It's Plagiarism Week!

Ideas are the ink of the writing endeavor. Without them, we can bring nothing to the page, but every pen has a limited supply of ink. If ideas arrived in vast quantities, Hemingway would have written 50 books, not seven. J.D Salinger would never have needed to move into seclusion to overcome writer’s block, and I would have finished my second poetry collection a decade ago.

Ideas are in short supply, but they’ll be in even shorter supply if you’re not waiting for them. To be a writer is to be open to new ideas every moment of every day. The act of waiting is only worthwhile if you’re actually listening. You must open yourself up and let the earth fall right into you.

Your life is your material. Your feelings, observations, and experiences are the root of your ideas. When you write, you are essentially plagiarising yourself. You’re plucking from your “existence tree” one fruit at a time. Sometimes you’ll turn that fruit into pie, and sometimes you’ll turn it into cocktails. The root remains the same: You are the best source of your ideas, so writers must always be practicing their powers of observation.

The deeper you look, the deeper you’ll write.

There is nothing new under the sun. It says so in the bible, so it must be true. Mankind has been writing love poems for centuries. What ideas are left for producing an original love poem? Well, you’ve got to look more carefully. You’ve got to go deeper. You’ve got to use your own perspective because you are the only thing you really know. Nobody can do you better than you can, so your individuality is the very thing that makes your observations unique.

If you can see your own experiences accurately, you will have what it takes to write something uniquely yours. Your values, lessons, and observations are perfect plagiarism material, so this is plagiarism week. We’re going to “plagiarise” our own experiences. This requires you to actively observe your own life.

We’re not going to write anything today. We’re going to prepare to write something tomorrow instead. Today’s exercise is to turn on your radar and observe your life closely as you move through the world. Tomorrow, you will be writing what you’ve observed.

Focus on your internal world. How does it feel in your body? How does it feel in your mind? How do you respond to the world? What do you notice in others? All of these things are valuable material for writing.
If you lose focus, it’s okay. Just acknowledge it and get back to your mindfulness. You will lose focus repeatedly, so treat this as a discipline that requires work and practice. Hopefully by the end of the week you’ll be a lot better at observing your life and extracting ideas from it.