Writers' ideas are reviewed in terms of genre, format and audience.
Novels also trigger memories from a reader's personal experience, and these give writers ideas for their own stories.
Garner says he avoids fiction for fear of unconsciously adopting other writers' ideas, and went straight from reading comics to Latin and Greek.
His Literary Theory: An Introduction, a punchy synopsis of other writers' ideas first published 20 years ago, must be the best-selling work of lit crit ever.
"In the 1960s it looked as if universities would establish a monopoly over the life of the mind, providing policies for politicians, sinecures for writers, ideas for journalists, and breakthroughs for industrialists," The Economist said in 1993.
Mr. Obama tends to take a magpie approach to reading — ruminating upon writers' ideas and picking and choosing those that flesh out his vision of the world or open promising new avenues of inquiry.
The film was initially to be written and developed by Working Title Films, but Black and Gass decided to assume creative control when they were not satisfied with the writers' ideas.
As well, comments reflect not only the writers' ideas about a particular news article but of the wider "story" circulating in public discourse and, as such, they provide insight into public opinion about an issue in its entirety.
My late friend William Styron would have raised an eyebrow at Harris's lofty description of the island as 'a non-writer's idea of a writer's paradise'.
This gave the writer the idea of founding the "Dittos".
