What Vincent van Gogh Taught Me About Plagiarism

Self Portrait with Felt Hat

Have you ever heard a comment that stopped you in your tracks? I recently asked an author friend what she was reading. She replied that she doesn't read when writing or editing for fear she'll plagiarize someone.

That stumped me.

For me, reading is akin to breathing - a physical necessity. I read all the time and usually have several books in play at once. I simply hadn't considered the possibility that because I read while editing or writing that someone else's work might end up in one of my books.

The Chambers Dictionary, New Ninth Edition, defines 'plagiarize' as: "to steal ideas or writings from another person and present them as one's own."

My friend's comment hung in the back of my mind. It worried me a bit until my husband and I spent the better part of a day in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. That was the first time I realized how much effort Vincent, arguably one of the finest artists in history, put into copying other people's art.

I adore Van Gogh's work. It's simultaneously soothing and uplifting to me. But Vincent van Gogh was a plagiarist. A blatant copyist. And you know what? That makes me respect him all the more.

Many people think Vincent was an out and out nutter (thanks to the whole ear incident and a few other odd events), but if there's one thing that Van Gogh understood, it was that he had much to learn as an artist.

The Courtesan (after Eisen)

He was mostly self-taught and used the works of painters he admired to explore their techniques, and eventually, to develop his own. Vincent greatly admired Jean-Francios Millet's style and copied at least 21 of Millet's paintings, adding his own influence through the use of color. He dabbled in the pointillist style of painting developed by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac and made outright copies of Japanese prints by Hiroshige. All in the aid of furthering his own abilities, of developing his own style.

We treasure these copies, these attempts to imitate someone else's work just as much as we treasure Van Gogh's originals, such as Starry Night, The Potato Eaters, and the Sunflowers paintings. Vincent's copies are attributed as being 'after' a particular painter to credit the original artist. There is no doubt that Van Gogh was using the work of someone he admired to help develop his art rather than trying to pass the works off as his own.

But now we come to writers.

Hear me clearly: am I saying that plagiarism as an author is a good thing?

Absolutely not.

What am I saying? That reading the works of people I admire is crucial to how I develop my style, my technique, my ability to pace a plot, to grow a character, to write believable dialogue, to create stories that capture the imagination.

Peasant Woman Binding Sheaves (after Millet)

This is no different than a musician who listens to other musicians and hears and modifies a particular riff. Robert Johnson, the famous bluesman, recorded modified versions of several existing recordings such as Skip James' 22-20 Blues and Devil Got My Woman, changing them so much that they became his own. These in turn influenced groups such as the Rolling Stones, who further evolved this original blues style into the gritty rock 'n' roll sound they're famous for today.

The Lennie Tristano method of teaching jazz focused on singing solos by Lester Young and other jazz greats, note for note. Not so they could be reproduced note for note, but rather so the musician incorporated the style, the feeling of those tunes into their own music, and then used improvisation to make the music their own. 

While I'm editing, I deliberately read books by authors whose writing captivates me. Rather than being fearful that I'll plagiarize them, I'm hopeful that the qualities about their writing that I so admire will seep into my brain and influence how I write, not necessarily what I write.

Skull with Burning Cigarette

I'm grateful for my friend's comment about her fear of plagiarizing someone else's work. I'm equally grateful that we were in Amsterdam at the Van Gogh Museum not long after. Vincent taught me that studying the works of those we consider great, in an honest attempt to improve ourselves, can only help us mature, regardless of our art.

What about you? Do you find reading a source of inspiration while you write or edit, or is it a distraction?


photos taken by Gae-Lynn Woods at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Turning a Farming, er, Mishap Into Writing Inspiration

Real life offers great opportunities for adding depth to your writing.

For example, I now know that lips do more than wear lipstick and hold cigarettes. They serve a very practical purpose, that of keeping spit in your mouth. Why, you ask, am I worried about spit and whether it stays in my mouth? Because it’s suddenly relevant thanks to a recent farming mishap.

Let me share a tip, something that might save you pain and unsightly drooling in the future: keep your free hand firmly on the heavy-duty brushcutter when your other hand yanks on the starter cord. If you don’t, said brushcutter is likely to fly up off the ground and smack you in the face. Or, more precisely in my case, the mouth.

Another lesson learned the hard way.

How could this possibly add depth to my writing? At the time of the lip-splitting injury, I wasn’t worried about writing at all. I was more interested in stopping the cascade of blood running down my chin and neck (although I do remember a certain amazement that a damaged lip could bleed so much), and berating myself for not putting a foot on the brushcutter before trying to start the thing. I am a grown woman. I know better.

