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Sunday, January 13, 2008

Publish and be damned: Incorrect Use of Source Material in Fiction


"Publish and be damned."
Duke of Wellington 1769-1852: replying to Harriette Wilson's blackmail threat, c1825; attributed (OED online)

I'm applying the Duke's words to a rather different situation, but they seem apt. Any author who uses source material incorrectly, and is discovered to have done so, is liable to get into a lot of trouble. However, although some types of usage are very clearly wrong (and Sarah's going to be posting more about that later) there are some rather tricky areas, where authors have to exercise a bit more personal judgement about what is, or isn't, acceptable use of source material.

Over at Dear Author Sandra's asked about some of these greyer areas in the relationship between texts and what type of referencing can realistically be expected in a work of fiction. Janet/Robin's given her answer, but I'd like to take a look at this too, in a bit more detail.

Do you seriously propose that the same standards should be introduced in fiction?

Obviously one isn't going to expect fiction to be written in MLA style with a full bibliography, footnotes and references within the text to the source of each fact or quotation.

Beyond that acknowledgement of an acceptable difference between the standards expected in fictional and non-fictional works, things become rather more tricky. In general, it's easy enough to say that an author of fiction needs to read non-fiction texts, absorb the information and include it into the fiction in a way which is not simply paraphrasing or quoting chunks (or entire original phrases) from the non-fiction text. It remains a controversial area, however, particularly with regards to the use of historical sources:
Historical details, as McEwan has said, bring life and vigour to fiction. The imagination is crucial, but research brings truth. So what is the novelists’ responsibility to their sources? How can a contemporary novel speak to the past, or speak out of it, as Adam Thorpe puts it? (Alden)
My feeling is that if an author of fiction want to include any text verbatim from other sources there needs to be a very good reason for it. The treatment of the material will also differ depending on
  1. whether it can be assumed that the reader will recognise the borrowing. For example, if in a historical novel the Duke of Wellington says "Publish, and be damned!" that would be something one might assume many people would know to be a statement that's generally attributed to him, just as one might assume that readers would realise that the depiction of him was based on a real person. So the author might not need to mention that in a little bibliography at the end of the novel.
  2. whether the source is more obscure and so it should be assumed that the reader is not likely to recognise it. In this second case, the author of the fictional work should, in my opinion, inform the reader about their source. For example, if there were frequent quotations from the Duke's letters within the text of the novel, I would expect that to be mentioned in a historical note/bibliography at the end, because the author would not have made up those words and the texts could not be assumed to be widely known enough for the public to be able to recognise their source.
Similarly, if the novel is based on a real person that the public could not be expected to recognise, then I would expect that to be mentioned somewhere, otherwise the public might be deceived by the text which is usually to be found on the copyright page and which usually runs something like this:
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. (from the copyright page of a novel published by Harlequin)
Clearly that would not be the case if one had a large chunk of one's novel set around the Duke of Wellington and the Battle of Waterloo. However, they're famous enough that readers could be expected to know that the battle was a real event. If it was a less famous event, though, or a less famous real person, then some recognition of that would be required, I'd think, in a historical note at the end/beginning of the novel.

In addition, if one's borrowed very heavily from particular sources, the extent of the debt would need to be made clear. Amanda Grange, for example, has written several novels which are heavily based on works by Jane Austen, and that's clear right from the start, in their titles: Mr Darcy's Diary, Mr Knightley's Diary, and so on. Grange is in no way attempting to pass off either the plots or the characters as her own, but openly and fully acknowledges her debt to Austen. The same sort of proceeding would also apply to non-fictional sources. Being lightly inspired by someone's account of her time as a wartime nurse is rather different from a novelist using several scenes from the nurse's autobiography as the basis of several scenes in a novel. The latter would require rather more acknowledgement, and use of her actual words would demand yet more.

Intertextuality, the relationship between one work of fiction and other, earlier, works of fiction, and the way it should be dealt with by authors is also much debated and disputed. It does depend, I think, on the extent to which you can assume that your reading public will be able to recognise what you're doing, how close the parallels are between the two texts, and whether any material is being used verbatim. The more obscure the source text, and the greater the reliance there is upon it, the more need there is for explicit acknowledgement of this.

I think it would be a reasonable expectation to assume that at least some members of the public would recognise intertextual allusions to myths, fairytales, Shakespeare, the Bible and other well-known texts and tales. I think it would also be a reasonable expectation to assume that the public would recognise other texts which are perhaps less authorative, but are well-known at the time of writing, such as some works of popular culture.

However, if an author of fiction found a relatively obscure play/novel/poem/film (and as with the famousness of real people and their public statements, obscurity can be difficult to define, and there will be borderline cases) and quoted chunks of it in the text and/or paraphrased chunks of it and/or borrowed significant amounts of its plot, then I'd expect that to be recognised somehow in a historical/bibliographical note. If the characters just quote from poems/plays/novels, and it's clear in the text that they're quoting, then one probably doesn't need to have a complete bibliography, even if some of those works are not so well-known. But it might be of interest to readers to find out more about those poems/plays/films/novels. In Jennifer Crusie's Welcome to Temptation, for example, some of the characters quote from movies:
"Oh, relax." Amy peered at Sophie over the top of her pink cats-eye sunglasses. "It's a video shoot, not a bank heist. What could go wrong?"

"Don't say that." Sophie sank lower in her seat. "Anytime anybody in a movie says, 'What could go wrong?' something goes wrong."

A green sign that read Temptation 1/4 Mile loomed ahead, and Sophie reviewed her situation for the eleventh time that hour. She was going to a small town to make an unscripted video for a washed-up actress she didn't trust. There were going to be problems. They'd show up at any minute, like bats, dive bombing them from out of nowhere. A strand of her dark curly hair blew across her eyes, and she jammed it back into the knot on top of her head with one finger. "Bats," she said out loud, and Amy said, "What?"

Sophie let her head fall back against the seat. "'We can't stop here. This is bat country.'"

"Johnny Depp," Amy said. "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Stop quoting. (from the first chapter, available on Crusie's website)
As far as I can remember, not every single movie quotation in Welcome to Temptation is "labelled" in this way, but many are, and the reader is certainly aware that the characters frequently quote from movies, even if he or she can't recognise the precise source of all the quotations. That would be acceptable in and of itself, but Crusie's also listed them on her website, which is a nice way of giving additional acknowledgement of the source of the material.

If the intertextuality is there and might not be recognised by the general reading public, but is minor, then it wouldn't need to be acknowledged. Loretta Chase has said that in Not Quite a Lady:
Hyacinth was inspired by the Empress of Blandings, of P.G. Wodehouses’s Blandings Castle stories.

Imagining a pig is easy, even for a city girl, but getting Hyacinth’s world right was trickier. What did a sty look like, exactly? What did it smell like? To create a believable fictional environment, I needed, among other things, live pigs.
Even if Chase had never mentioned this, it would have been quite acceptable, I think, because as one can tell from her description, Chase did not simply lift Wodehouse's description of the Empress of Blandings and place it in her novel. She was inspired by Wodehouse's text, but then made the pig her own by doing further research and writing about it in her own words.


The portrait of the Duke of Wellington is by Francisco de Goya, and is from Wikipedia. More details about the painting can be found on the website of the National Gallery, London.

43 comments:

  1. Obviously one isn't going to expect fiction to be written in MLA style with a full bibliography, footnotes and references within the text to the source of each fact or quotation.

    Yet given the twists and turns the discussion has taken on both Smart Bitches and Dear Author, one could be fooled into thinking exactly the opposite would be the case -- and this is really something that makes me spitting mad.

