#avoiding plagiarism

For those interested in prolonbged examination of the issues, I refer you to the Plagiarism Today website. Sweet Thoth but if you were in need of a rabbithole to vanish down (with a whole lot of accompanying headclutching), this should do you. 😅

Meanwhile. Read a lot but are concerned about accidentally plagiarizing somebody? Here are some thoughts.

Possibly setting up your initial set of guardrails will require some careful self-examination. If your early attempts at writing suggest to you (when you inspect the results with an eye to recent reading or research) that you're an imitative writer, then obviously you're going to want to keep an eye on this behavior—if you're acting in good faith, which let's assume that you are. And fortunately, if you haven't been keeping notes of what you read, there are tools out there to assist you. (For myself, I do keep a reading log, and periodically store "history" data from my browsers.)

For example: if while rereading your work you come across something that strikes you unusually strongly as originating with another writer, then you go online and start putting that phrasing in to find out whether someone else has used, or is using, anything exactly like that. One or another of the online plagiarism detectors will be of use. Pick one that you like. (You won't be seeing recommendations from me on these. Insufficient data.) If you're directly quoting someone, you should cite them in text (in nonfiction writing) or include a citation for them in acknowledgements (in fiction. In some cases, you may also need to pay them: your publishing editor will advise you on this).

Something else you would want to keep an eye on, just in the normal course of your reading and writing, is when you are in contact with work that is thematically similar to yours... and which it strikes you as unwise for you to further engage with. This is going to be very much the kind of decision that no one else can make for you... so keep your eyes open.

I've definitely been down this road. For example, when the New York Times published the first chapter of the first of the Harry Potter books, I read that chapter... and then shook my head and said to myself, "Better not take this any further." I made a choice, then and there, never to read those books (which later turned out to be wise for a whole sheaf of reasons). Particularly, it struck me as a near certainty that sooner or later we'd wind up being compared. I wanted to make sure I could say, with my hand on my heart (or under oath in a courtroom), that I'd never read that series. Equally, I wanted to make sure my own work, which preceded JKR's, was protected from accusations of borrowing. And sure enough, even though I'd been writing about wizards for more than a decade longer than JKR had, and demonstrably—in terms of my broader career—had no need to borrow ideas from anybody, the accusations did come every now and then. Usually they just made me laugh... but then I've been in the business a good while now: long enough to let such things pass.

I also had this concern, though. Imitative writers (and I've historically been one) can, if they're not careful, pick up bad habits. I was immediately concerned that if I got any deeper into her take on wizardry, I might accidentally pick up and incorporate something from it that wasn't originally mine. Call me finicky about this, but I very much prefer that the content and the thematic material in my books should not owe anything clearly or specifically attributable to anyone else. I like to think that my ideas come from me... or have at least been derived from material that's been simmering for a good long while in the storyteller's alembic in my head, to the point where catalysis has changed them to something different, or more, than what they were when they arrived.*

Now in the strictest sense of "ideas coming from me and nowhere else", this is (obviously) impossible. David Gerrold used to have a rather Zen-like saying about this misconception: "There's no such thing as one cow." By which he meant that no idea comes out of nowhere without antecedents (and that, by derivation, no idea can be completely unique and original). Almost without exception, any idea you have as a writer will have been inspired by something else. It may have come to you in a simple two- or three-step chain of reasoning, or as part of a long chain of thinking about a concept or question that stretches over days, weeks, sometimes even years.

With this in mind, your job, as a working writer, is to be as certain as you can that—at the very least—if you came by a concept or sentence by reading someone else's work, that you have at the very least shifted or modified it... or better still, that you've added something to it that wasn't there before. ( @petermorwood used to refer to this is the "reverse magpie principle".) It might not be completely yours, but at least you've visibly added your cognitive- or plot-DNA to the mix.

Another part of your job, which will also help defuse your fears of plagiarism, is to read very widely. At first glance this would seem to make you more likely to borrow something… but it turns out not to work that way at all. Reading a lot makes it harder to light on any one thing to borrow, either accidentally or on purpose. Things blend in the back of your brain, or run into each other full tilt, and recombine. That recombined data turns into what you mine... and (as a result) you hardly ever mine just any one thing, but a compound or newly-minted element.

This habit would have started more or less accidentally for me, as I've simply been an insatiable reader since I was around three. Over the last fifty years of writing actively,*** I've routinely read damn near everything that's fallen in my path. I've also purposefully gone out of my way to read things that are far, far out of my normal subject comfort zones or my normal paths of research (or pleasure reading). However inadvertently, this strategy has given me a vast amount of background—not material, but context—on which to draw no matter what kind of writing I'm doing. The more I read, the more my writing is informed by how much I've read. There's so much more chance for seemingly disparate subjects and themes to combine over time in a fruitful way in the background of the mind, where so much of the groundwork of writing seems to happen.

I think it's just as well that (in the most general sense) this seems to be how things work... because frankly, I don't think there's any way for a writer to learn to write without reading. And at one level, this seems to me like a no-brainer. If the end product of your work is going to be something that people read (and pay their good money for), then you have to know intimately, from the very ground-of-being off which you work, what reading is like: and what it's like when it's good. There's no other way to go forward, it seems to me, but to do that, and internalize what you learn.

Now let's step briefly over to the other side of the plagiarism question. Because however assiduously you may be avoiding doing it, you may still get blindsided by someone running into you with accusations of same.

I've been down that road. I was for some months involved in a Barbie: Fairytopia lawsuit where someone came out of the woodwork and tried to prove that when writing the first film, I had plagiarized their unsolicited and elsewhere-independently-published fairy book.**

The only way this avoided turning into a total crapfest was because I was already protecting myself (and the IP folk who'd hired me) by way of a smart other-IP writer's stratagem: keeping a full "evidence chain" of numerous numbered and dated drafts. All of these confirmed how the research and writing processes had unfolded over months... this evidence backstopped by the timestamped emails attached to which they'd been submitted to Mattel.

I was also keeping careful records of printed and online material I'd used in research. These enabled me to cite materials as being from specific sources... usually ones publicly accessible and in the public domain. This habit saved Mattel and their legal team a huge amount of trouble, and helped them see off the naughty people who were trying to use my work for the Fairytopia project to (ideally) blackmail Mattel into a fat settlement. The naughties were left without a leg to stand on, and seen off in relatively short order.

So the moral of that particular story would seem to be: keep your dated files, both drafts and research. And keep them always! It's not like text takes up a whole lot of room to store. I've got forty-plus years' worth of zipped-up research and draft files backed up here and there, because you can never tell when you'll need them. If you're a creative in this increasingly litigious and wicked world, you should be storing yours too. Verbum sap.

...Anyway: that's all I can think of to say about plagiarism for the moment. Thanks for listening to my very-non-TED talk. 😏

*I don't mind saying that numerous people who've read both my series and JKR's have—most gratifyingly—reported that the two are absolutely nothing alike except in that they both contain young wizards. And that suits me entirely.

**For the inevitable question, "Did you invent Bibble?!": the answer ("Well, maybe...") is in this earlier post.