In artistic works, I’ve heard, throughout my life, on the subject of how it’s not a good ideal to try to be totally original, “mediocrity borrows, genius steals.” For most of my life I had one interpretation of this, then recently realized another which was probably more in the spirit in which the phrase was intended. I’d like to share both because I think both interpretations have an aspect of the truth in them.

The interpretation of the maxim which I first took was that mediocre authors are overly worried about originality and so only take a little bit of an idea from an earlier work. This can pose a few problems. The most obvious is that they put the originality that they do have in the wrong place, such as where they’re not good at it. Suppose a man is good at writing dialog and characterization but not plot; if he takes the plot of a classic story and adds in characters that make sense to it in a different setting, he might write a story well worth reading. If he instead tries to come up with most of the plot it will probably be filled with plot holes and not be the sort of thing any good characters can be written within.

Another problem that this can have is that by not taking enough of the original idea, you may not have a viable idea. Imagine borrowing only Romeo from Romeo and Juliet, or Van Helsing but not Dracula. It would be comical to borrow Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride but for there to be no six-fingered man and for his father to be alive and well.

The moral of this interpretation is that if you’re going to take something from another story: commit. Take as much as makes for a good story in your story, then add what you’ve got to contribute. And this is quite reasonable. Human beings are not so greatly different from each other that no one ever does similar things, or similar circumstances never arise.

The interpretation of this maxim which occurred to me recently is very different, and is primarily about the effect of taking story elements from another story. When a mediocre story takes elements from an earlier story, it is said to borrow them because people primarily associate them with the earlier story and note the similarity as the later one being similar to the original. When the story which takes elements from an earlier story is genius, these elements come to be regarded as belonging to the later story. There are tons of examples of this in songs—whenever anyone things of the song Respect, they think of Aretha Franklin, not Otis Redding. When they think of I Will Always Love You they think of Whitney Huston, not Dolly Parton. You can see this in stories, too. There are all sorts of things historians attest William Shakespeare based many of his plays on and aside from those specialists who dig through ancient manuscripts, no one knows what they were, because it doesn’t matter.

Mark Twain once had one of his characters give the advice, “endeavor so to live that when you come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry.” In a similar vein, if you’re going to take story elements from another story, do such a good job with them that everyone is glad you did and the original author, if he’s still alive, is proud to have helped.