And this time, it’s not even a professor! Kaavya Viswanathan, Harvard sophomore and newly minted author has seen a lot of press due to the fact that she’s the youngest author signed by Little, Brown & Co in a very long, long time.
The Harvard Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, has printed an expose of the similarities between Viswanathan’s newly published novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, and passages from two of former Cosmo ed Megan McCafferty’s novels, Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings. Passages juxtaposed here for comparison.
Last year, a visiting creative writing prof described Viswanathan as a poised author with “a kind of a pitch-perfect novelist’s diction.” Is the diction hers, or someone else’s? Does it matter? I think anyone looking at the passages would likely recognize that it goes too far, and that there’s some plagiarism afoot (intentional or no).
I’m not trying to vilify Viswanathan. As far as I’m concerned, she’s probably a kid that got caught up in the pressure, but she should have known better. Looking back at some of the press she’s received over the past year or so, it looks like she wrote the book while a student at Harvard. That’s what’s really troubling to me. Perhaps it reflects the fact that cheating and plagiarism in upper middle class academic settings is nearly acceptable (as long as you’re clever enough not to get caught), or maybe even the way young students are taught to research (take the index card, write the source, paraphrase the facts).
Harvard professor Werner Sollors remarked to the Crimson, “it looks as though some strong version of anxiety of influence could clearly be detected in [Viswanathan’s book] all the more so because of those miniscule variations that change ‘Human Evolution’ to ‘Psych’ in the hope of making the result less easily googleable.”
Maybe it would be okay, if the appropriate credit was given. Especially when confronted with text, which is relatively easy to compare, we react strongly when it seems to be too similar. Take the following passages:
From page 46 of McCafferty’s first novel: “He smelled sweet and woodsy, like cedar shavings.”
From page 147 of Viswanathan’s novel: “…I had even begun to recognize his cologne (sweet and woodsy and spicy, like the sandalwood key chains sold as souvenirs in India.)”
Aren’t the end results quite different? Don’t they conjure radically different images? I won’t go so far as to say the rest of the comparisons have such different end results as these, but let’s not let our sense of morality interfere too much with considering copying in a holistic way.
The list of similar passages make it pretty clear that she copied them first, and then tried to alter them a little — kind of like the way someone in high school tries to paraphrase when writing a research paper. I think her “diction” has a long way to go before she develops into a real writer. Unfortunately, she will now end up in a lawsuit, her publisher will cancel their contracts with her, and no agent or publisher will touch her in the future.
I haven’t read any of the books involved, but from reading the compared passages, it looks to me that Viswanathan also lifted her characters and basic plot from McCafferty.
What exactly do you mean by “considering copying in a holistic way”? This doesn’t look like someone taking a suggestion from another work and then doing something original — it looks like someone who couldn’t do something original. The addition of the sandalwood scent in one excerpt is nice, but it’s not evidence of some artistic transendence.
No doubt her writing career is over. I wouldn’t call this artistic transcendence, either. I found it at least interesting that the end result was actually different in this instance. I thought it turned out to be a nice riff, at least for young adult fiction, which I think is a horrible genre. Young persons should read real fiction.
But generally I also think that the moralistic reaction that is generally evident when these things come around is a bit overblown. In this particular case I kind of doubt it, but it’s something to consider when we’re thinking about copying text.
You make it sound like there’s something to consider. *Should I copy someone else’s writing… or not? On the one hand… copying someone else’s text is so much easier than writing something original! On the other… gee, people get so moralistic!*
I’m really having trouble grasping this mindset. You can take Poe’s “Cask of Amontillado” and change the title to “Cask of Sweet Sherry” and change Fortunato to Frank Chiang and make the first line read “The hundreds of injuries of Frank Chiang I had stood as best as I was able, but when he ventured to call me a jerk, I vowed revenge” you haven’t made a nice riff, you’ve just made a lame copy. It’s still a copy, even though the end result is actually different in part of the wording.
Why call people “moralistic” when they object to artistic theft? If someone wants to be a writer, they will have to learn how to write. Their own stuff. Their own words. Their own ideas. Yeah, it’s work. Nobody’s forcing them to do it if it’s not a challenge they want to take.
she’s a copy cat …zero talent zero common sense…:-)