Beginning writers need to draw models and take inspiration from other stories they have read, but the dirty little secret is that so do gifted writers. They are taking materials from their culture and deploying them as raw materials to manufacture something new. Thinking about authorship in those terms, as a cultural process, allows us to revitalize some of the things literature scholars have always done—talking about sources, exploring allusions, comparing different works within the same genre, watching an author's vision take shape over multiple works. All of these approaches help us to see that writers are also readers and that understanding their acts of reading can help us to better understand their writing.

If we can follow this process backwards in time, tracing how Melville read and reworked material from the Bible to create Moby-Dick, we can also trace it forward in time, looking at how other creators, working in a range of different media, took elements from Moby-Dick and used them as inspiration for their own creative acts. That's what Ricardo Pitts-Wiley did when he wrote and staged Moby-Dick: Then and Now. It's also what the incarcerated youth did when they participated in his workshop and learned how to read and rewrite Moby-Dick. Talking with Pitts-Wiley, we see that he didn't view remixing as a matter of turning kids loose with the text to do what they want with it; he insisted that remixing must begin with a close reading and deep understanding of the original work. (Chapter 7, page 76, Reading in a Participatory Culture)