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Imitation: Conscious and Unconsciousby Waverly Fitzgerald The issue of plagiarism surfaced several times during 2006, most recently in November when Ian McEwan was accused of lifting phrases from a memoir written by a WWII nurse in his historical novel about the war, Atonement. Here’s an example of one of the phrases in question. McEwan wrote “In the way of medical treatments, she had already dabbed gentian violet on ringworm, aquaflavine emulsion on a cut and painted lead lotion on a bruise.” The memoir by Lucilla Andrews read “Our ‘nursing’ seldom involved more than dabbing gentian violet on ringworm, aquaflavine emulsion on cuts and scratches, lead lotion on bruises and sprains.” I don’t know about you but I don’t consider this plagiarism. To me it’s merely evidence of good research. Furthermore, McEwan had cited Ms Andrews’ memoir as a source in his acknowledgements and at readings. Luckily a host of other writers flew to his defense, and the furor died down quickly. This was not so true for Kaavya Viswanathan, the Harvard sophomore, who earlier in the year was accused of plagiarism because phrases in her Young Adult novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life, bore a strong resemblance to phrases in the work of Megan McCafferty. Viswanathan claimed that she had internalized the writing of one of her favorite authors and that any similarities between her work and Ms McCafferty’s were “completely unintentional and unconscious.” I was as quick to condemn her as anyone else. Then I had an unsettling experience. One of people I asked to give me feedback on my contemporary detective novel said it reminded her of the writing of Marisa Piesman. I didn't recognize the name so I reserved some of Piesman’s novels at my local library and read the first one with interest. Great heroine, in fact, she reminded me of my protagonist. I loved her wittiness and her cultural references. Then I picked up her second novel and got that indefinable feeling, sort of like sinking into an old chair, that I had read it before. Which seemed possible since it had first been published about ten years earlier. In those days, I often trolled the New Book shelf looking for mysteries (now I just reserve books online). I kept on reading and suddenly came to a line that was almost exactly the same line as in my novel. In my book, the heroine has just broken up with a boring guy named Glenn. In Piesman’s book, the heroine has just broken up with her boring college boyfriend named Grant. Her mother says to her: “I’ve been a little bit worried about you. You dumped Grant last spring.” In my book, my heroine’s best friend says to her, “I’m worried about you,” and then, a few lines late, “You haven’t gone out with anyone since Glenn.” I shuddered. Without realizing it, I had absorbed this rather innocuous line which surfaced quite unconsciously in my book. A little later on, I came upon another line that seemed similar. In Piesman’s book, the heroine says she’s already in a vulnerable position, and the police detective corrects her, “I mean physically vulnerable, not emotionally.” In my book, the client tells my detective, “I just want to know if he’ll hurt me.” And my detective answers: “Physically or emotionally?” Ok, so maybe those don’t sound like plagiarism to you. Looking them up to type them into this newsletter, they didn’t seem as flagrant as they did when I first read them. But I still felt stunned by the realization that I had, as Viswanathan claimed, inadvertently, unintentionally and unconsciously, copied a writer’s words. Some writers, hoping to avoid this problem, refuse to read anyone else’s work while they’re writing, or at least, any book of the sort they’re writing. I can see the value of this. It would mean that you could live intimately with your characters and hear only their voices and yours. But I can’t imagine going without reading novels for the year it takes me to write one of my own. So my solution is the opposite: deliberate and conscious imitation. I often ask my students to write in the voice of a favorite author. There are several ways to do this. I particularly like asking everyone to read out loud for five minutes. There is nothing more delightful or ridiculous than a room full of people all reading different books out loud. After about five minutes we put down our books and take up our pens and try to continue writing using the same style and voice in our stories. Reading out loud tends to alert your ear to the rhythms and sentences and the resonance of certain word choices and helps launch you into a river of words. It also exposes you to sentence structures and vocabulary your might not otherwise use. A versatile writer is a better writer. Another favorite exercise is to give students a sentence or paragraph and ask them to do a conscious imitation, retaining the structure exactly but replacing it with their own content. I was first exposed to this exercise when I took a Creative Writing course during my high school years. My teacher gave us a paragraph written by Jack London describing a canyon and asked us to change it so that it described another kind of landscape (I chose a beach) but keep the sentence structures the same. Priscilla Long assigned a similar exercise in her class, “Art of the Sentence, Art of the Paragraph.” Priscilla warned us that it would take a while to do this assignment and it did take more time to write this one sentence than it did to write paragraphs in my own words. But this practice really forces you to crawl inside the sentence, inhabit it, feel its structure, wrap yourself in its restrictions and wrestle with it until you can wear it like a banner. Imitation is part of the writer’s apprenticeship. Whenever I think about imitation, I think of the retrospective of Mark Rothko’s art which I saw at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The first room was full of his early work. There was a painting that looked like a Klee, a painting that looked like Picasso, anther that resembled a Jackson Pollock. These were all painted within the first ten years of Rothko’s artistic life. Then I walked into another room and there was the first of the paintings which I think of as characteristically Rothko, those beautiful luminous blobs of color floating in color. From then on, every painting was quintessentially Rothko; you couldn’t mistake them for any other painter. The same is true, I believe, for writers. We try on many different voices, we experiment with techniques, we try out different material. And one day, we find the voice that rings true, the niche in which we fit, the story that is ours to tell.
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More articles on writing by Waverly Fitzgerald: Getting the Most Out of Summer Writing Conferences Imitation: Conscious and Unconscious |
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