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  2. Yet given the twists and turns the discussion has taken on both Smart Bitches and Dear Author, one could be fooled into thinking exactly the opposite would be the case

    Yes, and that's why I wanted to start a discussion here about what the rules might be for fiction, starting with the idea that there are grey areas, and areas where the rules for fiction are, simply, much more slippery than the ones for non-fiction.

    Clearly, someone copying chunks of text from a relatively obscure source (fiction or non-fiction) into fiction, unattributed, not marked at the time as a quotation, and, therefore, passing it off as their own work, is wrong.

    That much is obvious. But if, say, an author of fiction copied chunks of nineteenth-century newspaper articles describing the Battle of Waterloo (to continue with that example), into a scene involving two imaginary characters reading about the battle and discussing it over breakfast, that would not be wrong, I think. It would be nice if the author could mention in a note/bibliography that this is the case, but within the text of the novel, that method of usage would mark it as a quotation. Now, someone using a chunk of text from a modern newspaper gets more tricky, because of copyright.... And if someone wrote a novel in which one of the characters was a journalist, and the old newspaper article was passed off in the novel as something the character had thought up himself, that would be wrong, because the reader might well think that it was all the author's own work. I'd expect the author to provide a note to explain if they'd used someone else's work in that way.

    Of course, authors sometimes write poems, excerpts from novels etc and try to pass them off as the characters' work, but that's acceptable. It would also be acceptable for an author to write something and try to pass it off as a real person's work (e.g. if the novel was about an early Shakespearian play, and excerpts of this "early play" were included). However, that would only be acceptable if the readers could reasonably be expected to know that the real person hadn't written them. If the author was trying to pass off his/her own writing as Shakespeare's, he/she would be perpetrating a fraud on the reader.

    It seems to me that in fiction, the issue of attribution and intertextuality is heavily affected by how much the educated reader could be reasonably expected to know, and how the author informs the reader when the words and/or information used are not the author's own and have not been significantly changed by the author of the fiction. There's also the issue of how much inspiration/use is deemed fair, even if the author of the fiction re-writes the information in their own words.

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  3. I accept that there are grey areas in fiction that are usually absent when writing non-fiction, and that there may be particular difficulties where the writer may assume knowledge that is not possessed by all her readers. There can be unexpected misunderstandings: for example, over on another (language) forum today, a non-native English speaker asked what the term 'Big-Brotherish' might mean: I responded with solemn and po-faced information about Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four, and then another forum-member pointed out that the allusion might be to the modern TV series, something that simply hadn't crossed my mind!

    When we analyse a published, printed book and try to decide whether a dubious passage may be reasonable unattributed quotation that everyone may be expected to recognise, such as Biblical or Shakesperean phrases, innocently unconscious echoing of something the author has read, deliberate plagiarism, or something else, the classifications can seem dauntingly complex.

    But look at it from the writer's point of view: I think it is often a lot simpler. The writer knows perfectly well what she is doing if she is copying a sentence word-for-word from a book. That source is not floating around vaguely in her mind - it is open in front of her as she writes. Knowing that, she has a decision to make: whether to allow her readers to assume that the words are her own, or whether, at the very least, to include an acknowledgement mentioning her published sources, or better, to digest the information and to set it out in her own words. If those words are in her book exactly as they are in her source, and that source is not even mentioned anywhere, then we are dealing with plagiarism.

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  4. If those words are in her book exactly as they are in her source, and that source is not even mentioned anywhere, then we are dealing with plagiarism.

    But let's imagine that the our author is writing a scene which goes a bit like this (and I am most definitely not good at writing fiction, so apologies in advance for this):

    Looking up, he could think nothing but that the woman in front of him walked in beauty, like the night. Dressed completely in black, her long hair hanging loose....

    Thoughts are often indicated in fiction through the use of italics, or are reported by the author, rather than placed in quotation marks. And it would be unlikely that a man struck by love at first sight would mentally stop to attribute the quote to Byron. So what's the author to do? Should she not include the quotation, in case some readers assume that she herself wrote that line? Or can she safely assume that it's reasonable to expect that at least some people would recognise that as a (slightly adapted) quotation?

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  5. Where are the suggestions that authors of fiction should cite exactly like academics do?

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  6. I think that the Byron quotation comes under the heading of the cultural familiarity that a writer may legitimately expect of her readers, even though not every one of them will recognise the words. If I were reading a novel in German, and were struck by a memorable phrase, which I afterwards discovered to be a quotation from Goethe or Schiller that most educated Germans would know at sight, I would not feel that the writer had in some way misled me or tried to claim those words as his/her own. The author would have had a reasonable expectation that many, or most, of his readers would know he was quoting, and so any misunderstanding would lie with me, the reader.

    Half of Crusie's pop-culture references pass me by as well, but that isn't her fault: most of her readers probably get them. As I said above, the author's intention seems to me to be crucial, and the lifting of whole sentences from publications that are unlikely to be known to a fair proportion of expected readers has to be conscious and culpable.

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  7. Where are the suggestions that authors of fiction should cite exactly like academics do?

    Of course no-one's gone so far as to suggest the use of MLA style referencing, that's just hyperbole on my part, and I didn't say that anyone was suggesting that "authors of fiction should cite exactly like academics do."

    However, there has been debate about quite how similar fiction is to non-fiction when it comes to the standards and methods of attribution that are to be expected of their authors.

    The now infamous initial response from Signet to the Cassie Edwards allegations included the statement:

    Although it may be common in academic circles to meticulously footnote every source and provide citations or bibliographies, even though not required by copyright law, such a practice is virtually unheard of for a popular novel aimed at the consumer market.

    There was, rightly, outrage at this attempt by Signet to (a) brush off the allegations and (b) imply that "popular novels" aren't held to a high ethical standard when it comes to attribution of sources.

    However, although nobody ever went as far as saying that romance authors should always include footnotes, there was some discussion about how they could be used.

    There's also been a feeling expressed by some people that plagiarising from non-fiction is somehow less bad than plagiarising fiction. I think they're missing the point that Sarah made above, in her post about plagiarism, namely that the examples aren't just of facts being "stolen", they indicate that Edwards "stole the creative expression" of those facts.

    So I think that in response to both the Signet statement and the people saying that it's less bad to plagiarise from non-fiction, there's been a tendency to point out how similar fiction and non-fiction writing is. And while I can't speak for Sandra, I get the impression that she's been reacting to this by pulling in the opposite direction, and trying to find areas of difference.

    As I see it, there are both broad similarities (plagiarism is wrong, using someone else's words or ideas and passing them off as your own is wrong) and differences (e.g. how you indicate the use of a source, the extent of the references to primary and secondary source material).

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  8. Half of Crusie's pop-culture references pass me by as well


    Yes, I've noticed quite a few things in her novels which feel like pop-culture references because they're running jokes or allusions which the characters obviously understand, but which I don't. But I don't know if there are more which are passing me by, because, obviously, if I'm not recognising them as pop culture references, then I won't know that they're passing me by.

    As I said above, the author's intention seems to me to be crucial, and the lifting of whole sentences from publications that are unlikely to be known to a fair proportion of expected readers has to be conscious and culpable.

    Yes, I agree that the author's the only one who knows what he/she intended, and the author should be aware of the issue and should never make a conscious decision to plagiarise.

    The problem is that the author's intentions, particularly as stated by the author after they've been accused of plagiarism, don't help the reader much. If an author accused of plagiarism claims that his/her intention was pure, he or she may be lying. Even if he or she is telling the truth that he/she assumed he/she had given sufficient attribution (the Ian McEwan case seemed to hinge on the question of how much attribution was required), or that he/she assumed the readers were likely to recognise the quotation, how do the readers decide if the author was plagiarising? Do we just accept that perhaps the author innocently had different standards so that what appears to the readers to be plagiarism wasn't really plagiarism because the author didn't intend that?

