The Scam Artist

So the romance world has another outrage to deal with, but this time it’s been perpetrated on us rather than by us. A writer named John Havel decided to “expose” Amazon’s bestseller list practices by plagiarizing a novel and then manipulating it onto the list. Havel justified himself by saying that all the profits he made through his project would be donated to charity. So even though his whole enterprise was based on theft of someone else’s labor, it was okay because he was both demonstrating Amazon’s dishonesty and not keeping the profits for himself. Kat Mayo has summarized this entire saga, and you can read about it here.

This whole project was, of course, ethically suspect from the beginning. But it might have been less so had Havel chosen a book that was truly in the public domain (Moby-Dick with a sexy new cover, for example). But instead, he chose a Harlequin Sensation, Untamed Billionaire, Undressed Virgin, by Australian author Anna Cleary. Cleary, needless to say, knew nothing about this since Havel didn’t bother to ask her permission or to explain his project. She only found out that someone had taken her book, changed the names of her characters and her title, and posted it online for his own profit when other writers informed her.

All of this is sordid enough, but the real source of the outrage (beyond outrage for Cleary and her stolen royalties) is Havel’s reason for choosing her book. It was a romance. Romance, we are told, “sells big,” is easy to scam, and is an object of contempt as far as Havel is concerned. Reading Mayo, you get the impression that Havel doesn’t consider romance novels to be “real” books. Apparently those of us who write in the genre are scam artists ourselves; therefore, our books are open to plagiarism without consequence.

Romance writers confront contempt frequently. It’s never fun, but it can usually be dealt with in one of two ways. First, you can say that reading is all about personal taste and that our readers enjoy what we write. Second, if the contemptuous one seems amenable, you can list a few of the many romance authors who might confound his/her expectations and recommend a little reading.

However, we shouldn’t have to argue that our books belong to us. That they’re real, and that it took a lot of effort to write them.

Havel’s ultimate argument—as Mayo points out—is that all romance books are the same, thus their readers are so gullible that they’re asking to be scammed. As Havel sneers, “Plus, don’t you remember seeing cheesy paperbacks with Fabio on the cover at the grocery store check out? How’s this different?” But the thing is, Mr. Havel, those “cheesy paperbacks” weren’t all the same. They were written by different authors with different approaches and levels of skill and different readers, as you’d know if you’d ever bothered to read a few. The fact that you didn’t like their covers doesn’t mean the books themselves were something you could treat as a joke. And it sure as hell doesn’t give you license to steal them.

Oh and by the way, John, Fabio hasn’t appeared on a romance cover since the nineties. But compared to the other things you seem ignorant of, that’s probably a minor point.

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Plagiarism: I Know It When I See It

There have been several plagiarism scandals in the online writing community lately—from lifting somebody’s free story and offering it under your own name to (I’m not kidding) lifting Dracula from the Bartleby Project and offering it as a new book under an assumed name. Now all of this pretty straightforward. You steal somebody’s words and you’re plagiarizing, QED. But lately I’ve been wondering about those gray areas in writing that aren’t entirely clear. It’s not so much a question of what plagiarism consists of as it is a question of what originality consists of.

Take plot, for example. Shakespeare’s plots are notoriously borrowed. He used stories from Plutarch, Boccaccio, Plautus and a number of other sources. In fact, Shakespearean texts usually begin by describing just where Shakespeare appropriated this particular story. But no one claims that Shakespeare is a plagiarist. Plots are fair game, although readers may well point out that Book A is pretty similar to Book B, which perhaps did a better job with that particular twist.

So plots are free for the taking. But what about other things? Suppose an author, let’s call him Willy S., has a really cool love scene that takes place on a balcony, and I decide I want to do the same thing. Maybe I even go a step further and have my heroine on said balcony and my hero down below, ready to climb the ivy to be near her, just like Willy S. did. Am I plagiarizing? No, not by most contemporary standards. However, I’m not exactly original either. I’m borrowing and I’ll probably get called for it.

