to be had from the shocker, but not to the extent that writers have been twisting their stories into pretzel shapes just to make the twist work, which often, it doesn’t.

I’m not saying the surprise doesn’t have value; it does. It’s just that there are other values we don’t access when we go into the cave of meaning, sigh, and say, “Well, that’s been done. Can’t do that.”

Sure you can. As a matter of fact, we need you to.

Everything,

L

*I would like to state for the record that I know bugger all about pulling taffy, but the visual matches what I’m thinking about. I haven’t nailed this analogy yet. Still working on it.