I confess, I am a thief. I steal – I like to think from the best. I steal ideas, words, form, ways of doing. But I’m not alone…
Pablo Picasso is widely quoted as having said that “good artists borrow, great artists steal.” Eliot said something similar about poets and before him Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain. So I’m in good company.
The point is that there is so much we can learn, from masters, past and present; so, we figure out what is good, what we really like about the novel and what we want to incorporate into our idea, and then we do something entirely new with it.
My most recent steal is the setting for my novel, The Astronomer’s House, with a house and a place at its centre, spanning time – stolen or perhaps I should say inspired by, but entirely different from, Alice Hoffman’s The Blackbird House, which I loved.
