In a post on CrimeReads, Stephen Hunter says it’s ok to steal from books you love. “I steal,” he says. “I steal words, conceits, images, metaphors, structures, milieus, even whole plots.”
Hunter has swiped linguistic tools from John le Carré and R. Sidney Bowen, but also admits that he wishes to re-write his favorite novels to make them his own. “I refer to that spasm of bliss we all felt when we encountered a work so profoundly stimulating to our imagination, so in accord with who we were at the moment that it literally took over and became the world for a period,” he says. “It also marks the moment when we first thought ‘I wish I had written that’ became ‘I want to have written that.'”