    Or do we try to work out what universally agreed norms might be, so that these issues can be determined as objectively as possible (inasmuch as such a thing is possible where one's obliged to fall back on phrases like "reasonable doubt")?

    It seems to me that that takes us back to trying to determine what the author could reasonably have assumed, what's a reasonable level/method of acknowledging source material, etc.

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  9. As I see it, there are both broad similarities (plagiarism is wrong, using someone else's words or ideas and passing them off as your own is wrong) and differences (e.g. how you indicate the use of a source, the extent of the references to primary and secondary source material).

    I take strong issue with the sense that I or anyone else associated directly with SB or DA has "fooled" anyone into thinking that academic citations are expected in fiction. I responded in depth to Sandra's concern about that, in fact, and will repeat here what I said on DA, in large part because of the parallels between what you said here and what I said there (but also because I'm going to be stubborn and adamant and testy when it comes to having my point taken on this, lol):



    Sandra said:However, I still maintain that writing for academia is very much different from writing fiction, and that to compare the two of them is like comparing apples and oranges. In academia it’s not enough to list all your sources in a bibliography / List of Works Cited, but you also have to document your sources in the text whenever you are quoting from, paraphrasing, or simply referring to somebody else’s findings (or to a primary source). As soon as you don’t document your sources of your indirect quotations, you plagiarise.

    Robin said:I think you see the difference as more disparate than I do, Sandra.

    IMO, what both Edwards and the Signet statement are saying is that taking unattributed material in the way Edwards did was “fair” (I’m not saying fair use, because that muddies the plagiarism/copyright distinction, and that’s crucial here, IMO). But plagiarism is merely the use of another’s words, ideas as one’s own, either in direct transcription or close paraphrase. Which, IMO, means that when Diana Gabaldon insists that public domain sources can’t be plagiarized that she’s incorrect, or when Deborah Smith says, “No doubt, many, many other highly regarded authors have used research material the same way” and that’s okay, she either hasn’t seen the excerpted examples or is confusing the issues in some way, IMO. Because taking a scholar’s exact words or paraphrasing those words or taking their ideas without attribution *and passing them off as your own* is plagiarism, regardless of venue. Outside of the intertextuality issue, which I’ll address in a bit, how is this an apples/oranges comparison?

    Now I agree with you that the *form* and *level of detail* of citation is different in academia, but IMO there’s a baseline unity here in that neither fiction nor academia is or should be okay with using someone else’s words *as your own* — and I don’t think either Ms. Edwards or Signet’s initial statement echoed that sentiment.

    Sandra said:Do you seriously propose that the same standards should be introduced in fiction? Have you any idea what novels would look like in this case (if anybody is interested I’d be happy to take a page of one of my novels and document my sources as I would do if I were writing an academic text)? And at the danger of repeating myself, what about intertextuality? As somebody who enjoys interextual and intermedial references, both as a reader and as a writer, I find several comments and sweeping statements that have been made on the two blogs deeply upsetting. (Btw, of course, there’s no question that quoting from somebody else’s novel/short story/poem/play when it is still under copyright, is a no-go area unless you clear the copyright issues first.)

    Robin said:First, regarding the copyright thing, I love what “rhetoretician” said on this LJ , especially on the distinction between attribution and permission. One of the reasons I think we’re so anal in academia is because we kind of merge the copyright (permission) and plagiarism (attribution) concepts in our citation standards. We assume permission, as that is the nature of scholarship, but then we sort of amp up the attribution aspect to, IMO, acknowledge this assumption in our use of other’s texts.

    So in the fiction context, you can, of course, have both copyright and/or plagiarism issues at stake, which intersect in some cases but are not identical. I’m most interested in the plagiarism issue for now, though, since that’s IMO what we’re largely talking about here. That is, what protocol should there be first in regard to using other’s work and second in regard to recognizing that.

    Because works of fiction are themselves assumed to be entirely original work, we obviously have fewer formal rules regarding the use of external stuff in an allusive capacity — i.e. in instances of intertextuality. So here we go with what I agree is really the watershed issue in this discussion, although not so much for the concept of intertextuality as for the point at which we find the tensions you referred to in one of your SB posts (i.e. at what point will someone think you have plagiarized rather than used something for intertextual purposes).

    Intertextuality is a conversation among cultural and literary texts, right, and as such it depends on an assumption that the user of those other texts is engaging them as *known* in some general capacity. That is, intertextuality is not about passing off those other texts or symbols or metaphors or characters or whatever as one’s own (as the plagiarist does), but about engaging those external things in conversation in one’s own work, commenting on, transforming, reconceptualizing, etc. those other texts within what is still considered a wholly original work.

    Where the difficulty comes in is where it is not clear, somehow, that intertextuality is intended, or where there is a certain type or level of dependence on other texts that seems more like appropriation than allusion. That’s why I asked you the question about Ian McEwan, because I think to some degree the lines you drew are lines that are community specific — that is, they’re lines the Romance community was drawing but that some in McEwan’s circle weren’t (and IIRC he actually included some attributing language in a forward or afterward or something). In that case, Romance readers, especially, seemed to feel that McEwan was appropriating something as his own that belonged rightly to someone else. Which, IMO, is a tension point where you have a text, for example, that’s well known in one community but not in another.

    But then there’s the example taking Jane Eyre and changing the gender and names of the main characters, and then turning it in as an original romantic work. There doesn’t appear to be any attention to deceive in that example, but clearly there is a problem with appropriation, even if there is attribution. There are authors who have been accused of plagiarism and have claimed intertextuality, and certainly I think that there are some contextual elements to these disputes, as well as substantive ones. How much text, how obvious the allusion, how masterfully is it used, how obvious is the “play” in the text, etc.

    So I think there are a couple of tension points regarding the intertextual discussion. First, there is a question in some text about whether or not the author intends the extra-textual work to be recognized as other. Then there is the question of whether even if the work is intentionally other, is its use merely allusive or adoptive.

    Now I have always had a liberal take on both copyright law (i.e. I tend toward interpreting copyright protections and narrowly as possible to keep creativity flowing between members of a community) and community ownership of knowledge. But if there is confusion as to a basic standard of attribution in Romance when it comes to secondary source work, I guess I don’t think it would hurt to have more attribution than less. And NO that doesn’t mean a full set of footnotes and a detailed bibliography (but phooey on the notion that footnotes are “virtually unheard of” in fiction), but it does mean that IMO if you (general “you”) use the words of secondary sources in a way that others would assume to be your own, you need to make a specific attribution for those words. OR, better yet, don’t use them word for word or in close paraphrase. And if you are engaging in intertextual allusion, then IMO it becomes a judgment call in terms of how much you want to offer your reader by way of acknowledgment. I don’t think an author’s note is at all out of line or diminishes the purpose of the intertextuality, but by the same token, as a reader I wouldn’t expect a footnote.

    Now, if you have concern at all that someone might feel that you’re either adopting rather than alluding or that your use of another source is extensive, I would think that an author’s note would be a reasonable. Is it sad you have to think like that? Yeah, maybe. And certainly you gotta do what feels right to you. IMO most of the issues we’re going to encounter aren’t going to be regarding something as sophisticated as intertextual allusions — I think they’re going to be more basic. But depending on how much faith you have in your readers, or how much faith you expect your readers to have in your craftsmanship (and again, this is still a general “you”), I think *some* form of acknowledgment may be worthwhile, if not ideal within what we would hope to be a highly literate reading and writing community.

