January 14, 2008

16 Comments »

1. Should I live in terror that next week someone is going to “uncover” the whole laundry list of allusions in my books and my career will be over because I employed a recognized, well-respected literary device?

   No. On the one hand there’s a quote or two from a handful of sources, which, if it has a clear context within words that are inarguably *yours*, then it’s an allusion.

   But something like this….that is repeated copying from the same source and very clearly plagiarism, not allusion.

   Anyone reasonable can tell the difference. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t plenty of unreasonable people who wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, but in this case, those people are just the hangers-on, not the ones who’ve done any of the actual investigating or exposing of the plagiarism.

   What’s frightening to me is the pack mentality. Outrage is one thing. Using that outrage as an excuse to level personal insults and make offensive assumptions about a person they don’t know anything about, that’s another, and it’s pretty disgusting. I wish those people would stop ignoring the blog owners’ pleas to focus on the actions rather than the author herself…

   Comment by Bekke — January 14, 2008 @ 9:45 pm

2. Oh, no, I agree that what was eventually uncovered was absolutely plagiarism. And that’s bad, wrong, morally reprehensible, etc., etc.

   No, what concerned me is the level of reaction when what was known was much grayer. (It’s not that it is good or even okay to use language from research *like this*–it’s that research IS used in fic all the time and does NOT need to be cited to be correct. I could see CE in particular not even thinking that there is something special about language other than the facts or action it represents, too, of course.) Summon the wolf pack–not just those who understand the issues but those who start making wild declarations about what plagiarism is and means. I start wondering if those people would join any pack and try to rip any author apart for things that are perfectly moral, legal, ethical, etc., just because it references something else. Just look at Dear Author and the off-in-right-field quotes from policies that apply to academic research papers. The fact that fiction isn’t a research paper than that footnotes are entirely out of place in 99.99% of novels is simply dismissed by Jane–this lack of footnoting is portrayed as a moral weakness and evidence of some sort of dastardly plan of thievery!

   Not even all nonfic is footnoted. Take a look at any undergrad history textbook. Are textbooks, then, a source of eeeeevil plagiarism? Of course not!

   I absolutely don’t see Candy et al. declaring that I am The Evil One on the basis of my use of biblical quotes. But I can see other people doing it–out of ignorance, out of malice, out of a desire for attention, whatever.

   Comment by Lydia — January 15, 2008 @ 5:11 am

3. Oh, and I don’t think Cassie Edwards thought she was stealing from any of the books. It’s pretty clear that she was using Laughing Boy as if it were research–to get the details of place and time. She doesn’t realize that taking FACTS from another work is fine in fiction, but you can’t just lift out pretty bits of language, too.

   Some of those examples aren’t plagiarism and aren’t unethical–yes, even in the Laughing Boy example. Others are. Yes, I’m sure she took on purpose. But I doubt that she realized it was wrong because of how she used it and what she was trying to get out of it. This is more an example of really poor writing and clumsy use of sources than a thought-out attempt to exploit someone else’s work.

   Even Candy’s getting a bit caught up in it all:

   “Savage Dream also contains several instances of paragraphs that are remarkably similar to another one of her own novels. This is not the first time things like these have been caught, and I have debated including them in the document, because I’m not entirely sure it’s noteworthy or newsworthy in quite the same way–if she wants to recycle her own passages, that’s not exactly great writing, but it’s not heinous in the same way.

   I suppose I can create another PDF for those sorts of things…. ”

   (From the comments on the section you linked to.)

   So now bad writing will be a crime?

   And then there are other knee-jerk posts like this:

   “I have a copy of Don Poynter’s “Self Publishing Manual” and he says “Make it a rule never to repeat any three words in a row” when he advises writers on steering clear of plagiarism. ….”

   (same source)

   Got it. So if I have a character say “Drink to me only with thine eyes,” then I’m guilty. Or how about if someone ironically says, “If there were world enough and time.” And never-freaking-mind the Bleak House homage, in which I used no similar LANGUAGE but which I used the element of fog and the same style of prose to deliberately reference the work (which, BTW, many readers got as at least Dickensian if not from that particular book):

   DICKENS:

   Chapter 1 — In Chancery
   LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

   Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

   Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time — as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.

   The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

   My reference to it at the start of VOICES:

   Fog pressed down upon the city, smothering it, pulling the smoke down from the chimneypots to swirl in the streets under the weight of the brown and breathless sky. It was a black fog, a killing fog, and Maggie and the other chavies had coughed up soot every morning that week when Johnny kicked them awake. That morning, Moll had coughed up blood.

   Dawn had been an unfulfilled promise, a slight lightening from tomb-black to dirty gloom, extinguished mere hours later as maids lit the morning coal-fires in grates across the city and the smoke floated up and settled back down again, great snowflakes of soot falling with the sickly drizzle. The bobbies strolled along their accustomed patrols swinging their bull’s-eye lanterns even at ten o’clock; by two, the lamplighters were at work, their progress marked by a trail of dirty, sulfurously glowing orbs that illuminated nothing but more fog.

