Of carpet cleaning and plagiarism

If you have cats and carpets, you need three things: paper towels, a carpet cleaning foam spray, and a damp sponge. Armed with these tools of the trade, I can pick up any untoward glottal deposits by the Imperious Lady Barf easily and con brio.

Which brings me around to the subject of the day: plagiarism.

Fellow author Sarah Strohmeyer wrote a letter to The New York Times today, which brought up some unsettling questions about Kaavya Viswanathan’s well-honed practice of borrowing from other authors and plagiarism in general. (To continue the Kentucky Derby theme, Sarah Strohmeyer is a stablemate of mine at NAL, although she’s in graded stakes company while I’m in optional claiming.)

As authors do, Sarah was reading another author’s book. She’d written a scene she was happy with—then came across a remarkably similar scene in the other author’s book. She deleted her own scene, since there were striking similarities. Now she wonders if there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of books out there with similar scenes. Books she can never hope to find or read.

This is the problem with writing fiction. As Sarah says, women’s fiction is universal. I would go on to add that westerns, mysteries, thrillers, etc. are universal.

Cat barf is universal, too. I’ll bet you there are thousands of people out there who clean up cat barf the same way I do. Now what if I wrote a scene in my book about Laura cleaning up cat barf?

“Laura glanced at the carpet: cat barf, again! She went to the cupboard and got out the carpet foam spray cleaner, then reached under the sink for an old sponge she kept for precisely this purpose. She pulled off a couple of sheets of paper towels and knelt down on the carpet and removed the hairball and put it in the garbage. She sprayed the carpet and wiped it with the damp sponge. ‘There,” she thought to herself. ‘No more cat barf.’”

But what if another author, somewhere, in a book I haven’t read (and judging from the millions of books out there, I probably won’t read) has already written and published this?

“Jan looked at the carpet and thought: cat barf again. She walked to the kitchen, pulled off a couple of sheets from the roll of paper towels, took the carpet foam cleaning spray from the cupboard, and an old sponge she kept under the sink for exactly this kind of situation. She removed the hairball and threw it in the garbage, then sprayed the carpet and wiped it with the damp sponge. ‘Aha!’ she said. ‘The cat barf’s gone!’”

Would my face suddenly appear on “The Smoking Gun” website?

Experiences are universal. Most people have waited in line at the MVD, or eaten at a fast food place, or mowed the lawn, or made love. There are only so many words in the English language to describe these actions. And romance writers alone write hundreds of sex scenes a year. Mystery writers write hundreds of crime scenes a year. Western writers write hundreds of shoot-outs a year. As Sarah Strohmeyer points out, how is she going to read thousands of books just to make sure she isn’t unconsciously lifting something?

Writers read. We can’t write in a vacuum. I’ve read at least a thousand books in my lifetime. Some of that stuff inserts itself into my subconscious. There is no way I haven’t written something similar to someone before me—many, many, many times. There are only so many plots, and there are only so many words to go with those plots.

When I went to “The Crimson Tide” site and read the first few paragraphs that Kaavya Viswanathan “lifted”, I thought: that could happen to anyone. I could have done the same thing. But as I read more and more of these examples, the pattern became clear. This wasn’t coincidence.

So I’m opening it up to you. Have you ever come across a book where the premise was similar to your own, and you got that uncomfortable feeling? Or a scene you wrote, in retrospect, was similar to one you saw in a book?