We are writers, hear us roar.
As writers, we perform a high wire act and deliver our audience either one of two outcomes. We make them scream in horror as we fall (with or without a net) or applaud our abilities to finesse our steps high above the ground.
And we’d have it no other way. We love the high wire. We like taking risks, learning new things and going to new places. If writing wasn’t a profession we’d be looking to join a traveling circus. Also, we tend not to like authority. This has the unintended consequence of making our editors permanently grumpy. And so it goes (yes, I pilfered that).
The past is our high wire. We fall from it when we write something cliche, reforming a beloved phrase from another writer and try to make it our own, or when we try to boilerplate phrases and clusters for quick reuse and end up insulting readers with generalities.
We get accolades for crossing the high wire when our writing sheds a light on something from a new perspective. We are successful when we create for our clients an article which engages readers about a fairly dry subject. Like all circus acts one part of our job is making things look easier than they actually are.
Personally, I’m guilty of all the bad stuff from time to time, a bit of quick rephrasing, some tired old constructions to add bulk to an article. I’m no better than Hemingway who said he wrote 99 pages of sh– for every single page of good writing. That goes for me too.
However, while I am breaking all the rules, I still make it across the high wire, and I’m going to show how I do it. Specifics will come in future posts.
I can repurpose cliches and rebalance the cringe-worthy parts. I can allow my writing to be influenced by techniques of admired writers while not sounding obvious, or being plagiaristic. I can be repetitious while couching it in equivalencies, multiple citations, and one or two surprise facts placed at just the right spot.
As writers have stated in so many different ways that no one has been able to source the original quote, “To steal from one writer is called plagiarism, to steal from many is called writing.”
Welcome to a den of thieves Bilbo Baggins would be proud to join.
This article was co-written by ArticleBunnyArticleBunny
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