    And I'm quoting Sandra's text (and the Gabaldon and Smith references) under fair use. *g*

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  10. I take strong issue with the sense that I or anyone else associated directly with SB or DA has "fooled" anyone into thinking that academic citations are expected in fiction.

    OK, well, I'm sorry if you get the "sense" that I'm implying that. As I said, I don't think anyone was saying that MLA style (or its equivalent) was expected in fiction, and I certainly don't think that you "or anyone else associated directly with SB or DA has 'fooled' anyone into thinking that academic citations are expected in fiction."

    I responded in depth to Sandra's concern about that, in fact, and will repeat here what I said on DA, in large part because of the parallels between what you said here and what I said there (but also because I'm going to be stubborn and adamant and testy when it comes to having my point taken on this

    Yes, obviously there are "parallels between what you said here and what I said there" because I was inspired by (and referenced! ;-) ) your discussion with Sandra over on the thread at Dear Author.

    What I was hoping to do was encourage a bit more discussion about what type/level of citation is expected in fiction, given that it isn't expected that they be "academic citations" and the instances when these methods of citation should be used (e.g. when can an author assume that no citation is required since the readers can reasonably be assumed to recognise the source text?).

    In other words, as you said:

    Because works of fiction are themselves assumed to be entirely original work, we obviously have fewer formal rules regarding the use of external stuff in an allusive capacity — i.e. in instances of intertextuality.

    I've been trying to work out, through the use of imaginary and real examples, what these "formal rules" might/how they might be expressed, which, again, is something you were working towards too:

    if there is confusion as to a basic standard of attribution in Romance when it comes to secondary source work, I guess I don’t think it would hurt to have more attribution than less. And NO that doesn’t mean a full set of footnotes and a detailed bibliography [...], but it does mean that IMO if you (general “you”) use the words of secondary sources in a way that others would assume to be your own, you need to make a specific attribution for those words. OR, better yet, don’t use them word for word or in close paraphrase. And if you are engaging in intertextual allusion, then IMO it becomes a judgment call in terms of how much you want to offer your reader by way of acknowledgment.

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  11. Laura, It was really the word "fooled" that pricked me, not the parsing of the gray area. ITA with you that we've gotten to that parsing point, and I DO think it's important not to get completely paranoid about citation to the point where the creativity of authors is stifled. I mean, the current copyright laws already are too narrow for the comfort of some of us folks, so I don't want to come out on that side, at all.

    I just think that there's a baseline commonality between academia and fiction in that passing off someone else's words or creative expression *as your own* is not okay. As a number of people have pointed out, it's sort of strange to see long phrases and sentences of descriptive language passing across from non-fiction to fiction (beyond, of course, factual description) because for one to weave certain things into a wholly original work (and I'm not talking about intertextuality here), the expectation would be that such stuff was coming into a text transformed by the authorial voice of the fiction writer.

    So on one level we're discussing all these parameters of what constitutes plagiarism in fiction, but we're also talking more generally about the nature of "wholly original" and about the influence and shaping of external texts, especially when there is a perceived value differential.

    Which, IMO, we get this dualistic treatment of the intent issue, as well. At the point of plagiarism, why one copied isn't necessarily the issue, but the intent with which one uses an external source is, IMO. Which is why IMO that "as one's own words" clause is so crucial in the plagiarism definition. Did Edwards intend her book to be a conversation with Native American scholarship or a wholly original work of fiction? Did she believe that by using the direct words she was creating a more authentic portrait of NA life, and if so, why not at least provide an author's note or even a list of external sources she used to flesh out that world (given the transcription, that is)?

    And if the point is authenticity, is that what people find acceptable in the references? Is there a perception that these things are of such an objective nature that it doesn't matter how one expresses them -- in fact, the more detail one can use the better (this, of course, premised on an incorrect assumption that all of her sources presented authentic and unbiased detail!)? What if she had borrowed text from other Native American Romances -- for the sake of continuity or authenticity? Is it a question of *how* she was using the material as well as what she did, and what are the implications in either conflating or isolating those two things?

    It's an interesting double cut, IMO, because on the one hand the use of external sources suggests that she valued the detail, but it also suggests she didn't so much value the *source* of said detail as itself a separate piece of scholarship. Not that I can ascribe these points of intention to her, just that what is reflected to me as a reader is an interesting paradox.

    Is there a perception that scholarship is somehow of lesser creative value than fiction, so who cares if Edwards pinched a little for her books? That's basically what the first Signet response communicated to me, intended or not. And it's present in some of the defenses of Edwards, as well. In some ways I'm horrified that Laughing Boy has now joined the comparative mix, but in other ways I think it offers a new baseline for those who have been excusing or defending the previously publicized examples. I'm anxious to see where the conversation goes from that discovery.

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  12. Georgette Heyer in her historical fiction romance, An Infamous Army, (sorry too dumb to know how to italicize or underline) has 2 pages--single spaced, fine print--of sources that she entitled (always loved her sense of humor): Short Bibliography. My current reprint of the Spanish Bride doesn't include GH's source acknowledgment, but I remember a fairly lengthy one in an older edition.*

    As much time as I waste (er, spend) reading romance and SF/F and mystery, I spend even more time reading non-fiction. I know that Laura V is correct to say that non-fiction writing requires just as much work and skill as a novel. (However, if the folks I have to read spend time polishing their prose, it must have been awful to begin with.)**

    Seriously though, I do make occasionally even life-and-death decisions based on studies that are written in much less than deathless prose. So I take non-fiction very seriously.

    I don't see any distinction between plagiarizing non-fiction or fiction. Misappropriation is misappropriation. But I think other people consider using non-fiction text without a lot of reworking as mere "research." That's why CE plagiarizing a novel seemed more significant than pilfering non-fiction, but only because the earlier excuses fail to apply.
    _______________
    *My puppy was locked in the den by mistake and he ate a lot of my keepers.

    **Just kidding, I'm in the med biz and none of us, myself included, can write a single coherent sentence. However, the stellar soporific affects of the New England Journal of Medicine must not be discounted. If I could bottle it for sale, I could retire.

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  13. "it's sort of strange to see long phrases and sentences of descriptive language passing across from non-fiction to fiction (beyond, of course, factual description) because for one to weave certain things into a wholly original work (and I'm not talking about intertextuality here), the expectation would be that such stuff was coming into a text transformed by the authorial voice of the fiction writer."

    There's a wide variety of practice in historical fiction, though, because the subgenres are so diverse. The expectations are different for, say, fictionalized history (close to nonfiction), alternate history, and fiction set in wallpaper history.

    For example, in The Scandal of the Season (fiction with Alexander Pope as the central character), Sophie Gee quoted Pope's poetry, but in the dialogue I had no idea whether some of the words put in his mouth were actually his words, culled from his diaries. Or whether words attributed to the fictionalized Arabella Fermor (about whom Gee says little is known) were actually taken from the diary of one of her contemporaries. (Sophie Gee is an academic. The lack of detailed footnotes is probably a choice, not an oversight.)

    I wouldn't be at all surprised to run across that sort of appropriation in historical fiction, and while I do check for historical notes when I finish the book, they're not always present. I don't have a problem with looseness in these types of books--if an author has really blended fact with fiction, the footnoting would be a nightmare, more difficult than in nonfiction.

    Part of what bothers me is the phrase "wholly original work". Is a work necessarily less original because it hews close to primary source materials where they're available? It's a different kind of synthesis that fantastical fiction, but does that alter its originality?

