Plagiarism 101

My sophomore year in college, my roommate and I ended up in the same composition class. One of the assignments was to write a précis of an article. We went home that night, read the article, wrote our summaries, and turned them in, only to be called to the prof's office the next day and accused of plagiarizing each other. It took all our powers of persuasion to convince him that we actually hadn't looked at each other's papers, that it was all down to the fact that we'd been living together for months by then, and reading each other's poems and stories and absorbing each other's turns of phrase; and besides it was a short article and how many ways could you summarize it, anyway? Years later, I found myself using this story as a preface to warning my own composition students about plagiarism and the awful penalties that would be visited upon them should I catch them engaging in it. Their response has usually been to look at me blankly until I explain to them exactly what plagiarism is.

So I feel a little sorry for Kaavya Viswanathan, the 21-year-old author of How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life, who's been accused of plagiarizing numerous bits of dialogue, plot points, and perhaps her whole novel. But only a little. The Harvard Crimson, student mouthpiece of her university, claims to have found no less than 40 instances where the prose is just a little too similar for comfort to passages from Megan McCafferty's Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings. The Boston Globe's comparison of three passages is pretty damning, right down to the number of specialty shops mentioned, but I haven't seen the 37 others.

Viswanathan claims her "copying" was "unintentional and unconscious," that she read these books so often, with her photographic memory, that the author's phrasing and sensibility became her own. Ms. McCafferty's publisher, Crown, says that's not a good enough explanation. Normally, I would be smack in the middle of the crowd with my pitchfork and torch, calling for the malefactor's head. That was certainly my feeling about creative writing professor Brad Vice, who (temporarily) won the Flannery O'Connor Prize for a book containing a story apparently plagiarized from (or in the author's words, "an homage to") a story from Stars Fell on Alabama by Carl Carmer. In Vice's instance (and wow, isn't that an appropriate name, somehow?), he committed the cardinal academic sin of Failure to Cite after using sections of Carmer's prose in his own story, without acknowledgment. One of my students does that, it's instant failure. The Big F. The Fat Zero. The Long Goodbye—oh wait; that's Raymond Chandler.

See how easy it is? Constantly bombarded as we are by the media with uncited cultural references, stuff creeps in. And sticks. How often have you spouted some clever signature line from a show you love? It works the same way with voracious readers. Ask any author how easy it is to escape one's influences. I guarantee they'll hiss at you and reach for the whiskey. It's why most of us don't read fiction or poetry when we're writing it. Next thing you know, you're sounding like whomever it is you're reading. Seamus Heaney's poems get into my head this way and after reading one of his books, I have to either stay away from writing poems for six months, or throw out everything I write as derivative. And there's a very fine line between derivative and plagiarized.

Jen, who urged me blog about the uproar, felt equally uneasy about wholesale condemnation. "Sometimes," she said in an email, "there are unintentional 'echoes' here and there (and in my case, in physics writing, there're only so many ways you can word something without making it completely wrong)." And she's right. But the "only so many ways to state something" clause applies more to fact than to fiction. In Viswanathan's case, she seems to have crossed the line.

And yet I can't bring myself to call "Off with her head!" the way I can with Brad Vice. He, after all, is a multiply-published Associate Professor of creative writing at an accredited institution, with an MFA of his own. If anybody should know better, he should. Viswanathan, on the other hand, is a very young, untried, uncoached, first-time author, and her account of how her book came to be is an appalling tale of publisher's greed and editorial negligence. Her editor claims that "We went through a couple of drafts."

My jaw dropped when I read that, only because this was "a couple of drafts" based on a manuscript of 4 chapters and a synopsis (largely unheard of in fiction publishing, where agents usually want to see an entire manuscript) after they were bought by the publisher. After! Forgive me if I'm a little shrill, but everyone I've ever talked to in publishing, everything I've ever read by professionals has said in no uncertain terms that you need to have a complete, professional, edited manuscript of your novel before even thinking of writing query letters. This means a couple of drafts, at least, before anybody but you and possibly your writing group sees it.

What the hell was going on there? A crash course in creative writing? This poor young woman is sucked in the door by a "book packager," handed off to the William Morris Agency, who then secures her an absurd advance (half of which went to the "book packager") where she's paired up with an editor who doesn't know anything about Young Adult fiction. Another editor, one more familiar with the genre, might have caught the similarities before the book went to press. But the real point is that Viswanathan is an accidental author given next to no guidance. Hello? No wonder she's in trouble.

Writing fiction is not for sissies, and it ain't as easy as it looks. When you've never written anything before and are told by people in the biz who ought to know better that your work is perfect, how can you not go wrong? I'm willing to suspend my disbelief and give Viswanathan the benefit of the doubt in this case. If anyone should apologize, it should be her agent and her editor, for not shepherding someone with no experience through the process a little better. Go ye and sin no more.

The rest of you—you know who you are—suck it up and write your own stuff. Somebody, somewhere, will figure out if you haven't.

Comments

[Jennifer Ouellette]

Excellent analysis of the situation, and precisely why I thought you'd be such a good person to address it. But I feel I should point that your post's title echoes of that of one of my own posts ("Mediagenics 101"). Humph! Plagiarist. :)

[Lee Kottner]

Cultural trope or shameless stealing? You be the judge!
Of course, it could have just been an homage to your brilliance, Jen.

[Erica]

The line between "homage" plagiarism and plain old being derivative is fine enough, then one has to allow for the issues of tedious, i.e."classic," tropes of any genre.

Fiction is not, as most people assume, a coherent single thing. It is a large body of may things, all of which are informed by many other things. It's at least in part the author's job to be aware of what parts of their writing are informed and shaped by what influences - your blog is frequently about just that, isn't it? :-) The rest of the responsibility lies solely on the editor's shoulders. I have friends in the industry whose job it is to catch all these mistakes and point them out. (And they are ignored a great deal of the time, which will surprise no one, I'm sure.)

The author *is* culpable for not being aware that she stole whole chunks of writing. Of course she shouldn't be crucified - she should have been stopped however. Save the vitriol for the editor and publisher, who failed, utterly, at their jobs.

When I steal a bit from a writer - even if it's a bit that I can safely use because it's not word-for-word, but a conceptual thing, I know it. If I'm writing fanfiction, I point it out. "I stole a bit from Dorothy L. Sayer - if you're a fan of her work, you'll know immediately which bit it is." In my "original" fiction, I've inevitably used ideas and concepts from quite literally hundreds of sources - so who is to say that the work is original?

When I was in Illinois discussing my novel with a reading club, I was asked by one of the attendees why I relied on an old chestnut as a plot complication at one point. I was surprised, not because I didn't think it was a "classic" theme, but because you only have so many choices when creating certain situations - ANY choice would have been done to death! LOL

Like I always say, whatever you came up with - Shakespeare already did it and better, so just give up on the idea of originality and you'll be happier. :-)

[Lee Kottner]

Erica sez: "The author *is* culpable for not being aware that she stole whole chunks of writing. Of course she shouldn't be crucified - she should have been stopped however."

I couldn't agree more. In this case, it's rather like the "insane but guilty" option some states have in criminal cases. Did Viswanathan plagiarize McCafferty? Sure looks that way. Is she responsible for her actions? Yes. But she's not the only one responsible. Where was her editor, and why is she not being hung out to dry as well? I'd also like to know why Stephen Ambrose gets a slap on the wrist for plagiarizing other historians when Viswanathan gets cricified for it.