Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

You forgot to say but is there a paypal charity contribution site setup for the Post-Cassie Edwards-Traumatic Stress Disorder Foundation?

Here’s a question I’ve been meaning to ask for a long time:

Did Cassie Edwards run over your dog?

Scary thing is… the text book prose is more natural and pleasant to read than her fiction.

DUDE!

The whole (is ‘insidious’ too strong a word?) nagative aspect of this is these unattributed authors make zero, bupkus from a nationally sold author for the material.

I mean, it’s one thing to use an (attributed) academic text to help an author structure a scene, but to lift it almost verbatim is just plain lazy.

Interesting spaminator word - degree73.

Reminds me of the time a student I was tutoring asked me what % of her term paper could be direct quotations. Only difference is they were going to create a bibliography too!

Jenny - “Did Cassie Edwards run over your dog?”

She didn’t have to. She makes it too easy…

Candy,
Just wanted you to know I adore you for working the “Dangeresque” angle into all of this. Made my day.

Did Cassie Edwards run over your dog?

To be honest, I do feel sorry for her. Not enough to keep quiet about this, obviously, because I think this is an item of legitimate public interest, but yeah. Ow.

Candy, do you feel sorry for her because she gets picked on?  I can see that, certainly, especially as someone who is not a snarker by nature.  But obviously she sells lots of books, meaning she makes a comfortable living from that work, and she obviously has some very devoted readers, judging by some of the comments here.  For that I certainly don’t feel sorry for her.

Now, Crusie’s comment made me a little ballistic, I must admit because of all the people I would expect to make that comment (and only that comment) it wouldn’t be an author and a former teacher and doctoral candidate. 

Authors talk all the time about copyright and such, but for academics the issue of plagiarism is much more basic and is part of the delicate balance between knowledge as a public good and community asset and the integrity of individual scholarship and its institutional and cultural rewards. 

I find it a bit ironic that some of the passages you’ve quoted from other sources are academic in nature, because that’s the community that takes plagiarism so deadly serious.  Although perhaps if it’s not another commercial author who’s being plagiarized it’s not such a big deal to people??

After reading multiple jeremiads on why selling ARCs is a mortal sin and why fan fiction writers need to be threatened with all sorts of possibly impossible legal action, I’m kind of curious to know where authors stand on something like this.  Is it not such a big deal because it’s just some long-dead or dusty academics whose work has found its way into popular fiction?  Is it only 18-year old girls who have had their books worked on by a book packaging company who deserve to be vilified (of course, that involved the work of *other popular authors*)? 

Obviously we don’t have Edwards’s side of the story here, so I can’t comment on anything related to *her* personally, but I am pretty troubled about what seems to be a strange dichotomy of responses to various issues involving “intellectual property,” authorial integrity, intellectual honesty, and copyright.  I’m not, actually, interested in pillorying plagiarists, and I don’t think plagiarists are mortal sinners, but when people are attacking bloggers and such for finding and revealing copied material, I fear we’ve gotten away from a baseline value of the balance between the community and the individual when it comes to artistic and intellectual creativity.

And finally, I’m always so puzzled when stuff like this happens because it could have been SO EASILY AVOIDED with a FOOTNOTE, or at least SOME SORT OF ATTRIBUTION, even if it were an author’s note (and, of course, no actual quoting or close paraphrasing of the reference work).  Heck, even Ian McEwan included SOME attribution to Lucilla Andrews’s autobiography, as insufficient as it may have been.

Why do you hate Janet Dailey?

Look, i’ve got no idea what Edwards did or didn’t do - never read her books, want to wash my eyeballs at the thought - but if she didn’t run over my dog I’m sure she kicked it.

I appreciate the hard work authors do but after a book is out, it’s out. And even if someone does have a jones against a particular author the implication that dissecting that book, trashing that book, or putting it on a pillar and kissing it nightly is out of line annoys me. It’s out, it’s there, it’s free game to converse about in the manner of conversing.

It’s not like she’s saying Cassie Edwards smells bad and is a sexual deviant. It’s discussion (and has been) about the quality of work.

Is a UK university actually quite harsh on this?  If that sort of passages got into an essay, even with a reference, it would still be plagiarism and not put in our own words enough. Instant zero if you’re not a fresher.

because that’s the community that takes plagiarism so deadly serious

And yet academics are some of the worst plagiarizers out there.

