Thu, April 27, 2006

It's exceedingly rare that I write anything for the Internet which isn't published at onebee, but it does happen sometimes. It's also rare for me to do a few minutes to a half hour of research about some news story that has made a blip on my admittedly rusty current events radar.

These universes collided yesterday when I read about the Kaavya Viswanathan "plagiarism" "scandal" in yesterday's American Voices at The Onion. Curious, I dug around for a bit and found a listing which compares Viswanathan's book to the books of Megan McCafferty which sport the similar phrases.

(Ironic plagiarism side note: McCafferty's website was the one given to me as a reference for designing the site of junior chicklit's finest author to date, Beth Mayall. Fortunately, the design we chose incorporated more "loose interpretation" and less "verbatim copying.")

I read a couple of other articles, and ended up at a blog entry written by another chicklit author (I think), and added my two cents:

Why didn't she steal the good parts, rather than stuff this generic?

Seems to me "generic" is the key term. How many different ways are there to describe getting someone's attention? You could probably find dozens of books using the phrase "tapped him on the shoulder."

Stacked up in a long list, the similarities sure seem damning. But with the similarities in character and broad strokes of plot (which seem all but dictated by the genre), you're bound to see more overlaps than you would with a book about, say, diamond miners in outer space. You're going to go shopping. Your friends are going to lose weight and grow boobs. Better to spend your time writing the story than hunting down ways to describe these mundane developments without repeating any of the same words past authors have employed.

(Needless to say, my uninformed opinions have already been excoriated.)

I'm always looking for ways to maximize efficiency by leveraging existing writing as "fresh" onebee content. (As evidenced earlier this week.) So, I'll be adding most of my outside comments back to onebee (except for comments at Arksie's or AC's blogs, where I comment too often – and I also assume a sizeable readership overlap).

In the spirit of intellectual property theft, I'll go ahead and call this "Further afield," ripping off the same idea from Jason Kottke.