For writers, accusations of plagiarism stick. The Cornish novelist and poet D. M. Thomas became as well known in the early 1980s for ‘The White Hotel’, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, as for the charge that he owed the passages in the book on the 1941 massacre of 33,771 Jews at Babi Yar in Kiev to the Russian writer Anatoly Kuznetsov. In the same period, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper came unstuck when he authenticated newly discovered diaries which appeared to have been written by Adolf Hitler. They turned out to be forgeries – plagiarism with criminal intent. The historian was not alone in being deceived: a fellow historian and two handwriting experts were ensnared by the forger as well.

But the pond of plagiarism isn’t always a murky one for writing and writers. Among the books I was given for Christmas was P D James’ ‘Death Comes to Pemberley’. The Austen purist in me stiffened – imperceptibly, I hope – as I peeled back the wrapping paper on Boxing Day and contemplated the pollution of my bookshelves by pastiche. Two weeks later, my scruples overcome, I embarked on the prologue, which is an impressive and immediately engaging 12-page synopsis of the plot of ‘Pride & Prejudice’. Throughout ‘Death Comes to Pemberley’s’ 300 pages, I have been reflecting on the idea that writing in the style of others can lead writers in the direction of their own voice.

From Austen, there is much for other writers to learn: how to provide a pithy commentary on social behaviour in a small community; when to employ the efficient technique of reported indirect speech to equip characters with the means to reflect on their own actions; which personality traits to highlight and which to underplay to deepen characterisation whilst avoiding satire. When Sir Walter Elliot from ‘Persuasion’ makes a guest appearance as a temporary employer of Wickham and Harriet Martin wanders in briefly from ‘Emma’ to tie up one of ‘Death Comes to Pemberley’s’ plot strands, we see how P D James’ delight in emulating the style of an admired writer extends to a playfulness that delights both writer and reader.

Plagiarism is, after all, merely imitation, that greatest form of flattery. Writers tempted to engage in it must do the work of deconstruction before they reconstruct, demolish before they build back. They need to think how vocabulary, idiom, sentence structure and characterisation uniquely combine in the writer in whose footsteps they intend to follow. Then there is the question of what will be transferred wholesale and what modified. In ‘Death Comes to Pemberley’, Elizabeth and Wickham are Austen’s creatures, she as lively a mother as she was a bride and he the scoundrel he always was – although in the later novel, there is hope of redemption for him and Lydia.

So how successful a plagiarist is James? Let’s find out. Which of the following four quotations are from ‘Death Comes to Pemberley’ and which from ‘Pride and Prejudice’?

1. ‘No-one, of course, was so ill bred as to make their curiosity apparent, but much can be learnt by the judicious parting of fingers when the hands are raised in prayer, or by a single glance under the protection of a bonnet during the singing of a hymn.’

2. ‘He was surely not unaware that he could not enter a room without every woman present turning her eyes towards him.’

3. ‘They were in fact very fine ladies; not deficient in good humour when they were pleased, nor in the power of making themselves agreeable when they chose it, but proud and conceited.’

4. ‘Elizabeth expected to get nothing of interest from Mr Collins’s letter except the reprehensible pleasure of relishing his unique mixture of pomposity and delight.’

I would like to ask PD James, an experienced and successful writer, what were the most difficult aspects of writing in the style a writer with such a distinctive voice. I would like to know too which other writers’ styles she is tempted to try out.

Have you experimented with writing in the voice of another writer? If so, which writers did you take as your model, and why did you choose them? Was it more difficult than you expected? If not, do you think plagiarism could be useful developing your own writing skills? Responses, please – in the style of a writer of your choice, of course!

A psychiatrist by profession, she has that facility with languages which seems to elude the English, and is a fluent reader of German, French and English, the latter with such ease that she ate up Dorothy Richardson’s stream of consciousness without a murmur the year I chose as my annual gift the first volume of Pilgrimage, at the time newly republished by Virago.  That year, as every year, a short and neatly written letter from her arrived in late January, giving her verdict on style and structure in a pithy analysis that would not have shamed a literary critic writing for a weekend review section.

