HE WROTE: But Seriously Now

Actually, I am being serious. There’s been quite a bit of press about this whole plagiarism thing reference Kaavya Viswanathan. First, if she wasn’t 19, in Harvard and it wasn’t a 500k two-book deal, I don’t think people would be talking about it so much. But those things are true, so given that this blog is sometimes about writing, here’s my Moot outlook on it.

What I found interesting were two articles. One in PW Daily around May 10th or so and the other in the NY Times on Friday, May 12.

Here’s the one from PW Daily:
<<<“On April 15, Viswanathan wrote 259 words for the Times of India about her favorite books. She mentioned that she was currently reading Zadie Smith's On Beauty — "I like it a lot" — and she expressed her admiration for the works of Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse, Henry James, Jane Austen, the Brönte sisters, Kazuo Ishiguro, Margaret Atwood, Dorothy Dunnett, and Ian McEwan — hardly the stuff of mass-market chicklit. At school, she wrote, she keeps up with the belles lettres "by reading all the books that are short-listed for the Booker," a reference to the Mann Booker Prize for Fiction, a prestigious award for novelists from the British Commonwealth and Ireland.
When she spoke to the Associated Press on April 23, she again said that she enjoyed Atwood and Ishiguro. And when asked in an interview with UniversityChic.com to list "some of [her] favorite books," she answered, "I really like Kazuo Ishiguro."
On a less highbrow note, she told the Times of India about her "guilty pleasure": old children's books, especially the works of Enid Blyton, the English author behind the Famous Five and Noddy book series. And she confessed to UniversityChic.com that "I really like reading trashy romance novels. Is that something I can admit?"
But one author Viswanathan never mentioned was Megan McCafferty. And while McCafferty's books aim at a young audience and contain romance, few would describe them as "old children's books" or "romance novels." If McCafferty's books had "spoke[n]" to Viswanathan "in a way few others did," she kept it to herself.”>>>>

OK. Now, first, calm down romance writers. I think she was trying to be ‘cute’. You know sometimes we say things and they come back to haunt us. But I don’t think she’s going to be showing up at RWA National in Atlanta. I also wonder when the heck she had time to do school work reading all that high-brow stuff never mind the trashy stuff. Do they give homework at Harvard? Plus somewhere in there she wrote a novel. Anyway, I barely have time to read the side of the breakfast cereal box while eating the cereal.

I remember we (Jenny and moi) did an interview where we got asked those questions: What’s on your nightstand? Favorite line from a book? etc. It makes you kind of look around and go, well, three open Ding-dong wrappers, the tv remote, an empty water bottle and a lot of dog hair. Well, more specifically the question is “what BOOK do you have on your nightstand?” And the answer I gave was The Origin Of Consciousness in The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Which sounds really cool and sophisticated. Hell, Sean Penn gave that same exact answer in an Esquire interview a year or so ago. And that book is indeed on our nightstand. Of course the question wasn’t whether I was reading it. Deb reads it a lot. I’ve read it. Tried to understand it. Grasped some of it. I tend to read what Deb tells to read me because Deb reads everything and is a lot smarter than me and I trust her. Which leads me to the article from the Times which Deb cut out for me and handed to me as I left for the airport last week and told me to read several times. It’s an op-ed piece by Whitney Otto who wrote How To Make An American Quilt, which is a book I also read, because Deb told me to. Good book.

Anyway, I’m not going to copy the article, cause it’s long and the Times might come after me, but if I read it right, and it’s quite possible I got some of it wrong here are some of Otto’s points:

-Chick-lit/romance novels laid end to end are like tract houses. They might be painted differently but they are essentially the same thing.- My take: The same could be said of any genre, even, gasp, books that have the pretense to call themselves works of literature, but it’s not exactly true either. This is the classic literature/genre argument, which I’ll tackle on another post when I have more energy and actually care.

-Overachievers rarely become writers. Writers tend to be underachievers who listen to gossip, drink too much, and have an entirely different set of skills than that required on a Harvard application.- My experience is that most authors I know are not smiley happy, 19 year olds with a bright future ahead of them at an Ivy League school. Hello Jenny, Bob and all you other authors out there. Living the dream. I always say writers are not in the bell curve and we aint exactly on the good end of the bell curve either.

-If she used a consultant to get her into Harvard, then it makes sense she used a consultant/book packager to get her into the world of publishing.- Agree with that. What the hell is a book packager anyway? How do you package a book? How do you package something that is supposed to be creative and your own work? One of the greatest things about being an author is you get to do it yourself. Why would you give that up? Oh, that’s right. To get published. But publishing is like, a bonus. It’s the writing itself that’s the reward. Or should be. And has it occurred to anyone that maybe the book packager was the one who plagiarized? Doesn’t matter in a way because her name was on the cover as the author. Just seems like a weird system that I don’t get.

-Why should anyone be surprised about a “faux writer writing a faux novel.”- Kind of a cold statement but cuts to the core of the matter. This is something Jenny and I have spoken about quite a bit. There is a very big difference between wanting the writing life and being a writer. I think a lot of people, perhaps Viswanathan among them, want what they envision being a writer is as opposed to what being a writer really is. The true life of a writer is a very lonely one, sitting there in front of your computer, trying to conjure up character and story out of the dark depths of your brain.
Not book tour (shudder). People come up and ask directions for the bathroom.
Not agent and editor meetings in New York (scary). And they sit and talk about shoes and other important stuff. A lot.
Not panels at National (very, very scary). Lots of people wanting the secret yet there is no secret.
Not book contracts (ok, wait, those are good but they’re pieces of paper). Because they’re never as great as other people think they are and how they sound to outsiders.
Not standing around at cocktail parties being able to smugly say “I’m a writer.” Because usually people then ask your name and then say “Never heard of you.”
But it is a really cool job. I’m not contradicting myself. I’m saying the essence of writing is great. I think writers work so damn hard, pretty much all the time, and are desperate to make a living at it, because they want to keep doing it. If that makes sense. There’s nothing else I’d rather do for a living than write. But you know, if that next contract didn’t come and I had to get another job, my life wouldn’t be over.

You write because you have to. Because it’s your essence. Not because you envision yourself being a writer. Because you are a writer if you write.