I was a speaker at a luncheon on plagiarism this past semester, and some of the stuff I found…a lot of it is unintentional, but frequently academics, like any other group of writers, just hope they won’t get caught.

The big difference, I suppose, is that the academic community at large is violently opposed, and most of us (especially English teachers, of which I am one) work our butts off to keep it from happening.

Candy, I can’t get to a library right now, as I’m still home on Christmas break, but I can certainly run the passages through the available databases from here. I can access a lot of the standard academic/scholarly databases. I don’t know if that would help or not. E-mail me if you think it would help.

I appreciate the hard work authors do but after a book is out, it’s out. And even if someone does have a jones against a particular author the implication that dissecting that book, trashing that book, or putting it on a pillar and kissing it nightly is out of line annoys me. It’s out, it’s there, it’s free game to converse about in the manner of conversing.

I can appreciate how the “jones” can seem a bit harsh to others.  I mean, Crusie and another author posted something on Crusie’s blog a while back that effected a deep-seated change in how I view their author-blogger personae (although I still appreciate and regularly recommend some of their books), so when I saw her comment, I had a flashback moment that exacerbated my frustration with the current comment.  It diminished my ‘benefit of the doubt’ margin, in other words, and I can certainly admit that. 

But what you are saying here is also very true, IMO.  These posts are in reference to a PUBLIC work of fiction and a commercial product, intended for monetary profit to the author and publisher.  Edwards as a person is not being indicted or publicly mocked.  And in this case, the fact that it’s consistently the perceived quality of Edwards’s work that receives the mocking here to begin with (not her personally), the passages the SBs have uncovered are in tandem with those original complaints, IMO. So jones or no-jones, IMO that shouldn’t decide the value of what was revealed here.  Nor, of course, should it be cause for a posse, either, IMO.

And yet academics are some of the worst plagiarizers out there.

The big difference, I suppose, is that the academic community at large is violently opposed, and most of us (especially English teachers, of which I am one) work our butts off to keep it from happening.

I think this is a big difference, in part because the more prominent a scholar is, the more likely their work circulates widely enough for the plagiarism to be discovered.  And then there is a balancing to be done based on how much of it is original—how honest is the overall scholarship, in other words.

I do get frustrated with the fact that famous scholars can seem to get away with plagiarism, although if they have also produced a large body of original and valuable work, I can see the trade-off less harshly.  But yes, I do think in general the academic community is almost rabidly anti-plagiarism, if for no other reason than we all recognize we have a personal stake in its prevention.  And we’re not at all shy about calling others out for it, despite the fact that I think any scholar worth their creds has a fair amount of fear of unconsciously plagiarizing when producing any work of significant size and depth.

And finally, I’m always so puzzled when stuff like this happens because it could have been SO EASILY AVOIDED with a FOOTNOTE, or at least SOME SORT OF ATTRIBUTION, even if it were an author’s note (and, of course, no actual quoting or close paraphrasing of the reference work).

So you actually propose to put bibliographies at the end of each work of fiction? To document all your sources as if you were writing an academic text?

Sandra, that’s precisely what Susan Johnson did in some of her historicals.  And you can acknowledge in the Acknowledgements—I know I’ve seen that before.

But no, I don’t think anyone seriously expects authors to provide a Bibliography for all their sources, because much of what they write is an accretion over many years’ research and reading.

But this is unexcusable.  No accretion here.  Just plagiarism

I don’t believe Robin is advocating that, Sandra.

However, I do know I’ve seen many authors acknowledge their sources, even if just in general terms. What I see in these posts is plain cut and paste—not only should Ms Edwards have used her own voice/words, but shouldn’t there be some attribution?

What Sarah F. said.  IMO there’s a world of difference between a full academic bibliography and virtual transcription of research materials into a book without any sort of attribution.  We’re not talking about the insertion of facts here, either, or even the use of widely held ideas or commonly known information.

I know it’s taboo for authors to give the impression of criticizing each other, but I’m kind of perplexed by some of the author comments (and silences) on these here threads.

or what Sarah Frantz said….





(spamfoiler: justice11—talk about eerie!)

liz: Google Janet Daily and Nora Roberts, and you’ll understand the reference.

Just to clarify: I work in academia, I teach English lit at university; and it’s true that plagiarism in academia has become a big problem, but I do regard fictional writing as a completely different thing. It’s obvious that it’s not such a good idea to use verbatim quotations from copyrighted works. However, when you write a historical novel you simply can’t document all your sources. And what about intertextual references? Should Pratchett have included all his sources for a novel like Witches Abroad?