My 2011 choice for Kirsten is The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal.  It is the story of De Waal’s family told through objects.  It begins in the Paris of the Impressionists and ends in the Vienna of the Second World War.   The objects, netsuke, are small, intricately carved figurines of ivory used by Japanese men to tie their personal belongings by cords to their kosode and kimono.  In the book, they supply a fitting narrative structure for a man who is a ceramicist before he is a writer.

As De Waal‘s medium of choice is objects, not words, it comes as no surprise that touch is central to the reader’s experience of the book: the feel of fine furniture and fabric in the houses of the wealthy, the dry bindings of manuscripts in dealers’ studios, the secretive touch of lovers.  The Hare with Amber Eyes is captivating as biography and autobiography and illuminating as social and political history. Despite De Waal’s declaration that this is the only story he has to tell, it does something new and arresting in using language to describe so intensively the sensations of touch.

Eight OCA creative writing tutors have named their highlights of the literary year, commenting on what their personal highlights of the 2011 literary year have to say to writers as well as to readers.  Here are their choices.  What are yours?

Liz Cashdan

A highlight in the writing/reading world this year as always was the NAWE conference in Northampton in November.  The conference was opened by Carol Ann Duffy reading from her newest book The Bees. One poem that has stayed with me is Water about the death of her mother.  Here are the last six lines:

“Nights since I’ve cried, but gone

to my own child’s side with a drink, watched

her gulp it down then sleep.  Water.

What a mother brings

through darkness still

to her parched daughter.”

Also at the conference, a chance to workshop with Columbia University, Chicago writing tutors on how keeping a journal can lead you into writing a story; with poet Eve Grubin on reticence in writing poetry, how you don’t have to explain things away, trust your images to carry the message for you.  She introduced us among other poets to Americans Mary Howe’s What the Angels Left, and Dorianne Laux’s  The Shipfitter’s Wife.

I could go on with many more instances of illuminating and challenging workshops and discussions.  But if you’ve never been to a NAWE conference before, start saving now for next November.

Beatrice Colin

This year one of my favourite books has been A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore. It came out last year but since I am such a huge admirer of her short fiction, I was loath to read it in case it was a disappointment. It wasn’t. Sharp, funny and lyrical, it is a novel that explores our deep longing for wholeness in contemporary life, be that as mother or as a soldier. Her dialogue, as always, is brilliant, her imagery, jaw-droppingly accurate and she remains the kind of writer I return to when I want to remind myself how seemingly effortless good writing should be.

John Drew

Earlier this year, an Australian resident in China submitted some poems for an OCA course after being advised to try his hand at poetry. I stuck my neck out, as a tutor sometimes may, and tentatively suggested that the approach he took to his cross-cultural encounters, even his sensibility, might work better in fiction than in poetry. He countered that, to understand what he was doing in his poetry, I should read an Australian poet called Ioana Petrescu.

By a peculiar coincidence, it so happened that Ioana Petrescu had written her first poems in English at some workshops I had given in Romania shortly after the fall of Ceaucescu. I located her present address in Australia and, informing her that she was being used as a stick to beat me with, asked her to send me her latest poetry. This she did, together with a request to write an introduction to her next collection of poetry.

In one poem, ‘Camping’, friends of Ioana’s in Australia tell her of the excitement generated by a camping trip in the Outback: no fresh food, no hot water, no mod cons. Such a happy approach to deprivation causes Ioana to recall her experience of urban life in Romania in the 1980’s. Life under Ceaucescu, she realises, could be seen to be ‘forever camping’.

I suddenly found myself in Romania again this summer and tried out Ioana’s poem on some students at a Fine Arts high school. The poem is self-explanatory, isn’t it, I asked the teacher, the students don’t need any briefing about Australia?  They know something about contemporary Australia, the teacher replied, but they don’t have a clue what life was like in the last years of Ceaucescu.

