There’s a quote that gets passed around so often it’s become a cliché: “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” It’s been attributed to Picasso, to T.S. Eliot, to Igor Stravinsky — nobody’s quite sure who said it first, which is, honestly, very on-brand.
But here’s the thing: most people misunderstand what it means. It’s not a license to plagiarize. It’s a philosophy about how creative work actually develops.
Borrowing means taking something and keeping it at arm’s length — a little homage here, a little hat-tip there. You’re still trying to be politely separate from your influences. Stealing means something bolder: you take what resonates with you, absorb it so completely that it becomes part of how you think, and then it comes out the other side as something new. The source is still there if you look closely, but the output is unmistakably yours.
Every artist you admire did this. Cormac McCarthy absorbed Faulkner’s long, rolling sentences and produced something that sounds nothing like Faulkner. The Beatles listened obsessively to Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly and arrived at something nobody had heard before. Tarantino has watched more movies than most people will in ten lifetimes, and every frame of his work shows it — but you’d never mistake a Tarantino film for anything else.
This applies to blog posts just as much as it applies to painting or music or film.
If you want to write well, you need to read voraciously. Find the writers whose work makes you think, “I wish I’d written that.” Pay attention to how they structure an argument, how they open a piece, how they know when to be concise and when to let a thought breathe. Notice the rhythm of their sentences. Notice when they use a single short sentence for emphasis.
Like that.
Then steal it. Not the words — the moves. Take the technique, practice it until it feels natural, and use it in your own work. Over time, you’ll have stolen from enough different writers that your influences will blend into something that’s hard to trace back to any one source. That blend is your voice.
The writers who struggle most are often the ones trying hardest to be original from scratch — staring at a blank page, convinced that influence is weakness. But originality doesn’t come from a vacuum. It comes from having processed so much good work that your output can’t help but be interesting.
So here’s the practical advice: read the blogs you wish you’d written. Read essays that make you jealous. Read pieces that make you think, “how did they do that?” And then study them the way a musician transcribes a solo — not to copy it, but to understand it well enough to make it your own.
Great artists steal. Great bloggers steal. The only difference between theft and inspiration is how well you digest what you’ve taken.
Now go read something good.