Angry - Not Me

THE SOURCES OF YOUR IDEAS

How should a writer of fiction credit the source of his ideas, given that all ideas have their source somewhere?

In academic works it is customary to credit sources in a bibliography at the end of the work, or in footnotes at the bottom of each page or tagged on as an appendix. Those are the ‘club rules’ for that type of writing. But for fiction the issue is very much more complex, not just because ideas come at us from all over the place, but also because there are times when we do not even know that an idea we have has its source in something specific.

There is an excellent book called ‘The Road to Xanadu: A study in the ways of the imagination’ by John Livingston Lowes. It basically goes to enormous length to dissect Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem ‘The Rime of The Ancient Mariner’ and to show the sources of Coleridge’s ideas in the poem. Coleridge read voraciously, sucking in everything he read, digesting it, feeding his creative sub-conscious so that when he wrote the poem what he wrote was informed by everything he had read even when Coleridge himself was not always aware of how much his reading influenced what he wrote. At over six hundred pages long, this text by J L Lowes is an excellent illustration of how it would be close to impossible and patently absurd for fiction writers to credit the sources of all their ideas in the way that academics do. All creative ideas have their source in something else. An imagination needs fed before it can begin to work and what feeds it is everything, including everything seen or read or heard. As a result a writer does not always know where his/her idea comes from. Crediting creative ideas in the way that academics credit their ideas (and the way that J L Lowes has done for Coleridge) doesn’t make any real sense…unless you have a very specific interest in researching or knowing this aspect of a work. It is certainly not what the average fiction reader wants to trawl through – over 600 pages of footnotes for a single poem – unless the fiction reader has a very particular interest in how the imagination of a particular writer works.

If a writer was to contemplate crediting every thought and idea that fed into the writing of a novel, he would never be done, especially if he were a writer who was thorough in his self-reflection. So what does a writer do? Yann Martell acknowledged the spark for his novel ‘Life of Pi’ in a foreword. I thought that was a generous and honest thing to have done, but the anger of the ‘plagiarism police’ was not assuaged, rather it was fed; and I am certain that there were many other ideas in ‘Life of Pi’ that had their genesis in something else that Martell read and are not credited in the same foreword. I, myself, have never tried to hide the ‘sparks’ for my own works, whenever I have been aware of them, and I have taken flack for two of my stories because they have their source in something else and I have not tried to hide their source. I am not here whinging about that flack, but I do believe that those who have been angriest and loudest in attacking me, have not got a sure grasp of how the imagination works, how creativity works, or of what constitutes plagiarism.

Visual artists allow themselves to be influenced by the works of other artists. It is accepted that artists do that. Film-makers do it, too. It is done because that is how creativity works. Shakespeare recycled the plot of 'Romeo and Juliet' and wrote his own words into the poetry of his play and came up with something that was better than all its sources and was 'his own'. Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales' clearly has many sources including Boccaccio's 'Decameron' and the poetry of Petrarch and Dante, and the work of Ovid and The Bible. We are here talking about two of the giants of English Literature and how their imaginations worked, responding to written works that already existed in their world. If writers today were honest, they would admit that they do not create in a vacuum and that the ideas they have do not come out of nothing, but instead come out of everything that they have seen, heard, read. Writers should be allowed to do this, otherwise how could they really function? As to crediting their sources by attaching something to the created work for every idea, that doesn't really make sense when 'everything' has a source elsewhere (even if the sometimes the source is somewhat oblique).