When I was a little girl, my younger sister often tagged along behind me. It seemed as though she copied everything I did, which was a source of constant irritation to me. My mother often responded by saying, “Oh, honey, it’s okay; imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”

Yeah, that didn’t float with me either, back then–I still wanted to beat her up. [If you’re reading this, baby sis, you know I love ya.]

I think there’s some truth to that saying though–don’t you feel good when you see somebody want to borrow your special recipe, or ask where you bought your very tasteful drapes, or where you get your awesomely stylish haircut? It feels good to have people acknowledge the worth of your decisions by emulating them.

For writers, however, too much imitation is a bad thing. After all, who wants to keep reading the same tired plots and story lines over and over again? It gets dull. (And who wants to write them, for that matter?)

Yes, originality is critical, but for some writers, The New can often be hard to come by and they resort to a little bit more imitation than they should (i.e., plagiarism.) There’ve been some big cases of plagiarism in the news in recent years, and by some pretty big names, too. That’s got some writers feeling queasy about sharing even rough excerpts (as I did last week).

But here’s the thing (in case you didn’t know):

The U.S. Copyright Office basically states that your work is protected [for the most part] from the moment you create it and “fix it in a tangible form,” whether it is published or unpublished, although it still recommends that you register your copyright with them, anyway, due to differences in copyright laws abroad. That way, if someone does “imitate” any of your work too closely, you have the right to bring a suit of infringement, something the unregistered copyrights or “poor man’s copyrights” (sending a copy to yourself and dating it) don’t provide.

It’s certainly something to ponder when you’re trying to build your platform by sharing works in progress, but I guess my take on sharing excerpts is that it’s more important for me to get the word out there about what I’m doing, knowing that I’m mostly protected, than to hide my progress under a rock of fear of imitators. I think I’d be flattered someone thought my work good enough to imitate.

On the other hand, maybe those thinking about “borrowing” my stuff too liberally might want to talk with my little sister first to find out what other kinds of things I like to do with rocks…

Just something I was thinking about on this slow Monday. Look for more excerpts to come.