Joanna Ezekiel

I first became aware of Persephone Books http://www.persephonebooks.co.uk/ last year. They are a small London publishing house reissuing fiction, poetry and non-fiction by neglected nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers. Working my way through the catalogue, and after a trip to India, I read ‘The Far Cry’ by Emma Smith, which was first published in 1949. She gives us the story of a young girl’s ocean voyage to India, where she starts a new life.  Although, from this creative writing tutor’s point of view, the narrative viewpoint changes abruptly and is often omniscient, the descriptions of the sights, smells and sounds are constantly vivid and surprising, such as ‘The swimming pool continued to sparkle with children’. The intensity of her use of sensory detail, especially verbs, really drew me in.

Liz Kay

I’d like to mention Fay Weldon’s Chalcott Crescent (Corvus, 2009) for a line that comes towards the end of the book: I have always used fiction to get to the heart of the matter, to discover what it is that I know. This, I think, distils what a lot of writers may be doing without realising it. Good authors often tell us things we already know, but have never managed to actually put into words - and only then can we really examine a concept, and kick it around a bit. I’ve always been a fan of hers - well before she gave my own book, Missing Link, a terrific review in 2009! The novel is an interesting read, with a dystopian take on life, and an inventive structure. She has a unique style, and would be a useful addition to any creative writing student’s booklist.

Nina Milton

I had not encountered Hari Kunzru before, despite the fact he was one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists in 2003. In fact, I knew so little of him, that on starting the book he published this year, Gods Without Men, I wrongly presumed he was American; the control and confidence he uses within his setting…mostly an area of the California desert called the Pinnacles…convinced me he knew the US well. The breathtaking sweep of the novel immediately reminded me of Don Delillo, Tom Wolfe or even John Irving.

The novel bobs back in forth in time, from 1778 to 2008. The main theme is that of Jaz, who has a Punjabi background and his wife, Lisa, who is Jewish. They’re from New York and live acutely New Yorker lives – Jaz is a computer whiz working on Wall Street. Their story is the tragedy of a disrupted holiday in a holiday resort close to the Pinnacles. Their autistic son, Raj, disappears into the desert, setting up a dramatic hunt that reminds the reader of recent media hype around ‘missing children’ cases.

The modernity of these lives is counterpointed by other characters who are also drawn to the desert. These include mystic North American Indians, hippies, an eighteenth century Spanish official, a British rock star, a UFO quester called Schmidt, a man with murder on his mind and a shell-shocked soldier from the first world war. Hari Kunzru manages to bring all his characters together using specific themes and leitmotifs, together with a quote at the front of the novel from Balzac…in the desert there is nothing…C’est Dieu sans les hommes…

I wondered, at first, as the myriad sections of the novel got underway, if this book was going to be too conspicuously clever for its own good, but Kunzru’s main objective, thank heavens, is to tell stories…they were all extremely readable and I was soon hooked by the characters’ lives, experiences and personalities, which allow the reader to become involved while the underlying text makes itself known.

I thought of comparing this book to David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas; it has the breadth and quirky approach to structure that Mitchell likes to take, alongside a gripping narrative that delves deeply into the many characters. But in my opinion, the scope of Gods Without Men has even more control and heart than Atlas, and I loved Kunzru’s concentration on one landscape, which he describes so vividly that it becomes a character in its own right.

Gods Without Men was not eventually short-listed for the Man Booker this year; I thought that was short-sighted of the judges. It also proves that taste in literature is a subjective thing…I’d be interested to hear what other people think.

Diane Paul

Julian Barnes provided a worthy ending to my year’s supply of reading for me and my book blog. The unputdownable Man Booker Prizewinner this year, The Sense of an Ending was too good not to read in one session. It’s my choice for a fascinating insight into how high quality literary writing can either encourage a would-be writer’s aspirations to attain perfection or dash their hopes of ever reaching such a pinnacle. Low on plot and action, yet the core of the story provided the pivot for the inner world of the characters and the repercussions that lack of communication can engender for us all.