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  14. AS someone over at SBTB pointed out, a lot of this "borrowing" took place long before everybody and her cat were surfing the Web, so that the copying-out would have had to be done by hand, word for word; how could she possibly think this is OK?

    The puzzlement for me is that she's gotten away with this for decades, especially since, as someone also pointed out over there that one of the books she plagiarized was The Fatal Shore, a bestseller and book club main selection.

    As for the controversy over whether Ian McEwan stole from Lucilla Andrews or used her memoirs legitimately as a source, the article has been linked to a couple of times already, but I think it's important to read this part, so I'm quoting it:

    I know well from researching Saturday, a novel about a neurosurgeon, that patient traumas, medical procedures, hospital routines or details of training demand the strictest factual accuracy. When all these elements are 60 years in the past, the quest for truth becomes all the more difficult and important.
    It was extraordinary, then, to find in the Wellcome Trust medical library, in Oxford, No Time for Romance, the autobiography of Lucilla Andrews, a well-known writer of hospital romances - my mother used to read her novels with great pleasure. Contained within this book was a factual account of the rigours of Nightingale training, the daily routines and crucially, of the arrival of wounded soldiers from the Dunkirk evacuation and their treatment. As far as I know, no other such factual account exists. Andrews even recounted an episode that paralleled my father's experience of being told off for swearing.

    What Andrews described was not an imaginary world - it was not a fiction. It was the world of a shared reality, of those War Museum letters and of my father's prolonged hospital stay. Within the pages of a conventional life story, she created an important and unique historical document. With painstaking accuracy, so it seemed to me, she rendered in the form of superb reportage, an experience of the war that has been almost entirely neglected, and which I too wanted to bring to life through the eyes of my heroine. As with the Dunkirk section, I drew on the scenes she described. Again, it was important to me that these events actually occurred. For certain long-outdated medical practices, she was my sole source and I have always been grateful to her.

    I have openly acknowledged my debt to her in the author's note at the end of Atonement, and ever since on public platforms, where questions about research are almost as frequent as "where do you get your ideas from?". I have spoken about her in numerous interviews and in a Radio 4 tribute. My one regret is not meeting her. But if people are now talking about Lucilla Andrews, I am glad. I have been talking about her for five years.

    © Ian McEwan 2006


    He obviously feels that it was appropriate to give credit where credit was due, and that he did so with sufficient clarity. Somebody needs to dig up a copy of Atonement--probably reprinted now that it's a major motion picture--and see just what he DID say in the credits.

    In my opinion, footnotes in a work of fiction are not appropriate unless they are (1)editorial annotations of an older work in which some references are now obscure; or (2)providing information that is necessary at that exact point in the story. I am not considering footnotes that are part of the fiction, as in Book: A Novel by Robert Grudin and in the works of Terry Pratchett and Jasper Fforde, for example. I think the appropriate way is that used by Heyer and by John Dickson Carr in his historical mysteries, an Afterword discussing sources and suggesting further reading.

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  15. wouldn't be at all surprised to run across that sort of appropriation in historical fiction, and while I do check for historical notes when I finish the book, they're not always present. I don't have a problem with looseness in these types of books--if an author has really blended fact with fiction, the footnoting would be a nightmare, more difficult than in nonfiction.

    Part of what bothers me is the phrase "wholly original work". Is a work necessarily less original because it hews close to primary source materials where they're available? It's a different kind of synthesis that fantastical fiction, but does that alter its originality?


    Beyond the sheer nightmare of footnoting there is the nature of the interweaving, which in the case of Gee's novel is clearly not one of disguise. In other words, she's calling attention to the fact that she's using Pope's own work to characterize his character. That, it seems to me, is much clearer as an example of intertextuality, where Gee's novel is "wholly original" in the sense that it creates something new as a *conversation* among texts -- and as an *intentional, overt conversation.* It's transformative, in other words, not merely derivative.

    re. McEwan: while I felt McEwan should have acknowledged that he used some of Andrews's phraseology, I thought that fact that he acknowledged her autobiography was appropriate. But as I said elsewhere, I remember Romance readers being upset by it, because they felt it was disrespectful to Andrews and to her work as autobiography and not a medical encyclopedia.

    As for the question of footnotes, I am not opposed to footnotes in fiction, although I'm not advocating them as general practice, either. Then again, I'm not advocating the transcription of secondary scholarship into the text of Romance novels, either. Often, IMO, an author's note is adequate to acknowledge the important or significant use of an external text, especially (although not exclusively) if that text was used as *research* and not as part of an intertextual conversation.

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  16. "she's calling attention to the fact that she's using Pope's own work to characterize his character. That, it seems to me, is much clearer as an example of intertextuality, where Gee's novel is "wholly original" in the sense that it creates something new as a *conversation* among texts -- and as an *intentional, overt conversation.* It's transformative, in other words, not merely derivative."

    I agree it's not merely derivative. But none of the potential *prose* sources were cited, so I imagine some of those readers who were upset with McEwan could also get upset with Gee.

    (To be clear, I'm not at all calling Gee a plagiarist, or describing Cassie Edwards' work as intertextual. Just feeling around for the boundaries between types of uses and attributions.)

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  17. Intertextuality is a new term to me, and I'd just as soon never have met it. I tried reading the Wikipedia entry, but MEGO was achieved before the end of the first paragraph. I think what it means (but what do I know?) is that it is a matter, as the Silver Tigress pointed out, of the author's intention. Is she trying to deceive us as to whether or not something is her own creation, or is she making an allusion we are expected to recognize--like Sharyn McCrumb's St. Dale being a take on The Canterbury Tales, or Pride, Prejudice and Jasmin Field and Persuading Annie by Melissa Nathan being modern retellings of Jane Austen novels. (Incidentally, in looking this up, I just discovered that Melissa Nathan died of cancer at the shockingly young age of 37. What a tragedy, and what a loss.)

    If a work is a tribute, an allusion or (as Colleen McCullough claimed when it was pointed out that The Ladies of Missalonghi owed an indecent amount to L.M. Montgomery's The Blue Castle) a conversation with the original, the expectation is that the similarities will be recognized, and the assumption is that the reader will be familiar with the original.

    How about this, though? It's something I've actually thought of doing. Suppose I take the basic story of the famous law cases involving the Tichborne Claimant in the 19th century, and use them as the basis of an SF novel set in the far future, with the the pretender claiming the Galactic Imperial Throne? Or suppose I took the story of Lizzie Borden, or Jack the Ripper, and set it in a twelfth-century walled city like Brother Cadfael's Shrewsbury? Artistic license, or license to steal?

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  18. Suppose I take the basic story of the famous law cases involving the Tichborne Claimant in the 19th century, and use them as the basis of an SF novel set in the far future, with the the pretender claiming the Galactic Imperial Throne? [...] Artistic license, or license to steal?

    I think that would be OK. In fact, I get the impression that it's done frequently since I've quite often read authors saying things on their blogs along the lines of "I saw this line in a newspaper report about a crime and it made me think...." If you were transforming the characters, inventing motivations for them, and placing them in a wholly new setting which you were creating, there'd be so much of your own invention that the original source would only be acting as inspiration. It's the sort of situation where I think it might be interesting for the reader if the original source were to be acknowledged, but it wouldn't be necessary. However, if you took verbatim sections of the transcript of a trial, then acknowledgement of that would be necessary.

    Jackie, the Heyer example is one I had in the back of my mind (though I didn't explicitly mention it), which is why we've ended up with the portrait of the Duke of Wellington staring out at us. I liked the way Heyer dealt with acknowledging and explaining her use of source material there.

