Stepping out on a thin limb...
More discussion on the plagiarism issue. My first post is f-locked and filtered, and it will remain that way. This, however, I am making public, even though I have a "friends-only" journal. Commenting is turned off. If you want to comment, it's not that hard to find me.
There’s been a brouhaha in my fandom over the nature of plagiarism. One of the “big name fans”, who runs her own, by-invitation-only, fanfiction archive, has published three articles on the subject, distributing them through a monthly, online newsletter that her writing discussion group sends out. The first article deals with copyright infringement, which is, by a degree or two, a different animal from actual plagiarism. Copyright holders sometimes have little or nothing to do with the actual creators of a work, and they are the ones who have the right to pursue legal recourse if someone abuses their copyright. Fan artists, writers, vidders, as a whole, are violating copyright every time they use their imaginations to create a derivative work. But fans still have a right to their own words, their own art, even if they derive from someone else's world.
The second article deals with what she called “fan stealing from fans”. She gave several specific instances where she felt people had been stealing from her, all of them concerning one particular story she’d written. I had heard of the accusations, usually from the accused author herself. One of the instances was public, concerning a rescue venue common to both, with one of the article writer’s friends making the accusation in a review. Some behind the scenes, back and forth emails between the author and reviewer finally convinced the reviewer to withdraw her accusation, and she acknowledged that there had been no “theft” or “plagiarism”. Yet the writer of this recent article still felt the accusation was valid, and said so.
A second incident concerned a character that she felt an author had “stolen” from her. In the tradition of Lois Lane, both writers had written plucky girl reporters. Both reporters were in love with the same hero. Both writers had chosen the same call letters for the companies that their respective reporters worked for: WNN, a take off on CNN. I was obliquely involved in this case as the accused author came to me for advice. The actual bearer of the accusation was a friend to both authors, one who had, by her own admission, attested to the alleged plagiarist’s innocence. But it seemed that the friend wasn’t believed.
The fact is, the accused author doesn’t read too many other authors in the fandom. I’m privileged to be one of those she does read. The article writer is not... or was not until the accusations surfaced. Then the accused author skimmed the story in question, and decided that there wasn’t enough resemblance, either in personality or physical characteristics, for her to have copied. And since the alleged plagiarist hadn’t read the story, there was no way for her to realize that she had chosen the same company name. She tried to articulate this to the article writer via email, but in the article, the writer dismissed the comments as insincere.
Then, she turned her ire to me. I had never been asked about this in this context. Her accusation was a complete shock. She described clearly a scene from my story, Serendipity, and asserted it was copied from her story. She named no names, of course, (as I have not) but she spelled out that I had done three things to copy her: created a family-owned Italian restaurant, had my character take one of the Tracys there, and gave my restaurant the same name as the family-owned Italian restaurant she had created.
She said there had been was such a response to her articles, especially the last one, that she felt she had to write a third installment. And in this, she reached out and accused my role play group, International Rescue: The Next Phase. Not of plagiarizing something she had written this time, but of something one of her friends (the one who had proclaimed the second accused’s innocence) had written. The scenario: a tornado rescue, set in Kansas, where one of the characters is badly injured.
Now, this is where my old files come in.
I’ve been exporting the chapters of my first fanfiction, A Personnel Dilemma, from Fanfiction.net, using their handy-dandy HTML generator, planning to eventually code the files and post the story at my own site. As I’ve been doing this, I’ve been rereading the stuff. A bit cringeworthy, to be sure, but it was my first story. I noticed, however, that I had my character meet up with Scott and Gordon for an interview in a... wait for it... a family-owned Italian restaurant in Greenville. A real life place that my husband and I had visited on birthdays because they had a nice special. Unfortunately, we went back one time, and found the restaurant closed.
Now the pieces all fell into place for me. I used the name Peroni’s in that first story, but the real name of the place was... Vince Perone’s. It had really made an impression on me, because the restaurant was sold in 1996, and I wrote A Personnel Dilemma in 2003. As I think back to writing that scene from Serendipity, I'm sure I was channeling Vince Perone’s, using it as a template for my “family-owned Italian restaurant”. And when I looked through the baby naming sites for just the right male Italian name to christen the restaurant, I think it was that vague memory of Vince Perone’s which made the name “Vincenzo” jump out at me. Not the forgotten scene from this author's tale.