Above all, Barnes’s superb use of the English language pulled me into his enigmatic world with its incisiveness and insight and left me with the urge to recommend it to all my students as a point of reference. It’s a worthy successor to last year’s winner, Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question, which, although hard to get into initially, threw up some thought-provoking questions that the author possibly wanted to explore in a well-balanced argument through his characters. Both books are character-led, showing how important it is to develop believable characters who can create the emotional pull needed if fiction is to represent real life.

Elaine Walker

One of the highlights for me this year was being introduced to the performance poetry of Martin Daws http://www.martindaws.com/ when I hosted a Poetry Slam for Literature Wales in June as part of Denbigh Midsummer Festival.  I also heard him perform a full set at The Absurd, a bi-monthly live literature event at Theatr Clywd in Mold http://www.theabsurd.co.uk/ and highly recommend him as a fine poet and an innovative entertainer.  Also, for anyone wondering about alternative ways of getting their poetry to an audience, he’s an inspiring introduction to the world of spoken word.

What would you choose and why?

The bath is a good place to read verse.  Good because quiet (after lunch, almost certainly), clean (one hopes), and free (in most houses) from interruption.  One afternoon a few days ago, I retreated there with Tread Softly, a collection of poems by OCA creative writing graduate Mary Webster.   Quickly, the sensations of hot water and weak Winter sun receded.  In their place came the rhythm of a 12-month cycle through the volume’s opening quartet ‘Seasons Edges’:

The poems, dense and without dialogue, describe a year through vegetation –

‘Feel Spring’s flattery
Stir leaf’s unfurling flush and
up-rush surge of bud swarm.
S w e l l.’
(‘Balance’, v. 2);

fauna –

‘(Too much shadow and old light)….underline
snail slime, spider web…..’
(‘Cusp’, v. 2)

light –

‘Slow roll rose petal
Sets adrift into lapping dusk.’
(Brimful, v. 3);

and sound –

‘Wind snips at leaves;
Their rags flap like the last wash.’
(‘Frayed’, v. 3)

There are no surplus words in this tightly packed chapbook.  All the strays have been sent away, chopped out through revision and revision.  Each one of its 46 pages is branded with the writer’s studied craftsmanship.

The erotic promise of a new love affair is uncovered slowly in the 70 words of ‘Shelling Peas’, the silent tension between two people engaged in a mundane domestic chore released through the poem’s intrusive penultimate word:

‘Sounds are dulled
But for them falling
And her breathing
And her skin, her blushing skin.’
(‘Shelling Peas’, v. 5)

Human experiences – the struggle to know a strange land, being alone as dawn breaks, accepting the death of a parent – are the business of the book’s central section, ‘Here and There’.   Born in England, Mary Webster has lived and worked on three different continents.  For her, writing poetry is one of the ways in which she has got to grips with a new country – South Africa while she was writing the collection which became Tread Softly.

The elision of the title of the poem ‘This Foreign Land’ into the arresting first line ‘fills my mouth with stones’ whose ‘weight crushes words’, brutally confront the reader with the ancient role of the poet as a maker of meaning for members of a wider community.

The brackets formed around ‘Here and There’ by ‘Seasons Edges’ and ‘Four Elements’ give prominence to nature without man or woman.   In ‘Water’, the concluding poem of the final quartet, the life-affirming succession of Spring into Summer, Autumn in to Winter, is replaced by the exhortation to:

‘Lie ‘till all your worldly cover is cleaned
And you return to your beginning.’

I closed the book and the front cover came to rest on my damp hand, the bath water cold and the sun gone, reading rewarded.

Mary Webster arranged the publication of Tread Softly through blurb.com in celebration of being awarded a first class honours Bachelor of Creative Arts degree in June 2011.  Her degree has gained her additional recognition as The Most Distinguished Performance on an Undergraduate Degree Programme from an Outside Body from Buckinghamshire New University in academic year 2010/11.  Tread Softly is her first collection of poetry.

