And this is going to be a very simplistic explanation, but there you go.

If you spent all day working on a meal and at the last minute, your next door neighbor pops in and takes the carrots off the stove, then claims credit for doing the entire meal, this is wrong.

You do all the hard work.

You deserve the recognition.

You use somebody’s hard work to help with your own hard work? Hey, not necessarily anything wrong with that….as long as you give credit to the owner of whoever had work that helped you with yours.

If you can’t do it ‘without breaking the flow’, then for crying out loud, use an acknowledgment. Use a footnote. The world won’t stop over footnotes in fiction. If this is just out of the question, then whatever it is that you need to ‘borrow’ from somebody else isn’t all that vital to the story. If it’s that vital, and you can’t explain it in your own words, then you need to give credit.

FYI, my two cents on this ‘using your own words’ is this:

We are writers. Any writer who can write a story, from beginning to end, from conflict to resolution, from chapter one to chapter whatever, should be able to take whatever knowledge they’ve learned through research and life experiences and explain in their own words.

But to just take somebody else’s hard work and let others think it’s yours?

Give credit where credit is due.

It’s that plain.

It’s that simple.

To do otherwise is just wrong. Plain and simple.