Do Great Writers Really Steal? On Plagiarism and Publishing | Literary Hub

Writing consists of basically two things: idea and execution. You come up with an idea, and you figure out how to execute it in terms of style, setting, and genre. Writers are understandably protective of our ideas, but for better or worse the law only really protects execution. Unless someone is directly stealing your exact words, it is nearly impossible to prove that they took the idea. And it probably wouldn't be a good thing if it did. As I've argued before, the history of literature is the history of remixing existing ideas in new ways. Prevent people from reusing an existing idea, and you end literature.