Steal This Book

You’ve probably heard something about the latest plagiarism scandal. This one involves a young Harvard student named Kaavya Viswanathan, who always seemed too good to be true — $500,000 advance for her first two novels, a movie deal, a best-seller her first time out, all before she was old enough to drink legally.

Turns out, it was too good to be true. Her best-seller, a chick-lit ditty with an 11-word title, contains at least 40 passages that were lifted from the work of another author, Megan F. McCafferty.

I’ve always been bewildered by plagiarism. I understand how you can be influenced by other writers in ways you don’t realize right away — after reading Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, I found myself putting exclamation points in places where I never had before — but how can any writer just take someone else’s work and stick it into the middle of her manuscript?

For the record, Viswanathan seems to be using the “cryptomnesia defense,” described here by Chip Scanlon:

… a condition described by Harvard psychologist Daniel L. Schacter in his book The Seven Sins of Memory. He maintains there is “evidence that people can, in good faith, produce from memory another individual’s writing or ideas while unknowingly misattributing these to themselves.”

If he says so.

I’m skeptical because, in the early days of my career, I was affected by two serial plagiarists who clearly didn’t believe for a second that they had actually written what they were publishing under their own names.

The first was in college, in Columbia, Missouri, when I was reviewing movies for the journalism school’s official daily newspaper. Although everyone who’s ever written a review of anything imagines himself blessed with unique insights and piercing analytical skill, there was a guy writing movie reviews for one of the campus papers who was clearly much better at it. I even bumped into him once on campus, and sat down to pick his brain about he approached the job.

Imagine my shock, a few weeks later, when I learned that he’d been fired from the campus paper for plagiarizing all his reviews. My memory is inexact, and we’re talking about things that happened almost 30 years ago, but I’m pretty sure he was ripping off reviews from David Ansen, who started writing reviews for Newsweek about that time.

My second brush with plagiarism came in the early ’80s, when I was features editor at The Riverfront Times, an alternative weekly in St. Louis. I was thrilled to be able to hire a movie reviewer away from a rival weekly, a paper that was head and shoulders better than us in terms of design and editorial sophistication.

After a few months, the reviewer began to act erratically. Sometimes he’d bring his copy in late. (This was a decade before writers began submitting their work on computer disks, not to mention way, way, way before email.) Sometimes he refused to go to the advance screenings for the local reviewers, telling me he wanted to see the movies with an audience. That was bad for our little paper, since it meant we wouldn’t get our reviews into print until after all the other reviewers had weighed in, and after many of our readers had already seen the movies in question. But, because his reviews were so good, I put up with it.

Then the strangest thing happened: He started turning in reviews that were already typeset. I mean, he’d bring in columns of copy that had already been printed. He’d merely cut them out of their original magazine and taped them to a piece of paper.

You would think this would’ve been a red flag for me. But he had an excuse that, in all the naivete of youth, I chose to believe: He had begun writing for a magazine in Boston, and had an agreement that he wouldn’t submit reviews to us until they’d already been published there. He sent them his original drafts of the reviews, and then gave us the edited versions from Boston. I may have been suspicious when his columns of type didn’t include his byline — if I wasn’t, I should’ve been — but I still let him get away with it.

After a few weeks of this, we got a dark hint from his previous publisher, the editor of the rival weekly in St. Louis, that there was something very wrong with this guy and his work. And then shortly after that, we learned the truth: that he didn’t actually write his own reviews. I forget which critic he was plagiarizing, but I remember being surprised that it was someone so well-known and respected. It probably wasn’t David Denby, but it was someone in that class, as I recall.

So how did I get snookered twice by the same trick? One former colleague of mine told me, in a different context, that I’m blind to the parts of human nature that are foreign to me. Since I write for the sake of publishing my own work, it would never occur to me that someone else wouldn’t care about something like originality. The point was to publish, make money, and collect accolades without actually having to do the work.

Slate’s Jack Shafer tackled the “why” question in a piece last week. These are the two reasons that seem closest to my experiences:

Ambition Often Exceeds Talent: I know of very few examples in which an exceptional writer got caught plagiarizing. Sometimes writers accept jobs or assignments beyond their talents. When the deadline whistle blows, they find themselves facing this cost-benefit quandary: Shall I tell the truth and bail, damaging my career for sure, or shall I steal copy and only risk damaging my career?

Writing Is Hard Work: A corollary to ambition exceeding talent. Even prolific writers, who can toss off a thousand words an hour, complain about the difficulty of writing. Writing well is a difficult enterprise. So is writing poorly. With so many examples of good writing out there to “borrow,” why suffer only to write poorly?

Shafer also acknowledges this terrible truth, which applies to literary scoundrels of all descriptions:

Even If You Get Caught, You’ll Probably Get Away With It: Trudy Lieberman reported in the July/August 1995 Columbia Journalism Review that many journalists caught plagiarizing paid little or no price for their transgressions.

We truly live in an age in which accountability is for suckers.

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