What Was Little Brown Thinking???
I have this idea for a story: There’s this kid who is an orphan. He’s a sweet kid, intelligent and scrappy, a little small for his age but that may be due to improper nutrition. His parents died under strange circumstances and he is being raised, reluctantly, by an aunt and uncle who are very cold and unloving toward him. He also has a nasty and obnoxious cousin who torments him at every opportunity. The poor kid is pretty much unloved and on his own. Then one day a mysterious stranger turns up and informs him that he will be leaving the harsh, cold environment he has known all his life and will be going to a boarding school where everything will change.
Now up to this point the story isn’t particularly remarkable. It has been told many times before. In fact, if you change the gender of the orphan, it sounds a lot like Jane Eyre. I expect there are plenty of stories that follow this model from Dickens to the contemporary fad for books about abused and neglected children. The story is pretty much available to anyone to write about
However, in my story I think I’ll call my kid Barry — Barry Tinker. And the school he is going to is a school for magicians because Barry’s parents were really magicians also and were murdered in a war between white magic and black magic.
Maybe I’m getting into dicey territory here.
What got me thinking about this is all the press about 19 year old Kaavya Viswanathan's $500,000 book deal from Little Brown and the subsequent lawsuit because of the many similarities between her book, which came out in March, and books by Megan McCafferty. Everyone knows there is no such thing as an original idea in art. But there is fair use and then there is plagiarism. McCafferty’s publishers have documented more than 40 instances of direct rip-offs from her books in Viswanathan’s book. It would be a stretch to call that accidental.
I actually hadn’t been following the story until Mark started talking about it. He reads three or four newspapers every day and knows the programming schedule for Book TV by heart. Ever since we began working on F/V Black Sheep he has been moderately obsessed about being copied or by having someone accuse him of copying. It’s a valid concern. In these excessively litigious times, when lawyers scan newspapers for stories they might be able to build a case around and then contact potential “victims”, publishing is a rough game. Publishing has always been a highly litigious business anyway and these days it is brutal.
So what happened with Kaavya Viswanathan? She’s young and very intelligent according to reports. She’s also pampered. Her father paid $10,000 to an admissions service to get her into Harvard after she was initially rejected. Later, she had the services of a professional book packaging marketer (don’t know who footed that bill) to get her novel shaped up so she could land that $500,000 deal from Little Brown. This is not a girl who has been taught to do things on her own. What’s a little plagiarism when you’ve already hired someone to get you into college and get your book before a publisher?
But more importantly, what the hell was Little Brown thinking? Half a million dollars to a seventeen year old who’d never published? Are they nuts? Unfortunately, I think I know what they were thinking — they were hoping to ride the Zadie Smith wave. This is in no way a condemnation of Zadie Smith. I’ve tried reading her books, I can’t get interested but she writes beautifully. She is also young, very beautiful, intelligent, ethnic and highly marketable. Little Brown took one look at Kaavya Viswanathan and thought they had found their Zadie Smith. Serves them right to get hit with a lawsuit. When are publishers going to go back to publishing books because they are good books, not because they have been packaged by some slick service and written by someone who will look good on the cover of People?
In the meantime, I’ll go back to my story. Maybe I’ll give Barry two magician friends, Don and Germionie. This sounds like it has potential.
Thanks for reading.
posted by Kathleen Valentine at 8:26 AM
2 Comment:
heh heh heh...Yep, I'd run all the way with the Barry Tinker series. Think of the yarn you could buy with the proceeds!!
Ya know, when I heard the accusations against Steven Ambrose, I scratched my head. I mean, with all those books to his credit---many of which he researched by actually visiting the locale, taking the voyage or flying the B-52 himself, etc etc---why would he get sloppy and risk his reputation? It's too easy to track down passages from books these days and find their origins.
Then I heard Tom Clancy respond to the Ambrose matter by saying the reason he never reads the manuscripts new writers send him for his opinion is that it's too easy to absorb the material and unwittingly use it in your own manuscript, fully believing it's your own. Later, I heard Shelby Foote say almost the same thing. And you know what? I could totally see their point. Writers are readers. How do you know that brilliant passage on the monitor is really yours or something you've forgotten you read?
Ms. Viswanathan aside, I'm betting plenty of reputable authors unconsciously use ideas or even passages they found in print somewhere else. And you can't run a search on every sentence you write. So.
Anyways, good luck to Mark. Sounds like he's being very conscientious.
Sharon, it is true that writers do that and that is where the idea of "fair use" comes in. If I read a story and an aspect of it strikes me and stays with me, chances are good it is going to come out in another story at some point. But the amount of "borrowed" material in Viswanathan book goes way beyond the norm. A couple of the paragraphs that I read at the Publisher's Weekly site were practically word for word.
In A.S. Byatt's Possession there is a scene where Maude goes to an old, run-down estate owned now by the descendants of Crystobel and goes through the abandoned part of the building to the room that Crystobel once lived in. There she finds a cradle full of dolls that Crystobel wrote poetry about and, on a hunch, she rummages in the cradle and finds the missing letters. That scene has so hauneted me that I know some day a variation on it will work its way into my work. I just have to make sure it is a variation and not a direct rip-off.
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