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Another Day, Another Plagiarist
Jun. 15th, 2022 08:52 amhttps://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/jun/15/parts-of-john-hughess-novel-the-dogs-copied-from-the-great-gatsby-and-anna-karenina
There is another article about the “untidy research process” (really, a phrase for the ages) that led to the “unintentional” plagiarizing. Basically, he’s a magpie, like pretty much all plagiarists. If you dug deep, you’d find that literally _nothing_ the man writes is his own; everything is cobbled together from shiny bits picked up promiscuously.
When I was in college, the professors in my department — computer science — had a rule, generally referred to as the Gilligan’s Island rule. Whether for a test or something else, if we were in a situation where we had been “studying” or “working with friends”, and then we were supposed to be producing our own work, the general idea was to take a break and do something very different. Like, watch Gilligan’s Island. Then as individuals, do the individual work, so that when it was assessed it was clear whose work it was.
Also, generally when I sit down to write fiction, I am looking at a blank screen. I am typing into an empty box. If I have sources, I’ll have a page of links to sources, so that when I’m using them, I know what’s theirs and what is mine. If I took notes, it wasn’t ever verbatim _because I’m too fucking lazy_. I absolutely _never_ have written down particularly brilliant turns of phrase because I know how they stand out as obviously Not Mine. A coworker in the early 1990s said something absolutely delightful, and I asked where it was from. He said it was his. It was not. It was Tom Stoppard’s, altho I didn’t nail it down for another decade. And when I did, I went aha! _That’s_ where it is from. [ETA: No it wasn’t, actually. There’s a small chance that Stoppard incorporated an allusion to the source, altho I can’t track it down there, either. When I wrote this entry, I couldn’t even remember the quote in question; I can _now_ and it most definitely is Gilbert, altho Wodehouse uses it in at least three places, and as late as the early 1980s, you could buy a pin with the quote on it. It’s the “an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative” one, and it would be difficult to find any delightful Gilbert quote that wouldn’t stick out like a sore thumb in anyone’s speech patterns in the early 1990s, which is when this conversation took place.]
_Don’t_ write down clever sentences that you wish were your own. Ever. It’s a terrible habit. It’s rude. And if you ever _are_ successful as a writer, it will come back to haunt you.
There is another article about the “untidy research process” (really, a phrase for the ages) that led to the “unintentional” plagiarizing. Basically, he’s a magpie, like pretty much all plagiarists. If you dug deep, you’d find that literally _nothing_ the man writes is his own; everything is cobbled together from shiny bits picked up promiscuously.
When I was in college, the professors in my department — computer science — had a rule, generally referred to as the Gilligan’s Island rule. Whether for a test or something else, if we were in a situation where we had been “studying” or “working with friends”, and then we were supposed to be producing our own work, the general idea was to take a break and do something very different. Like, watch Gilligan’s Island. Then as individuals, do the individual work, so that when it was assessed it was clear whose work it was.
Also, generally when I sit down to write fiction, I am looking at a blank screen. I am typing into an empty box. If I have sources, I’ll have a page of links to sources, so that when I’m using them, I know what’s theirs and what is mine. If I took notes, it wasn’t ever verbatim _because I’m too fucking lazy_. I absolutely _never_ have written down particularly brilliant turns of phrase because I know how they stand out as obviously Not Mine. A coworker in the early 1990s said something absolutely delightful, and I asked where it was from. He said it was his. It was not. It was Tom Stoppard’s, altho I didn’t nail it down for another decade. And when I did, I went aha! _That’s_ where it is from. [ETA: No it wasn’t, actually. There’s a small chance that Stoppard incorporated an allusion to the source, altho I can’t track it down there, either. When I wrote this entry, I couldn’t even remember the quote in question; I can _now_ and it most definitely is Gilbert, altho Wodehouse uses it in at least three places, and as late as the early 1980s, you could buy a pin with the quote on it. It’s the “an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative” one, and it would be difficult to find any delightful Gilbert quote that wouldn’t stick out like a sore thumb in anyone’s speech patterns in the early 1990s, which is when this conversation took place.]
_Don’t_ write down clever sentences that you wish were your own. Ever. It’s a terrible habit. It’s rude. And if you ever _are_ successful as a writer, it will come back to haunt you.