    However, if the folks I have to read spend time polishing their prose, it must have been awful to begin with.

    Same could be said of some people's fiction, though. It can be truly awful too, even in its published form. I suppose the difference is that badly written non-fiction is more likely to get published if the author's got some original research to pass on, whereas badly-written fiction.... Hmm. No, maybe not so different. Badly written fiction can do well, if there's an exciting plot, or it engages the emotions. And of course, deciding what's "badly written" is a subjective judgement.

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  19. The point has come up somewhat glancingly several times, but I just want to emphasise it: writing non-fiction is every bit as personal and creative an act as writing fiction.

    The author's words are the words that he or she has chosen and often agonised over, editing and polishing to ensure that they convey the intended meaning as clearly and succinctly as possible. The very idea that anyone might imagine that it is somehow 'acceptable' to steal the actual words of a writer of non-fiction makes me incandescent with fury. Do they imagine that scholarly books and papers write themselves? There is an individual brain and personality behind all original written communication.

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  20. The question that somebody ought to ask Ms. Edwards, of course, is how she would feel if another author incorporated descriptive paragraphs from her novels (ones she had written herself, rather than nicked from elsewhere) into their work. Would she say, 'by all means - help yourself! Here, have a plot as well!'

    I wonder.

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  21. I take strong issue with the sense that I or anyone else associated directly with SB or DA has "fooled" anyone into thinking that academic citations are expected in fiction.

    Robin, when I referred to "the discussion" on both blogs, I was including the comments as well -- after all, they are part of it. And in the comments, there was more than one suggestion that authors should attribute their sources, should include footnotes and / or bibliographies.

    In addition, in the post on plagiarism as a community issue, Jane used plagiarism in academia and the standards of academia as a jumping board to talk about plagiarism in fiction. Which, imo, was problematic.

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  22. Because taking a scholar’s exact words or paraphrasing those words or taking their ideas without attribution *and passing them off as your own* is plagiarism, regardless of venue.

    I replied to this on Dear Author, though it might be lost in the archives by now. Here's the bit that concerns taking somebody's ideas attribution. (I've assumed you also meant to include research and somebody else's findings as such, since many studies in folklore, sociology and anthropology are not necessarly about original ideas, but about original findings.)

    Apples and oranges because what would be considered plagiarism in academia is not necessarily considered plagiarism in fiction. Again, I’m taking historical romance as an example simply because that’s what I write and because I know how I incorporate research into my novels. Most of the times, what I use for research are books on aspects of everyday life, ranging from Mark Girouard’s LIFE IN THE ENGLISH COUNTRY HOUSE to C. Willett Cunnington’s ENGLISH WOMEN’S CLOTHING IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, and to a lesser extent primary texts such as Captain Gronow’s or Harriet Wilson’s memoirs. And in most cases, I use these research books to fill in bits and pieces: in Steven Parissien’s REGENCY STYLE you can find lists with wallpaper designs and colors that were popular in the Regency era, e.g. “‘Picture Gallery Reds’ (red being by far the most popular background for pictures)” (139). Hence, one of the country houses in my next novel will have a picture gallery done in shades of red — no attribution necessary. However, if I were to write an academic article about wallpaper designs and colors in the early nineteenth century, and would use the aforementioned bit of information from Parissien’s book, I’d need to properly document my source, of course.

    Similarly, in an academic article on food, I can’t just write, “In the early nineteenth century, people greatly enjoyed chicken baskets, and considered black butter as a special treat,” but would need to give my source (either primary or secondary; in this case the info is taken from Maggie Black and Deirdre Le Faye’s THE JANE AUSTEN COOKBOOK), whereas if I use this for a novel and have my characters eat black butter for breakfast, I don’t need to give any sort of attribution.

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  23. So let's talk intertextuality with pop-culture references. And I'll use a real example. Shred at will.

    In my latest release, I mentioned that my hero was eating a bowl of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs. Fans of Calvin & Hobbes, the comic strip by Bill Watterson, will know that was Calvin's favorite cereal. I used it as an inside joke. A nod to Watterson's creativity.

    I didn't mention C&H or Watterson within the text, assuming that if my readers got it, they got it. And if they didn't, it wouldn't interfere with their enjoyment of the story (or not, I'm not here to toot my own horn.) I happen to have mentioned it on my website, but not for legal CYA purposes. Just as a heads up to readers that I think Watterson rawks.

    So. Legitimate intertextuality/fair use? Or plagiarism? Or somewhere in between? And if it wasn't on my website, would it make a difference?

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  24. I keep coming back to my personal understanding of plagiarism *in fiction* (NOT academic writing). Plagiarism IN FICTION is the theft of creative expression. That's why it's wrong to steal someone else's words, whether fiction or non-fiction, but not wrong to "steal" or use non-fiction facts/ideas as long as you put them into your own words.

    And everything else I'm writing in explanation is not coming out right....sigh.

    I don't think your use of CFSB was wrong. You meant it intertextually and it would be taken as such by those who recognized it. You meant it to be recognized, in fact, where CE didn't.

    I think it comes down to length, TBH. While I can fail a student for an obviously plagiarized passage, I really can't do with anything less than about twenty words (give or take). Four words don't prove anything, because if they're recognizable, then they're meant to be recognized, because you cannot hope to use four recognizable words and pass them off as your own.

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  25. Sandra, I'll pose the same question here as I did on DA: what do you think isn't okay about the Edwards examples? Because I'm still not seeing the species-level differences you're trying to draw here, especially given the point you made on the other thread. So perhaps approaching this from the other direction will yield that clarity for me (i.e. in knowing how you think Edwards has crossed a line).

    As for Jane using academia as a starting point, it was just that, a starting point. If there was a clear standard set in Romance fiction, obviously we could have started there. But the point some of us were getting filtered through the various opinions is that there *isn't* a clear, articulated standard (I mean, Deborah Smith said what she thought Edwards was doing is okay). So why not *start* where the bar is high and clearly presented, and go from there.

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  26. Sarah, I think we ARE on the same wavelength here. And you bring up an important point regarding length. While there's almost no hope of calling "Plagiarism!" at four words, several sentences tip the scale.

    It would be nice if there was some quantitative measure for plagiarism, but when you bring in the entirely legitimate point of intertextuality and transformative writing, it becomes a genuine quagmire.

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  27. In my latest release, I mentioned that my hero was eating a bowl of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs.

    :) Sweet!

    Sarah, when I wrote my last comment above, I hadn't yet read your "Words, words, word!" post. Sorry about that. You explain it much better than I do.

    I've got this theory that whenever I start talking about plagiarism or documentation of sources (and it doesn't matter whether I do it in English or in German), I unwittingly start talking Chinese... *sigh*

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  28. Sela, see, I see intertextuality as less of a quagmire than other people do. I still think what McEwan did in Atonement was wrong because he used whole sentences from Andrews, rather than just adapting her research (and HE used the "if I changed it, it might not be accurate defense that bugs the shit out of me--technical term, there!). Sure, he acknowledged her, but there was no indication, AFAIR, that he was actually using her words. And here's my point, because her words are not cultural capital, her words about gentian violet or whatever it was, are not instantly recognizable, so anyone reading it would think they were HIS words. But that's me. I know it's been "resolved" as perfectly acceptable by others.

    So I guess I've got a more black/white view of this. Can the writer of the second work genuinely expect the reader to recognize a full quote that isn't indicated as a quote? If not, you might want to paraphrase. Anyone our age would recognize the Sugar Bomb thing because we all grew up on Calvin and Hobbes. I don't think McEwan could genuinely expect his readers to know the difference between his words and Andrews, so he should have done more paraphrasing (ooops--slip there, I first wrote "plagiarizing"! LOL!).