   Now, Maggie judged from the pinching in her stomach that it must be gone past four, and the premature dusk had slipped into an unnatural night. Johnny stood at the base of a streetlamp against the parapet of the bridge, shining his thief-lantern’s unshuttered light into the thick brown soup, where it was sucked into nothingness, and nothing shone back.

   Yes, that is THREE PARAGRAPHS of my work. And yes, the reference to Dickens is a respectable literary device. It is not accidental. But neither is it immoral, illegal, plagiarism, or otherwise questionable.

   Comment by Lydia — January 15, 2008 @ 5:15 am

4. I’d also like to note that you can predict what I think of Cassie Edwards books as a reader from my posts about historical fiction. I’ve never met her, either, so she’s not my bestest secret friend, either.

   Comment by Lydia — January 15, 2008 @ 6:25 am

5. […] I wasn’t going to talk about the plagiarism / attribution / citation / credit due / inspiration / borrowing / lifting / stealing thing again. But after reading Lydia’s post where she says, Let’s see. I’ve quoted from Shakespeare and the Bible in just about every book. Thomas Jefferson and Donne have done their time. I have one four-word phrase that’s a winking homage to a specific Terry Pratchett book. I have a line from Star Wars in my latest one, out in March. I have an entire scene that’s a tribute to Bleak House by Dickens in Voices. Oh, and I use the name Pegoty, which was in David Copperfield, too. (…) Not only that, but I have completely ripped off and turned on its head the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast, Shaw’s Pygmalion and its vast copycat literature, quite a bit of Shakespeare (including The Tempest), and a lot of Dickensian conventions, (…). […]

   Pingback by Alison Kent » Blog Archive » Here’s the thing about research . . . — January 15, 2008 @ 9:46 am

6. Okay, point by point:

   1. I totally agree that CE probably has no clue that she plagiarised and she doesn’t understand what the fuss is about. That’s my GUESS. Too many people on those blog threads have been making assumptions about what CE knows and doesn’t know, stating possible motivations as facts. And they are so sickeningly self-righteous about it, too. Yes, what she did was very, very wrong. But too many commenters *are* acting like she ran over their dog, and that’s wrong, too.

   2. I also have doubts that CE’s career will be ruined by this, which means that a few crazies going nuts over some allusions they found in your books that they think are plagiarised…well, no one in their right mind would pay attention to them. I don’t disagree that there are people who would try to cause a hue and cry about something like that, but I do doubt that anything significant would come of it.

   As for some of the examples of CE’s plagiarism that really isn’t plagiarism, well, at this point it’s all being considered as a whole, and every instance of her copying someone else’s words is damning.

   Comment by Bekke — January 15, 2008 @ 1:53 pm

7. >2. I also have doubts that CE’s career will be ruined by this, which means that a few crazies going nuts over some allusions they found in your books that they think are plagiarised…well, no one in their right mind would pay attention to them.

   “right mind” is right. Sometimes that doesn’t count for much!

   >As for some of the examples of CE’s plagiarism that really isn’t plagiarism, well, at this point it’s all being considered as a whole, and every instance of her copying someone else’s words is damning.

   Quite true!

   And that she not only ran over their dog but chased their dog down in her car and hit it three times, just to make sure…

   Comment by Lydia — January 15, 2008 @ 3:14 pm

8. Lydia, popping in while writing a paper for grad school, so if I’m incoherent, that’s why.

   If I had the examples you’d provided above and the examples I’ve seen of the CE lifted passages on my desk as students work…there are no gray areas. Yours is, as you say, homage to Dickens (I make my kids do this in a creative writing unit I teach). It’s not plagiarism.

   The CE passages? She’d be on her way to the principal’s office with a write-up for violating the honor code. No, you don’t cite in fiction. Of course not. But neither do you copy, over and over and over again, from multiple sources, information, word-for-word that doesn’t belong to you. That’s different from integrating research. This is the kind of coyping I see when kids have gone to Sparknotes or wherever and lifted sentences to pad an essay. It’s jarring and obvious and easily detected because there is a major shift in the voice of the piece. And lifting from fiction works, such as the sentences which appear to be word-for-word from “Laughing Boy” — that is the same as the 11th grader who turned in a short story he took off the Internet and simply changed the names. (Again, I caught him b/c it didn’t sound like him — took me two clicks on Google to find it.) There’s no gray area there — it’s plagiarism, plain and simple.

   I get your fear, though. I’ve worried, some, because I’ve done the wink-wink-nudge-nudge thing, like your Terry Pratchet example. I’d wanted to have my hero in the WIP say, “I’m too old to lie to myself” as an allusion to Nick Carraway in Gatsby, but while I’d get it and so would my American Lit students, I’d now be afraid someone would Google chunks of my novel and I’d be on the plagiarist chopping block. I think the problem isn’t with the blogs or the press reporting it, it’s how people are so quick to be whipped into a witch hunt (can you tell what play written in 1954 I just finished teaching?). You can bet people are putting novels through Google search everywhere. That is scary.

   As to the issue of CE having paragraphs lifted from her own novels into later works? Auto-plagiarism. Not such a big deal in the fiction world, maybe, but can be in the academic world.

