Commonplace Book / Sample
To quote — perchance to steal
A commonplace book is a collection of thoughts, ideas, snippets of information, copied passages from other texts, and possibly also images or snatches of musical notation, all gathered into one volume by an individual for future contemplation. It’s a centuries-old practice and I highly recommend it. Even if you already keep this sort of journal, consider keeping a special commonplace book that is specifically tied to your current writing project. If it works for you, I’d suggest doing this in an analogue format — handwriting in a notebook, gluing in clippings and the like. Curate, add to and review the commonplace book often. It's a great way to gather ideas that, precisely because they are not your own originally, will send you off on interesting tangents and keep your story fluid.
Whether you keep such a book or not, references and allusions are inspiring as well as expanding, so this prompt is about incorporating borrowed material into your prose.
Select a short passage of text — from your commonplace book or something you've read recently or a line that you read a zillion years ago and never forgot — that compels you and seems to connect with what you're writing. Tweak it to fit your own story — perhaps changing the vocabulary but maintaining the rhythm or syntax — and sneak this altered sample into your text. If your source matter is out of copyright, you can go to town here. If not, the more oblique / the more you tweak, the less complicated things will be when you eventually get your manuscript published. (And beware of pop-song lyrics here, the rights to which are notoriously well defended and expensive to quote in print...) In most cases, you won’t want to footnote this sort of thing. Think of it as more of an Easter Egg.