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  29. I keep coming back to my personal understanding of plagiarism *in fiction* (NOT academic writing). Plagiarism IN FICTION is the theft of creative expression. That's why it's wrong to steal someone else's words, whether fiction or non-fiction, but not wrong to "steal" or use non-fiction facts/ideas as long as you put them into your own words.

    I agree, Sarah, but I also think there's a limit to use of "ideas" and some kind of standard that needs to be set regarding paraphrase. What Sela Carson was talking about, for example, would NEVER occur to me as anything but good, solid intertextual discourse. However, if I found an unpublished manuscript by, say, JR Ward, and I changed the character names and put the exact same story into different words, I don't think my actions would be viewed as intellectually honest, AT ALL (and note that I'm distinguishing from fan fiction here, which I think is okay, precisely because it's from a known source and isn't being offered as original work). Also, I think there are instances where giving attribution is both polite and reasonably honest, say, in the McEwan/Andrews situation.

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  30. Sarah, how much actual prose of Andrews's did McEwan use, do you know?

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  31. It's both structure and characters, apparently, and language. This is a great article that describes the structure/character similarities as well a little bit about the language. At the very very bottom, there's a side-by-side:

    Excerpt from Atonement, by Ian McEwan...

    "In the way of medical treatments, she had already dabbed gentian violet on ringworm, aquaflavine emulsion on a cut, and painted lead lotion on a bruise. But mostly she was a maid."

    Excerpt from No Time For Romance by Lucilla Andrews...

    "Our 'nursing' seldom involved more than dabbing gentian violet on ringworm, aquaflavine emulsion on cuts and scratches, lead lotion on bruises and sprains."

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  32. And yes, Robin, there's a standard of volume, I guess, but what you're describing is trying to hide theft of an unpublished manuscript. I don't think Bridget Jones or The Eyre Affair are plagiarizing because they're doing such a good job of giving us a NEW world, rather than just adopting and tweaking the old one. And the Austen rewrites/sequels are giving us NEW stories but expect us to know that they're using old characters.

    We're in agreement, I think. When intertextuality is not meant to be recognized is when it's plagiarism.

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  33. As a follow-up to the McEwan thing, Robin, my colleague, with whom I teach plagiarism and paraphrasing to our fellow colleagues at FSU, says that you cannot paraphrase "helicopter" or "telescope" or "quantum theory." So is your source has specific words like that for which there are no synonyms, you have to use those words. I don't think there's any other way to say "gentian violet" and "ringworm," etc., but there's sure other ways to say "dabs" and "cuts" although maybe not "bruises." And there's language structure, order, and message that are compromised there, too. JMHO, obviously not one held by many other people.

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  34. I think McEwan crossed the line with Andrews, no doubt. What I'm sort of trying to ferret (oh, god, will I ever be able to use that word again without wincing, lol) out here is whether we can use that as an example to make some generalizations. Because clearly that incident angered many Romance readers, and so it might be a good place to start by way of specific discussion on what is and isn't okay in terms of attribution and use of other texts.

    So I'm not at all arguing with you, in case that wasn't clear.

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  35. Well, I think it'd be a great example, except his *extended* acknowledgments seem to have been accepted as sufficient "citation," if you will. I wonder if it hadn't been McEwan and his book hadn't been so otherwise apparently brilliant if his "oops, my bad, but hey, I listed her in the Acknowledgments!" *would* have been accepted. Personally, I think the obvious character borrowing is bad enough, without the use of Andrews' actual words.

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  36. I think the obvious character borrowing is bad enough, without the use of Andrews' actual words.

    Is it just that he borrowed character traits and this wasn't sufficiently described in his initial acknowledgment of Andrews' work, or is it that you think that "character borrowing" in general is a bad idea?

    I'd imagine that quite a lot of authors get ideas for characters from real people (fictional and real) that they read about in their sources. So is it the extent of the borrowing of character traits that's the sticking point here?

    And how do you quantify how much character borrowing is OK without acknowledgment?

    Presumably the rules on this might be a bit different for (a) historical novels (i.e. the ones which are quite explicitly about real people), and (b) historical fiction in which the historical setting is real, but the characters aren't, but in which an author might take a real person as the basis for creating a fictional character?

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  37. Laura, imo, the problem with the McEwan-Andrews case is that he made extensive use of the woman's autobiography, of all things. When she was still alive. The decent thing would have been either to make the extent of the borrowing somewhat clearer in the acknowledgments (apparently he just listed the autobiography with the other sources he had used, is that right?), or to send her nice letter together with a signed copy of his novel, or both.

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  38. the problem with the McEwan-Andrews case is that he made extensive use of the woman's autobiography, of all things. When she was still alive.

    Looking at this theoretically, though, I don't see why there should be any distinction between doing this to the biography of a dead or a live person, just as ethically, there's no difference between plagiarising from an out of copyright source or one which is still in copyright.

    or to send her nice letter together with a signed copy of his novel, or both.

    Obviously in practice, if there's a live person involved they're more likely to get upset. But if you did send the live person a letter and a copy of the novel, is that enough? What about the author's obligation to the readers who buy the novel and think they're reading the author's words or characters but are in fact reading the words, or a lot of the character traits, taken from another source?

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  39. The very idea that anyone might imagine that it is somehow 'acceptable' to steal the actual words of a writer of non-fiction makes me incandescent with fury.

    Tigress, Tigress, burning bright
    In the forests of the night...

    (I made that up, you know.)

    And then there's the "bowerbird defense":

    http://tinyurl.com/3259e2

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  40. Someone has now discovered that Cassie Edwards "borrowed" from Longfellow's "Hiawatha." Even Nora Roberts was speechless. Any day now, it will be discovered that she swiped stuff from Janet Dailey. And the world will come to an end. (Or, as the Silver Tigress remarked, "Ouroboros!")

    I posted a comment over at SBTB to the effect that I now believe she did NOT understand that she was doing wrong--not because of ignorance, but because of a touch of sociopathy.

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  41. I'm awfully glad to see people talking about the intertextuality aspect of this whole situation.
    I love writing (and reading) re-imaginings of fairytales and myths, and part of the pleasure is not directly referencing the story you're basing it on, so that readers can have that nice moment when they recognise it for themselves.

    Clearly, when I do this my intent is not to plagiarise. And that seems to be the gist of what people are saying here--that if you can reasonably expect your readers to recognise the intertextuality, you're okay. But if you're trying to fool them that you thought of the whole thing yourself, it's not okay.

    However, I still feel a little worried. Because that all comes down to intent--and it's awfully difficult to assess intent from the outside. Also, in discussions about Edwards' alleged plagiarism, the consensus seems to be that 'ignorance is no excuse'. So whether Edwards thought this type of copying was okay, or whether she possibly meant some parts as a homage to, for instance, Longfellow, seems to make no difference to people's view that what she did was wrong.
    (note: I agree that ignorance is not a sufficient defence. Also, I can't see how she meant the Hiawatha lines as homage--I'm just saying that, even if she did, it doesn't seem to make much difference to how it's viewed)

    So, then, does my lack of intent to deceive really make any difference? I know I'm clear legally, as Rapunzel and Sleeping Beauty and Persephone are a loooong way out of copyright, but the idea that I could be accused of plagiarising these sources (by someone who, for instance, had no familiarity with Greek myths) is alarming.

    The thing is that you can't rely on your whole audience, or even the majority of your audience, recognising your intertextuality. I once had someone not recognise my Sleeping Beauty references--and they were pretty explicit (thornbushes, spindle, spinning wheel, enchanted sleep). I don't recognise Sela's Calvin & Hobbes reference, or many of Jennifer Crusie's quotes.

