A few thoughts without having read the linked essay, which does not interest me. Writers all write and work differently. Great writers develop their own, good

A few thoughts without having read the linked essay, which does not interest me. Writers all write and work differently. Great writers develop their own, good style or take time to craft it carefully into their works, "lesser" writers are satisfied with perfecting their skills and a certain artistic base level. Most of those "lesser" writers could probably write works of much higher quality if they wanted to, because the literary quality of a work depends to a large extent on the amount of time and care devoted to it. (There are bad habits, though.) Writing is mostly handcraft. It also depends on the genre, if you don't intend to write a work of high literary quality - for which there is a very small market and not much income -, then it's unlikely that the end result will have that quality. I don't believe that any writer consciously steals from anyone, not even the crappiest pulp fiction novelist would want do that, because it takes all the fun out of the writing. Writing is always about humans and there are only so many themes, so at a coarse look it might seem as if there is some stealing, but that is only a coarse and superficial look.