Now for the trickiest thing of all—using research. One of my favorite books of all time, Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand Of Darkness, includes an epic journey across a series of glaciers taken by the book’s two heroes (it’s on a planet that’s in a perpetual ice age). The first time I read the book I was convinced that Le Guin herself must be a mountain climber or backpacker because her details were so vivid. But it turned out, according to Le Guin herself, that she based all of these details on firsthand accounts of Arctic and Antarctic adventures. In other words, the facts she presented were real because they were taken from others’ experiences. In this case, I’d argue that Le Guin’s unique perspective creates an original narrative. But for those of us who study others’ work in order to understand what happens when you do something like skiing a downhill course, are we really writing our own stuff or are we simply repeating what we’ve heard?

If we not only repeat what we’ve heard but repeat it in the words of the original source (as happened a couple of years ago with historical author Cassie Edwards) then we’ve clearly crossed the line. But what if the words are changed? If I’m writing a novel about mountain climbing and I choose to base part of it on Jon Krakauer’s Everest account in Into Thin Air, is that plagiarism? I doubt that Krakauer could take me to court, but others could claim that I’m not exactly original.

And yet few of us write only about what we’ve experienced personally. If I stuck to that, my books would have a somewhat limited appeal. I’ve never run a bookstore or managed a winery. It goes without saying that I’ve never been a cop. For all of those things I’ve used my imagination, but I’ve also used the experiences of people who have, in fact, done those things. The best I can do is to acknowledge and thank those people. And hope that nobody thinks I’m stealing.

Originality is a rare commodity. I’m wondering now if it’s possible at all.

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“Mind Rape”

The Kay Manning plagiarism scandal from a few weeks ago (Dear Author describes the debacle here) has revived memories of perhaps the most notorious plagiarism scandal in the romance writing world: the Janet Dailey/Nora Roberts face-off in 1997. For those who need a recap, Roberts sued Dailey for plagiarism after a reader pointed out that large swaths of Dailey’s novels Aspen Gold and Notorious were lifted word-for-word from Roberts’ work. After a protracted legal battle, Dailey settled out of court and Roberts donated the money to Literacy Volunteers Of America.

But that’s not really what I want to talk about now. Roberts was clearly in the right and Dailey was very clearly in the wrong (as was Manning). But the thing that makes me uncomfortable about all of this was Roberts’ initial reaction to the discovery that Dailey had plagiarized her books: she called it, famously, “mind rape.”

Now that term is coming up again in the discussions of the current plagiarism cases. And it bothers me. A lot.

What happened to Roberts—and Gina Wilkins and Liz Fielding and Julie Kenner and Catherine Mann and probably lots of others—is theft. Somebody decided to appropriate their creations and pass them off as their own. The fact that this action was theft rather than rape doesn’t diminish the heinous nature of the act. I’m willing to acknowledge that theft makes you feel violated in some ways—people whose homes have been burglarized frequently say this, and as someone whose home was burglarized a couple of times, I can totally understand their point of view. But for me there’s a big difference between the feeling of disgust and anger you have after a burglary and the feeling of violation a rape survivor has after being assaulted.

Here’s the thing. Rape is a crime of violence. It involves a brutal penetration of the body. For many women, it’s the worst crime imaginable, which is one reason that including rape in a novel as anything other than a crime has been banned by most romance publishers. To use the word rape to stand for anything other than its real meaning, the forcible penetration of the body, runs the risk of making the word itself less powerful—and perhaps by extension making the crime itself seem less onerous.

The distinction here hinges on the issue of violence. Rapes are by definition profoundly violent. Plagiarism just isn’t.

This distinction should in no way be taken as an attempt to diminish the seriousness of what Manning and Dailey did. They’re thieves, pure and simple, and they deserved to be punished for their actions. But theft and rape are not the same thing.

In the end, these authors were the victims of a crime. Something was taken from them without their consent, and that sucks. But they weren’t raped. Thank God!

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