No, it was my husband who was thinking of my writing career when all this was going down.

To his credit, he didn’t mention writing until he got me back to the house, sopped up most of the blood, verified that my teeth were still snug in their gums, and determined that I probably wouldn’t need reconstructive surgery on the lip. (Yes, the split is that deep. It’s not a cut, not a fat lip, but a split right through the lip. Ouch. And ick, because it leaks.)




Only then does he say, “You need to write this down. How it happened, how it felt. The blood, what your lip looks like. Because one day, Cass is going to split her lip while trying to start a weedeater.”

Oooh, yeah, I think, attention totally diverted from the sting of hydrogen peroxide. “It wouldn’t be Cass,” I clarify, hoping that my imaginary main character is smarter than I am. “But Goober might do something like that.”

“No,” Husband says. “There’s no way Goober could start something as complex as a weedeater.”

“Good point. Maybe it is Cass. She might get bashed in the face when she’s arresting somebody.”

After that, I was off. Pain not entirely forgotten, but pushed to the side, brain alive with a new scene for my current book, wondering how to describe the sensation of a lip splitting, the taste of blood, and all the rest of it. Fun indeed.

I also realized that I do this quite frequently - pondering whether real life will work in a novel, not whacking myself in the face - though it’s usually someone else’s injury that inspires me. Yes, it’s crass, but it’s also the truth.

Is it just me, or do you find inspiration for your writing in the messes we get ourselves into?

(A few tips, just in case you ever split your lip while trying to start a brushcutter: 

An ice pack helps with the swelling. 

Laughing, smiling, and sneezing are not advisable. 

Straws help – think Mason Verger in Hannibal – but hold off on sipping that hot cup of coffee or tea until it cools down a tad.)

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Chasing the Dragon - Or Why I Write

There are two reasons I write, and the first is purely selfish.

Life is hard. I gained first-hand experience of this little nugget when my twin brothers grew so big in my mother's belly that her lap disappeared. Shortly after taking my lap, they popped into the world and from that moment on, life changed. It got noisy and messy and stinky and the center of the universe tilted.

Away from me.

I needed an escape.

I am fortunate to have parents who taught me to love reading. We read about castles and talking dogs and good people and different people and hurtful people and monsters. (Oh yes, the monsters. *delightful shiver*) I was transported. I might've been sitting on a lap but I was inside that page.


This one gift has given me a lifetime of pleasure and escape. An ability to step out of this noisy, messy, stinky place we call life and into an imaginary world. And when I say step into, I mean literally step into. Books do this for me in a way that a movie or television show cannot. I still disappear into a book and leave this world behind (and have done so to my detriment and the amusement of strangers on the London Underground many times).

I said that the first reason I write is selfish. When I put fingers to keyboard, I'm chasing the dragon - the pure intoxication - of that escape. The kind of absolute absorption into another world that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls 'flow' in his books "Flow" and "Good Business". He describes the basic elements of flow like this:

The task at hand draws one in with its complexity to such an extent that one becomes completely involved in it. There is no distinction between thought and action, between self and environment.

 
Mihaly also says that "...the most widely reported flow activity the world over is reading a good book, during which one becomes immersed in the characters and their vicissitudes to the point of forgetting oneself."

This is the second reason that I write.

A selfless reason, if you will. To give others an opportunity to forget themselves and the day-to-dayness of life.

I want to create good books with characters and experiences that are so absorbing that a reader steps into my imaginary world, bonds with those imaginary people, and cares deeply about what happens to them. I want that reader to come back to reality with a jolt, a sharp intake of breath, and feel elation that they escaped our noisy, messy, stinky world for a time.

I believe in the power of a story to enchant and transport. I believe the writing of such a story is a gift to the reader. Yes, I write to satisfy my selfish need for the dragon, but also to feed those whose hunger for escape is as great as my own.

 
I write crime novels, and at their heart these stories are about imperfect people facing hard decisions that define who they are and who they want to become. Life is noisy, messy, and stinky, and so are some of my characters and their problems. But still they struggle on.

 
Like we do.

 
Can I write a good book that transports readers? Time and reader feedback will tell. But in the meantime, I'll keep chasing my personal dragon and feeding that hunger for escape for myself, and hopefully for others.

What about you? Why do you read, or write, or both?

(For the record, I adore my brothers, but it's over four decades later and they're still noisy, messy, and stinky. Some things never change.)

* Shameless bit of self-promotion: Readers say they can't put the Cass Elliot crime series down! Click on the book covers to escape with Cass and the good (and bad) folks of Forney County, then let me know what the trip was like for you. *

 

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