Thomas Sullivan

Every author’s got one — a tale about a stolen tale.  They are so identical you might say we stole them from each other.  And — brace yourself — you may be abetting stolen intellectual property rights just by reading this, because even the subject has been used before in other columns.  But if I have to micromanage the marketplace trying to discover what someone else has thought of and expressed in their own way so that I can excise that idea from my imagination, my mind will end up being a very small island indeed.  No thank you, I’ll disavow any originality whatever on my part, call myself a mirror, a thief of nature, of life and — yes — inadvertently of other thieves who have thieved the thefts I thefted before I could think to thieve them.  Mea culpa.  There, I feel better now.  But if confession is good for the soul, it doesn’t change the fact that my writing is what it is and it comes out of me, my fulfillment and my destiny.  I don’t want to change it.  I want to be me.  Not being me makes me a hypocrite.  I want to spend as little time not being me as possible, even if that means I reinvent the wheel out of ignorance or otherwise overlap human endeavors unknown to me.  Was it Mortimer Adler who recommended not reading any books so that one’s thoughts remained original? 

That said, I’m not really worried about coming off derivative.  Fortunately the craft of writing demands so much of one’s soul top to bottom that the revisiting of themes, plots and elements can still be original.  It really depends on how totally and faithfully you can draw from everything inside yourself.  If you go about rendering ingenious premises or imaginative plot twists that someone else has used and do nothing distinctive with them, you are not only a bad thief, you are a bad writer.

I think plagiarism should be reckoned in degrees similar to rape or murder.  First-degree plagiarism would be the deliberate theft of words.  Probably no one would disagree with that, because actual expression goes to the heart of what every writer is — a wordsmythe.  Then again, there is the legal principle called the fair use doctrine.  Some years ago a court upheld the right of someone who “borrowed” something like seven whole pages verbatim from a book about teenage pregnancy.  I think one of the books was called Pregnant By Mistake, though don’t — um — quote me.  One suspects the sequel to the book that was borrowed from might be titled, Screwed Again. 

Second-degree plagiarism could then be the close paraphrasing of thoughts, concepts and words.  That kind of theft would probably most often occur in nonfiction. 

Third-degree plagiarism would be what — ideas?  Ah, here we get to the sticky wicket.

You can’t really protect ideas in fiction, only the expression thereof, and so there is plenty of room for grayness and paranoia and accusations and — let us not doubt — actual plagiarism of the third kind committed with intent.  I am not a lawyer (my father thought I should be, and my mother was grateful I was not), but there is some fine parsing in Hollywood and New York over what constitutes a shameless ripoff.  Shameless may be a mere decorative term.  I have no doubt whatever that a story of mine became the basis for a fairly celebrated movie some years back.  Even then I believed that it was virtually impossible to come up with anything new under the sun, so when my boy-child called upstairs, “Hey, dad, your story’s on TV!” I took only mild interest.  But a few minutes viewing of the middle of the film — already years after its theater release — had me heading for the video store to rent a copy.  The plot, the settings and even representations of aliens right down to fluttering vocal tissue were identical.  We are talking eccentric detail done at a magnification of 10.  No question.  Even the fact that the plot continued on from where my story ended and was suddenly in a different tone with a mismatched postscript all underscored what was obvious.

Whether done with full awareness by one writer or coincidently or subconsciously as part of a creative team, it happens all the time.  Hollywood really doesn’t need to scheme about this.  It’s loaded with out-of-work imaginations.  But the reality is that individuals are inspired by their own entertainment experiences, and I defy you to come up with something totally original.  If fresh work didn’t owe a debt to something, it would be as incomprehensible as amorphous shapes, raw color and cacophonous sound.  Stand-alone work, then, is always relative to something, just as individuals have parents.  Examine an idea at the genetic level and you will find the traceable DNA.  So there will never be a hard and fast definition for third-degree plagiarism.  It will rest on interpretation of extent and intent.  And sometimes the extent will be considerable while the intent will be zero.

Let me emphasize that point by telling you about my own incredible coincidence wherein I very nearly published something that would have cast me in a bad light.  The story I wrote was originally titled, Buster Beals’ Preparation H and the Intergalactic Relatives.  A spoof intended to follow up on three others I had published, the tale depended on a portal through which the main character communicated with an extraterrestrial race.  There are probably dozens of stories that could fit that parameter, but a sort of barter ensued in my tale, absurd stuff that led to a revelation and accidental cannibalism with a kicker postscript.  Additionally, I like to think that my piece was done with its own flourishes and style and perhaps attained a level of sophistication and humor that are uniquely mine.  Regardless, I read my story unpublished to a live audience and was startled when a member of one of them said he’d read it before.  I put his comment aside as a generality without much basis beyond a vague similarity to something, but a few months later I actually came across a story in a completely different tone and category of fiction that just had to be the tale to which my listener referred.  It was different in every specific element from mine, and yet there was a well (portal) through which messages were exchanged between unlike species and barter and a funny ending.  There were also major details and twists in mine not present in the other.  Still, had I read the two stories without knowing anything about the authors, I probably would have concluded that there was a link.  So I put my piece back in the file unpublished.  I may still market and publish it some day, but I will feel obliged to acknowledge similarities with the other tale, and that seems awkward.

