You’re deep in research for your historical novel when you find it: a real newspaper article so perfect it could have been written for your story. You want to drop it right in. Then you hesitate. Is that allowed, or is it plagiarism? Before you use a real source, a few things are worth thinking through. I’m not an attorney, so this isn’t legal advice. But in this video I share the copyright and permission questions to ask yourself first, then my favorite move for when the answer gets complicated: how to take the facts you need from real material and make them entirely your own.
The question is, I write historical and I want to use an article from an old newspaper. How do I do it without plagiarizing? Well, first of all, remember I’m not an attorney, so I’m not giving any legal advice. That said, here’s some things to think about.
Number one, how old is it? It might actually be off copyright. Secondly, find out who owns the copyright if it’s within the protected period, and ask if you can reproduce it. Ask for permission to use it. And then finally, remember what I end up saying to a lot of people who write historical, and to myself in my Josie Prescott Antiques Mysteries where I’m using facts to write fiction: step away from the truth.
You can fictionalize it. You can take the facts you need and give them a different context, a different backstory, a different setting, a different environment. Make it your own. Maybe you don’t need it at all. Now, if you’re writing an epistolary novel, for example, where you’re actually reproducing newspaper clippings in addition to other ephemera such as a playbill, a photograph, anything of that nature, maybe you want to make up the newspaper. You know, just do a little graphic design and create a facsimile. Let it look like a newspaper, where you are actually doing the writing of the article.
I hope that helps. I’m quite confident you can do it. I look forward to hearing how it works out. And good luck with the historical in general.
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