All right, I admit it. I did. I stole from someone else’s novel.
I had been reading a retelling of the Arthur story. I wasn’t thinking a great deal about it, except the usual “I wouldn’t have done it like that” thoughts that authors often think when reading someone else’s stuff. So far, so normal.
Then something must have happened. Maybe the powers of the writer lifted, or maybe I just got more into the right mood. But in the space of a hundred pages I found three things.
- A man arrived at a royal court. The King was sick, the land was threatened. Moving among the courtiers our hero felt both their fears and their belief that he – somehow – was going to set things right again.
- There was an image of a man standing by a fire, alone on a dark plain.
- Later, our hero led his horse into a valley gripped with frost. As he descended towards the valley floor he heard, clear across the air, the sound of a smith’s hammer from a hut at the side of a road.
I finished the book. The ending was no surprise. But those three things remained with me like images from a dream. And I…
Well, no, I did not steal. I did what all storytellers do when they find something that stirs them. I polished those images, worked them over and wove them into narratives of my own.
I’ve talked elsewhere about how writers need minds like sponges, to suck up anything they come into contact with, in case it one day becomes useful. Another way to think about this is that you are like a beachcomber. You wander across a great expanse of ideas and things that have been thrown up by other minds, and suddenly your eye falls on something. You pick it up and look at it and think, “Hey, I can use this!” And that’s fine. So long as you don’t try to take the whole beach home with you.
And by the time I finished, you would never know where those images had come from, just as you never know the history of the thing you’ve picked up on the beach. But I’ll record it here for honesty, and because (as our hero would have understood) to take without giving thanks is not good luck. I found them in the pages of Mary Stewart’s The Hollow Hills.