No mere allusion: building fiction through modeling

By guest author Elise Abram
visiting us from Canada (hence some variant spellings)

Modelling is not (as the title of a previous blog I wrote implied) actually stealing. It's more like borrowing. It happens all the time.
Look over a classic character's shoulder and learn!
Ray Bradbury did it. In the opening of his novel, Graveyard for Lunatics, Bradbury borrows Dickens's "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" parallel structure. In the short story, "The Veldt", Bradbury names the ch...