    But it just seems so tedious to *have* to add an afterword, or a page on your website. If it's interesting trivia (like JC's movie quotes), sure, but I hate the idea of spoonfeeding readers any information they might have missed, because it takes away the fun of discovery.

    So, yeah, I'm still thinking quagmire.

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  42. Tal, that article you linked to, about Murray Bail's Eucalyptus was very interesting. Two paragraphs stood out for me as particularly relevant to this discussion:

    This kind of conversation between different works is part of the orthodox repertoire in art. To include readers in the joke, modernist writers offer signposts, as Bail did with The Drover's Wife, or use famous phrases, as Bail did in Eucalyptus in playing with Patrick White's "dun-coloured realism". Yet the practice is riskier when the source text is both unknown and unacknowledged. A reader may praise an author's original ability to mimic a type of language without knowing he has in fact copied it.

    The judges of the Miles Franklin, for instance, responded to Chippendale's writing thinking it was Bail's. "We assumed he had read a lot of natural history textbooks," Rose says of his discussions with other Franklin judges, "but we read [
    Eucalyptus] as a work of the imagination." He stressed that Bail had committed only "a minor fault", which could have been solved with an acknowledgement. "It's always prudent to acknowledge, to avert confusion or awkwardness afterwards."

    As Immi points out, some readers may well be faster at catching the "joke" than others, and some may never see it at all. I also agree that, as Immi said, "part of the pleasure is not directly referencing the story you're basing it on, so that readers can have that nice moment when they recognise it for themselves." Certainly as a reader, it would feel heavy handed to me if every glass slipper was signposted with an "as first seen in Cinderella."

    Sarah's rule about not taking things verbatim is a good rule, but there are occasions when it can be broken, if an author thinks a text will be recognised (e.g. in Sela's example in which she wrote about Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs). And in these cases as well as with other types of intertextual allusions/references, although it might be clear to the author what his/her intentions were, "it's awfully difficult to assess intent from the outside" and a reader might still feel distrustful.

    For what it's worth, I didn't recognise the Calvin and Hobbes reference, and I wouldn't have recognised Bail's deliberate reference to Patrick White either, because I've not even heard of Patrick White. But I'd accept that both those references were valid and non-plagiaristic ones as made in that way, because clearly a lot of people would recognise them. So perhaps that's the (still rather nebulous) test. Could a reasonable number of readers, who have a good knowledge of the genre in which you're writing, be reasonably expected to recognise your deliberate inclusion of allusions or quotations? If yes, then it's OK. In fact, it's more than OK, it's a great part of the fun of reading many works.

    I'd be really sad if we lost those playful intertextual allusions, the subtle uses of fairytales etc. And I do agree that "spoonfeeding readers any information they might have missed, [...] takes away the fun of discovery." It would, of course, also mean that I'd have a lot less work to do, as a literary critic, if every author carefully annotated and analysed their own work for every single possible influence. But for a lot of authors it simply wouldn't be possible, because they've absorbed myths/fairytales etc in a way which means that they do come out subconsciously in the writing and the author may not even be aware of what he/she is doing. Certainly when I've analysed some people's work here at Teach Me Tonight they've said that I've picked up on things that they didn't know were there. Maybe they were just being kind to me and not wanting to say that I was writing drivel, but I tend to think that they were telling the truth, and that critics may be aware of things which the writer doesn't know he/she has put into the work. I think this can happen because of the different processes involved in writing literature and in producing literary criticism. Northrop Frye says that

    The poet may of course have some critical ability of his own, and so be able to talk about his own work. But the Dante who writes a commentary on the first canto of the Paradiso is merely one more of Dante's critics. What he says has a peculiar interest, but not a peculiar authority. It is generally accepted that a critic is a better judge of the value of a poem than its creator, but there is still a lingering notion that it is somehow ridiculous to regard the critic as the final judge of its meaning, even though in practice it is clear that he must be. The reason for this is an inability to distinguish literature from the descriptive or assertive writing which derives from the active will and the conscious mind, and which is primarily concerned to "say" something. (5 - from the "Polemical Introduction" to his Anatomy of Criticism, Princeton UP, 2000 edition).

    I think, although he maybe sounds a bit arrogant about the abilities of the critics, Frye's right that there's a big difference between writing analytical prose and writing fiction. The mental processes involved are different. Certainly some people are good at doing both but in general it's probably fair to think that someone will probably be better at doing one than the other. I certainly can't write fiction, and one of the reasons is that I'm far too aware of subtexts and intertextual allusions at all times. I could possibly write a parody, but not an original work. Most authors, I think, would write fiction on a much more subconscious level, certainly when writing the first draft, though they may go back later and pick out their metaphors, imagery etc and strengthen them. But even so, they may not pick up on things that will be obvious to the critic, because the literary critic's talents (and perspective on the work) are different.

    So, no, I don't expect an author to know what every single influence on his/her writing is, nor do I expect an author to carefully label every single allusion. Obviously care does need to be taken not to pass off someone else's words as one's own, and in cases of doubt there's no reason not to add a note of some kind at the end of a book to acknowledge the particularly useful sources or cases where words have been used verbatim (which, in any case, should only be done for a very good reason and not out of laziness or dishonesty). One should also be careful not to take plots from sources which aren't well-known. So West Side Story is an obvious reworking of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and that's fine, because the source is very well known. However, the similarities in even minor plot details between Linda Howard's 1988 White Lies and Christina Dodd's 2002 Lost in Your Arms (as analysed at AAR) look rather more suspicious. That level of similarity to a not-so-well-known work is really not something you should create deliberately. And if you were doing it deliberately, you would really have to indicate very clearly somewhere in the book what you were doing, preferrably at the front. [I'm not offering an opinion here on what Dodd's intentions were, because I don't know, and I've not read either book, I'm just pointing out that similarities were noticed, and that level of similarity clearly raises questions and is therefore not something an author should do deliberately.]

    Robin/Janet has just written a piece over at Dear Author about plagiarism that

    plagiarism is merely a remote point along a trajectory of intellectual dishonesty. It is a hard word, necessarily so, because it is a strong indictment. We should use it sparingly and thoughtfully. But at the same time, we should not be afraid of talking about the values of intellectual honesty and creative integrity that we all depend on in determining what plagiarism is and isn’t.

    I think sometimes we all take for granted that everyone knows what is and isn’t honest, acceptable, and appropriate in any given type of writing. But clearly that is not the case.


    I'm glad we're having this conversation here, and at Dear Author, and perhaps elsewhere too, because it seems to me that even if an author is acting with integrity, if the rules aren't clear (and, as we've seen, some are rather more of a "quagmire" than others), then there needs to be discussion about those more squelchy, slippery areas, so that writers don't end up accidentally sinking into the slough of plagiarism.

    Yes, you can see why I don't write fiction, can't you. I have a weakness for writing extended metaphors, and that one contains an allusion to John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and the Slough of Despond.

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  43. The Black-Footed Ferrets at the SBTB site have compiled a 48-page (and counting) PDF of side-by-side quotations from Edwards's books and the books she took them from. Just looking through a few pages makes it entirely clear that we're not talking about intertextuality, allusion, or hommage here. It's taking descriptive language out of someone else and putting it in your characters' mouths.

    http://tinyurl.com/3ab3fp

    Here is an article on the issue by the author of the Defenders article about the black-footed ferret that she took from (as he points out, it makes for REALLY clunky dialogue in a romance novel):
    http://www.newsweek.com/id/94543/page/6

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