As for the scene itself, it was completely predicated on a family in-joke. I’m from the Boston area, and grew up in the town of Norwood-or as the natives, including most of my family, would call it, “Nahwud”. In the late 1980s, my parents moved from the house my mother had grown up in to Greenville, so my dad could attend Bob Jones U. My husband and I were living in central PA at the time, but moved back down to Greenville (and in on my parents) in 1991. Of course, the rest of my siblings were still in MA, and my parents went to visit them fairly regularly. My dad used to joke that they were traveling up there to “recharge their accents”, and visiting certainly seemed to do that! So, when I wrote the scene, I was thinking, accent=Massachusetts=Boston. What kind of family-owned restaurants are prevalent in the metro Boston area (or were when I was growing up there)? Italian ones, of course. And so the folks who owned and operated my Vincenzo’s had roots in Boston, and if you read the scene, it’s all right there. The accents, the visits to family in Boston, and the joke.
Now as for our role play “plagiarizing” someone, it’s very true that our scenario came out after the story in question was published. However, some more delving into my old files turned up something interesting. One of our founding players and I had conceived of a tornado rescue like the one we eventually wrote up, focusing on our characters, from nearly the very beginning of our role play... and I found the original file we’d worked out between us in my folders. The date on it? June 19, 2004. I can’t remember when the story we are accused of plagiarizing was first published; the author removed it--along with all of her other stories--from Fanfiction.net when our accuser started her archive. And though some of that author’s other stories have been reposted at Fanfiction.net, this one has not. But it’s rather far fetched to say we were “copying” a story that may not have been published at the time.
It also shows a dearth of knowledge about how our RP operates. Until recently, our rescues were planned out by the players in brainstorming sessions held on instant messenger. We’d hash out all the details together as a group, then someone would volunteer to take the lead and set up the whole scenario. They named the original characters involved, chose the place and time, and generally the rest of us went from there. In this case, one of our players who is least involved in the fandom set up the story. She’s written a couple of short Thunderbirds pieces for Fanfiction.net, but anything else she has written has been in other fandoms. And like the author with the allegedly plagiarized character, she doesn’t read every fanfic that comes down the pike. She hangs out with us because we’re friends, and she’s having fun, not because of any particular love of Thunderbirds.
We set the rescue in Kansas for two reasons. One, we wanted to involve the Tracy farmhouse, which is canonically in Kansas, and two, we had a new player coming in, one whose character came from-you guessed it-Kansas. She expressed the desire for her own character to feel the fury of the tornadoes. So setting it where we did was a no-brainer. I’m not aware that we set the rescue in the same area of the state that the other author used; even if we had, our point writer wouldn’t have known it anyway. And why shouldn’t we use such as scenario? My writing partner and I had wanted to do this for two whole years before we actually could slot it into our timeline. Why should our imagination and plans be set aside just because someone else had the same idea we’d had... or vice versa? To insist on such has a chilling effect on creativity.
So, that’s what I found in my old files. Surprised me, actually, but reminded me as to where my thoughts were back when I wrote Serendipity... and when we started the role play. I have my doubts that the article writer would accept what I’ve said; her second article indicated she believes that anyone who has an idea similar to hers is plagiarizing her with malice aforethought. Also, I think she has the wrong end of the stick in her definition of plagiarism.
You see, I’ve been plagiarized. An illiterate idiot copied, word for word, part of one of my stories, then put it on her own Thunderbirds site, looking out at the world and saying, “I wrote this! Aren’t I so clever?” She also mixed the work of other Thunderbirds authors with official plot synopses, screenplays, song lyrics, and a few of her own illegible words, and called the resulting hodge-podge her own. She’s done this in more than one fandom. That’s real plagiarism. Two other authors in the Thunderbirds fandom have also been plagiarized. One slightly less idiotic writer took pieces of their works, changed the names and places to suit the fandoms she loved and wrote in, then posted them at Fanfiction.net as if they were her own. That was real plagiarism. She was caught at it, too, and a case made against her at the live journal community, stop_plagiarism . You can find my original post here and the final write up about it here.
Being plagiarized gives you a sick, angry feeling. You want to reach out and strangle the person who has done this to you, and hound them until they stop, until they admit their guilt. It becomes difficult to write, and the whole pursuit of justice can feel all-consuming. But being falsely accused of plagiarism is just as painful. You get the same sick, angry feeling, the same difficulty in writing, the same feeling of drowning in the accusations. Unfortunately, you are put in a position where everything you say and do is suspect. You are guilty until proven innocent, and even if you do prove yourself innocent, the stench of being accused still lingers on your reputation... because not everyone is going to believe you didn’t do it.
So, am I a plagiarist? Simple answer is: No. Can I convince this author of that fact? I have my doubts. But I have, at least, gotten this off my chest.