Photograph: Nigel Barker

In April, playwright Richard Hurford was commissioned by Sheffield Theatres to write a new play. The brief: to celebrate the Crucible’s 40th birthday and to launch a new community ensemble, Sheffield People’s Theatre. In a conversation with the dramatist (see below) about the role of collaboration in creating ‘Lives in Art’ on the eve of the show’s first night, Elizabeth found herself questioning whether writers really are the solitary figures of popular imagination.

How different would Sheffield be from the city it is today had the Crucible had never been built? That was the first question playwright Richard Hurford and Andrew Loretto, the executive producer of ‘Lives in Art’, asked when they began work on a new show that is the centre-piece of the theatre’s 40th birthday celebrations.

“The fact that the play has been created at a time of cuts in arts funding has made the central conflict of the play, between art and no art, a particularly relevant one,” explains Richard. “Such a huge theme has to be debated, and debated hard. My job has been to give voice to the ideas which have emerged and been refined over a period of months. We wouldn’t have the play we have now if I had been sitting working on the script alone, no matter how clear the brief.”

Although the Crucible is one England’s leading regional theatres, debate about whether to build it at all, and what kind of theatre it should be, continued throughout the 1960s. The voices in opposing the plans for a thrust stage were particularly loud. In the end, the innovators won out, championed amongst others by Lawrence Olivier, who lauded the classical roots of theatre-in-the-round. Lives in Art gives audiences the opportunity to reassess the value of art in their own lives, in the life of the city and in the wider community.

How does a writer work from such a broad a central idea, developing plot and building characters, especially when there is a community cast keen to be on stage and under the spotlight? “I was involved in every one of the 350 auditions for the new ensemble and that has helped me enormously with the script,” says Richard. “I’ve had the time to think through how to give every one of the 55 people who are now members of Sheffield People’s Theatre a moment when the audience’s attention is focussed on them – but without compromising the artistic integrity of the piece. From very early on, I thought in terms of groups, not of individual characters. As soon as Andrew Dunn (the actor from Dinner Ladies who plays the role of Crucible caretaker Battersby) joined rehearsals, we could see it was going to work as we had envisaged.”

While not every playwright is asked to work with a community ensemble, all have to collaborate with a director, producer, and set and lighting designers – and possibly a composer too. I wondered whether the process of collaboration erodes a writer’s sense of ownership of the finished script. Richard certainly doesn’t take this view of ‘Lives in Art’, describing the joy of writing, debating with the creative team and ensemble, and re-writing. “I feel absolutely that I am the play’s author,” he says. “I fought for every word. There were many, many suggestions for additions, deletions and changes as the work developed. Some have found their place on stage, many more haven’t.”

It would be easy to assume that dramatists are unique amongst creative writers in writing collaboratively, and that poets, novelists and writers of short stories are distinguished from them in writing in isolation. I’m not sure now this is the case. Perhaps we should distinguish more clearly between the act of writing (usually solitary) and the craft of writing (often collective). Many aspects of all forms of creative writing involve others, as witting or unwitting aid and inspiration: observation, interviewing and research, keeping a common-place book, collecting objects and artefacts.

Even the act of writing itself is not always solitary. Jane Austen famously wrote in the corner of the drawing room at Chawton, amidst the tea-drinking and chatter of Napoleonic-era Portsmouth. Swedish detective fiction-writing husband and wife team Maj Sjőwall and Per Wahlőő wrote a chapter each of their books round the dining-room table in the evening after their children had gone to bed.

Public writing is experiencing a renaissance, with online forums opening up opportunities for anyone and everyone to make their views known. Laptops and iPads have made writing an accepted sight for visitors to parks, pubs and coffee shops. Even in these public locations, though, the screen remains a private space. So we don’t know just what is being written against the backdrop of scraping chair legs, clinking glasses and shouting children. Emails? Blog entries? Facebook posts? All of those, no doubt. But why not first drafts of novels, short story plot summaries and revisions to stanzas of narrative poetry too?

‘Lives in Art’ is at Sheffield’s Crucible theatre until 12 November.