Not me. But you might have heard of Kaavya Viswanathan, the Harvard phenom who was inked to a $500,000 two-book deal practically fresh out of high school.
If you haven’t heard the story, here it is in a nutshell. Ms. Viswanathan wrote the book How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life. After it’s release, some readers noticed some similarities between this book and two books written by Megan McCafferty. There were 40-some similar passages, some of them almost verbatim. The excuse for this is that the young author internalized the books she read a few years ago and loved them so much that the passages were an unintentional inclusion.
Think about that. There’s a lot of great books that I love and there are passages that I remember from books I’ve read especially ones that I’ve read multiple times, but I don’t think I’ve ever written anything that used so much material. If you go to the Harvard Crimson analysis of the writings, you see near literal copying in certain passages. In a case getting worse by the minute, there are two more books with possible copying and another damning case revealed today. The movied deal has been killed and Ms. Viswanathan is not helping her case by saying that writing a book is hard and she would rather her second book be done so she could promote it. And today we find out that her publisher has not only pulled the book but has cancelled her contract. This young author is in it deep.
I wrote awhile back about James Frey, about his memoir which was fiction and how disappointed about it. Here we break a different type of ground. Ms. Viswanathan should have given Mr. Frey a call when she was stuck for a passage for fictional help. She said those passages were unintentional, that they were stuck in her photographic mind and just wrote them down. It’s a novel excuse, but the book count is now up to six different books by five different authors.
T.S. Eliot had a quote that is actually on poetry, but I think it may provide a bit of perspective. He said “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” At first glance, it may seem like a defense of plagiarism, but in essence, it isn’t. There are no original plots left and as writers, we stand on the shoulders of giants contributing what we can. Knowing this, new stories are filtered through the lens of past stories, borrowing an idea, a character, a deft phrase and making it your own. That is the essential point of writing. This is what you express, in your words.
In taking an idea, you can absorb it and write it out in your own words. Obviously though, the idea here is not changing just a couple of words, moving the phrasing around or changing a slight characteristic of a character (which in reading some of the compared passages, she didn’t even do that), but being inspired by what you’ve read and taking a piece here, a snippet there and making it your own. Even looking at Shakespeare’s works you can see a great deal of similarity between what he wrote and many other playwrights of the time.
At first, there was an initial outpouring for this girl, the young phenom who wowed a publisher so much she got a book deal without ever having anything published. Then came the questions about her, the ever more shady Alloy Entertainment (who not only owns half the copyright, a strange practice as typically the authors have the only claim on it, but also helped her “conceptualize” the book) and the revelations that more books were copied, seemingly by the day.
Did Ms. Viswanathan do something wrong? Absolutely. I don’t think there’s much question that there was something not entirely forward here. Does she deserve a second chance? Yes, but it must be earned. If there’s anything that Americans like more than an underdog, it’s a person, especially one of good fortune or privilege, falling far and fast , humbled and humiliated. I don’t agree with it, but people love to see other people’s heroes fail. The Germans have a word for it: Schadenfreude. It is pleasure in other’s misery. I take no pleasure in this, but I hope that she learns a lesson about it, internalizes that lesson and if she really wants to be an author, works hard at an intensely difficult thing which is writing, succeeding on her own words and thoughts.
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