The chill of a post-publication plagiarism accusation is something I don’t want to experience, though I got a foretaste of it once.  It happened when I was teaching ninth-grade and made a fiction assignment.  In order to launch imaginations I sometimes offered plots from my own writing, the idea being that if I gave you a premise and a resolution you still had to develop characters, narration and dialogue.  It was a steppingstone for bankrupt imaginations and virgin muses, but one particular student who was Learning Disabled either didn’t grasp that I had given her a plot or she wanted her parents to believe that she had invented her story.  In any event, the piece I wrote happened to be reprinted in The Detroit News soon thereafter, and the mother of the student called the newspaper and told them I had stolen her daughter’s assignment.  The newspaper knew me, had published me before, and after checking informed the mother that my story had originally been published years earlier.  It was blind fortune that I had chosen a published story from my inventory.  Had it been unpublished, it would have caused me major embarrassment if not a shattered career.  As it was, the woman called the school and probably mouthed her false accusation far and wide before she learned the irrefutable truth.  That same year I won a literary prize that was connected with the Detroit Auto Show, and a student in the high school division plagiarized a Roger Zelazny story that led to 25,000 programs having to be reprinted.  Sadly, I no longer feed plot cues from my inventory to writers as a learning tool.

Let’s compare the robotic derivations described in the last paragraph with some examples of inspired thinking to see how true creativity works.  In order to demonstrate that I need to bring another author into the mix, and it must be someone whose skills at invention are unassailable, an unalloyed imagination whose very reflexes are creative for the sheer joy of it.  Such a person would be able to objectively marry logic with quantum leaps and never miss a beat or blanch at old footprints in the sands of possibility.  Fortunately I have a candidate.  

The best pure idea writer I know may be David Niall Wilson.  It is impossible for the two of us to kick ideas back and forth without resonating similar permutations.  We both just seem to think through the conjugations of a theme in the same way.  Once, when he had an idea about genetic cheating in the Olympics, I mentioned that my most reprinted story — The Mickey Mouse Olympics — first appeared in Omni Magazine in 1969 on just that subject.  A lesser writer might have viewed that as a dead end, but David sees beyond pat generalizations.  For him, they are like rich topsoil that might grow any kind of vegetable underneath.  We ended up going back and forth with e-mail extensions on that satire, and while it was just fun and games for me, I was fascinated by how the process seized hold of him until his fertile mind turned a farcical premise into a wholly separate story.  This is how creativity works.  It is not a lightning stroke of unadulterated invention, it is insight into existing elements.  A chain reaction.  You throw a ping-pong ball into a room with 1000 set mousetraps and in seconds that catalyst will have triggered all of them in a crescendo of motion and sound. 

If there is nothing new under the sun, there are infinite combinations of the immutable basics.  Discovering them is a matter of stimulation, inspiration and habit.  If you can’t learn to play off the world, stand next to someone who can.  David Wilson and I are both cannibals who feast on imagination, and so communicating with each other compounds that.  I believe that that kind of conscious awareness of patterns in themes and plots is actually a doorway into creativity.  Because if you are able to grasp the connections, variations and derivations that have been done, you most certainly can exploit or develop those which have not.  This makes a David Wilson, or anyone else at that level of creativity in any field of artistry, a true original.  And remember this: while ideas may come to anyone in any particular order, the thing that distinguishes every artist is their style.

Therefore, a pastiche or homage is not considered plagiarism, rather (depending on how it is used) a parody or a tribute.  Furthermore, if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then a prudent distinction made between having one’s words copied and having one’s ideas revisited might turn out to be more uplifting than threatening.  One of my earliest works, THE PHASES OF HARRY MOON (Dutton hardcover, 1988), still has a cult following and brings me frequent e-mail suggesting that other works derive from it.  It is enormously flattering to me that favorite shows of mine, such as “Arrested Development,” “Malcolm in the Middle,” “My Name Is Earl,” and “Oliver Bean,” have been compared to it for their galleries of eccentric families and irreverent vignettes delivered with understatement at lightning pace.  Those programs are executed with great originality, of course, but that any reader would see one’s work as possibly inspiring others of that quality is what a writer wants to hear.  Recognition, it turns out, is the stuff of redemption and forgiveness as well as ego feed.

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  If you’d like to see more of my writing, please check out a free sample chapter from THE WATER WOLF on my website.   My free monthly newsletter is separate from this column and the mailing list is growing by leaps and bounds.  I’ll be happy to add you if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net   Past newsletters are being archived at the website below, and the photos are now included! 

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com