SimonDoom
Kink Lord
- Joined
- Apr 9, 2015
- Posts
- 15,736
The question was: whether you'd be offended or flattered. Copyright or whether it's right isn't a part of my question. I wasn't discussing that. Some people would be offended, some flattered, some wouldn't care. I've read threads where people say that they've inspired others to write, but what would you think if you read their work and they may as well have been quoting you? It's a 'what if' question, not a debate nor a reason to start one.
Here's Stephen King's quote on that (which was one of the reasons I thought of this question).
You may find yourself adopting a style you find particularly exciting, and there’s nothing wrong with that. When I read Ray Bradbury as a kid, I wrote like Ray Bradbury—everything green and wondrous and seen through a lens smeared with the grease of nostalgia. When I read James M. Cain, everything I wrote came out clipped and stripped and hardboiled. When I read Lovecraft, my prose became luxurious and Byzantine. I wrote stories in my teenage years where all these styles merged, creating a kind of hilarious stew. This sort of stylistic blending is a necessary part of developing one’s own style, but it doesn’t occur in a vacuum. You have to read widely, constantly refining (and redefining) your own work as you do so.
I like that quote. That describes my approach, in a way. I read and enjoy a wide variety of authors with different styles, and I pick things from them, cafeteria-style, that I'd like to see in my own prose. I'm not sure what the result is, and I'm not sure I'd recognize it in somebody else's writing if they tried to copy me.