   Comment by Linda — January 15, 2008 @ 5:52 pm

9. Oh, I know the difference between what is ok and what isn’t–and the vast majority of CE’s examples fall into the “not okay” zone. But there is a difference between full-scale plagiarism and clumsiness, and I think only SOME of CE’s examples fall into the plagiarism category, and I seriously doubt the malice that’s been ascribed to her in this instance. (The Janet Daily thing is in a whole other zip code.)

   My worry is that a lot of the people stringing her up by her toenails can’t tell the difference between an allusion, the proper use of primary sources (particularly period material, like old diary entries of a real person or a real new article), and plagiarism.

   Reusing phrases and descriptions is incredibly frequent among less skilled writers not because they’re lifting from themselves but because they are re-describing the same thing and they only have one mental description for it. This is more akin to an academic writer reusing key phrases from previous papers to build on what she’s written before than it is a mere massaging of text. That wouldn’t be auto-plagiarism in academic circles. I don’t think any of her echoes can be considered that, even by the strictest standards, any more than a songwriter who frequently devolves to the same structure for his works because of his limited range can be considered an auto-plagiarist.

   Comment by Lydia — January 16, 2008 @ 7:04 am

10. BTW, I’m not afraid of any real legal repercussions of quoting the Bible. *g* I am afraid of a mob. There’s a difference!

    Comment by Lydia — January 16, 2008 @ 7:04 am

11. You are not the last person on earth to pop your head up and find the plagiarism thing happening — my head is still spinning…

    Comment by Larissa Ione — January 16, 2008 @ 11:01 am

12. Dear me! Pardon me for quoting your, Ms Joyce, but, [quote]See, this scandal didn’t start with the discovery that the author in question had lifted passages from another work of fiction–it started with the uncovering of some clumsy and badly integrated research, done in a verbatim way which makes it fall into the Bad category but otherwise unremarkable for anything except its awkwardness. So even that shades to the gray because YOU DON’T WRITE FICTION WITH A WORKS CITED LIST.[/quote]

    Verbatim lifting is ‘clumsy and badly integrated research’? Color me stunned. And appalled. If verbatim lifting is not plagiarism, what is?

    And perhaps I’m only a reader and shouldn’t understand how a writer’s mind works, but I’m one of those readers who appreciate an author’s openness–you know, like having a nice author’s note at the end/beginning, saying, “and you can find all sorts of nifty links to my research for this novel through my website.”

    Comment by azteclady — January 16, 2008 @ 6:17 pm

13. And…it didn’t. The INITIAL “discovery” was really, in the terms of what happens in fiction and has always happened in fiction, no big deal. It was bad, as in a bad idea and quite clumsy, but it was not–yet–plagiarism in the context of a novel by any stretch of the imagination.

    If you think that I’m claiming some special status for the novel, why don’t you check out a high school to college freshman history textbook some time and look for the footnotes? Of course, we all know that those textbook authors are ALL shameless plagiarists, huh? After all, they use huge numbers of facts from other people’s research in their own nonfiction without acknowledging sources, they directly quote previous editions (with different author credited, often enough!) and often from other textbooks by the same publisher without attribution, and take words from their consulting experts verbatim without the least bit of citation.

    Go be stunned and appalled at that.

    The academic research paper is not the only kind of writing out there, and guidelines for the use of sources within it cannot be mindlessly applied to every kind of writing. YES, things have been quite fuzzy in the context of what’s allowable in fiction for a long time. Yes, much of what CE has done should be seen as a call to clarify what is acceptable in fiction and what isn’t. But you can’t pretend that the novel is an academic paper any more than a textbook is.

    Appreciate away when authors give sources. But I have NO obligation to give you such information, moral or otherwise, and you have no right to ask it of me. It is not some morally questionable action to choose to NOT tell all and sundry what one’s research technique is. And “openness” *snort* is not a virtue.

    It is, quite frankly, none of your damned business.

    Comment by Lydia — January 17, 2008 @ 7:49 am

14. You are, of course, absolutely right.

    Comment by azteclady — January 17, 2008 @ 7:55 am

15. Then why act as if authors owe this to…what? Big brother? Their readers? Why act like “hiding” is inherently suspicious?

    Only the guilty have anything to hide?

    That talk is scary.

    Comment by Lydia — January 17, 2008 @ 11:09 am

16. […] For every right someone claims, of course, a boundary in the form of a competing right or limiting obligation circumscribes it. And every boundary one person thinks is obvious seems foreign to someone else. For example, as someone who doesn’t really need to know what an author thinks of processed meat or face care products, I am interested in how I can find out more about 5th century Visigoths or 19th century American women frontier lawyers. Inquiring about an author’s historical sourcework for a book seems a much more natural inquiry to me than a personal question about an author’s life. But apparently not everyone sees it that way. And what seems obvious to me - that authors and readers lose every time plagiarized books are given a pass, either overtly or inadvertently - maybe isn’t so simply defined by others. Rights and boundaries, once again. Where do they begin and end? […]

    Pingback by Dear Author: Romance Book Reviews, Author Interviews, and Commentary » Blog Archive » You Have No Right! Or Do You? I Don’t Know Anymore — January 29, 2008 @ 3:11 am

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