Warning: this is not for you if you’re a plagiarist You’re what you are—a classless thief, and you have to change your ways and be creative if you want to survive in the writing world. Stop stealing!

Now to the real writers who are worth their salt, and are not afraid to burn their fingers with the heat of their keypads, here’s how to steal with style. This is how to do it.

First, you have to consume more than you produce. What do I mean? You have to read. Read some more. Read some even more. Read until you’re too full you feel like ‘throwing words’.

Do you think I’m being too much when I say you have to read more than you write? Well, before I tell you why you have to, hear what someone (other than me) has to say.

Read more than you write. In expressing the ambition to be a writer, you are committing yourself to the community of other writers…

Teju Cole, Letters to a Young Writer.

In reading more than you write, you’re going from the realm of the shallow into the dimension of artistic/creative depth (Oluwakemi Esho). You’ll find your space and your originality in the larger community of other creatives.

Reading more than you write is where you find out how to ‘steal’ with style. A quote by Teju Cole in his book, Letters to a Young Writer, will give us an insight into what stealing with style looks like.

“Read slowly, like someone studying the network of tunnels underneath a bank vault in preparation for a heist. What can you steal from the techniques of the masters? Understand what Joyce is doing with language in Dubliners. Immerse yourself in the slow, taut arc of Mann’s Magic Mountain. And then (a little brashness helps) ask yourself: what can you do even better than them?”

Have you seen where the stealing and the style mix? If you haven’t, then read slowly.

You’re not stealing their work and ideas and masquerading it as yours, rather you’re ‘stealing’ techniques and art forms you can only be exposed to if you read, and read ‘promiscuously’ (heard this from one of my tutors).

When you ‘steal’ you can then use your own unique voice that stands you out, and your readers know it as your style of writing.

Before I stop punching my keypad (typed this on my phone), let me show you some ways I’ve stolen with style.

I shared a poem on social media for International Women’s Day titled Woman to Woman. Well, here is a little confession. I got that title from the chapter of a book (a fictional piece) I was reading and morphed it into a poem. The ideas in the book and the poem I wrote are dissimilar, but because I was reading something, I was able to write something.

This is one way to steal with style. There are many other ways.

Just so you know. It was while I was reading I had the idea to write this. So, go and read.

I think I’m done here.

You gerrit? If you don’t gerrit forget abourit.