Gah, you comment faster than it takes me to write a comment.

I know it’s taboo for authors to give the impression of criticizing each other, but I’m kind of perplexed by some of the author comments (and silences) on these here threads.

Because authors tend to be paranoid and very easily start secondguessing themselves. When I wrote my first novel, I included two long chapters that are set at Holland House, and I did some extensive research on the Holland House Circle in the early 19th century. It frankly never occurred to me that I ought to mention the research books I’d used in the author’s note. But of course, if you would compare Lloyd Sanders THE HOLLAND HOUSE CIRCLE with those chapters you would find similarities.

Sandra: While I don’t agree with you that documenting all your sources in a historical novel is out of the question, that may depend largely on how many and what type of sources you’re using.  Here, though, Edwards appears not to have merely drawn upon source texts for background information, but lifted their words wholesale.  Even with bibliographical credit given—which it wasn’t—this kind of apparent copying would seem pretty sketchy to me.  If what occurred is actually plagiarism, she didn’t just steal uncredited information from these source works, but also their authors’ voices and styles.

Just to clarify again (and I really shouldn’t write these comments at 10.30 in the evening): I’m not talking specifically about Cassie Edwards, but I’m thinking about this problem of attribution in fiction in more general terms. If that makes sense.

Sandra, come on. There is a difference between cutting & pasting and LEGAL researching. You do the research about, for example, the ingredients and benefits of a certain dish, and then you work it into the story. Maybe even using language your character would use in a conversation. For God’s sake, if these passages are accurate, she couldn’t have just pulled them from memory. She had to have been typing them in with the other book open in front of her!

This isn’t about a stray and common phrase like “It’s also very fattening.” *sigh*

It is sad. And I feel sorry for her too, in the same way I feel sorry for other people who make bad decisions. (Again, assuming this is all accurate. And I assume it is. Very damning.)

Sorry, Sandra, I posted above you before seeing yours. I do understand the dilemma about whether an author has phrased it differently enough, etc. But the examples posted today are waaaay over the line.

Apologies for assuming you were talking specifically about Ms. Edwards.

Because authors tend to be paranoid and very easily start secondguessing themselves. When I wrote my first novel, I included two long chapters that are set at Holland House, and I did some extensive research on the Holland House Circle in the early 19th century. It frankly never occurred to me that I ought to mention the research books I’d used in the author’s note. But of course, if you would compare Lloyd Sanders THE HOLLAND HOUSE CIRCLE with those chapters you would find similarities.

I understand this, Sandra, as I made a similar comment about the bind we feel as academics—part of a community where we hate plagiarism but IMO smart if we fear unconsciously doing it ourselves, especially in an extensively researched work.

But why not talk about that, at least?  Especially since authors seem to be so willing to talk about ARC sales or fan fiction or blogger-reviewers, etc. 

I worry, sometimes, that these kinds of incident might lead more authors to argue that no one should take the history in Romance seriously (i.e. that Romance isn’t encyclopedic in nature).  And that’s one of the reasons I think this is an issue worth parsing out a bit.  Like can we at least agree on a baseline where copying or closely paraphrasing original non-fiction research into a fiction novel is a no no and then go from there?  Is that a fair baseline?  You’ve started hitting on some of the gray areas, IMO, like how authors should or shouldn’t handle any extensive research they do. 

I guess I’d draw the line somewhat like this:  I don’t think an author needs to attribute when she uses facts, dates, modes of dress or food or other aspects of daily life, historical events, common ideas of the day, or other cultural artifacts.  But if, for example, she wants to write a novel based on a controversial historical thesis, for example, written by a particular scholar, I think that deserves attribution. 

I think Ian McEwan owed Lucinda Andrews more attribution, too, because he was clearly relying on her written work of experiences personal to her.  I don’t think he needed to insert a bibliography into his novel, but what would it have hurt to have included a brief note indicating that he used some of the incidents in her book as grist for his fictional work?  I can’t remember the exact wording of his reference to her in Atonement, but I don’t think it went that far (someone please correct me if I’m wrong here).

Honestly, I wish some authors would consider more extensive author’s notes about their historical sources, not because I’m afraid they’re plagiarizing, but simply because I adore history and am always looking for more cool stuff to read.  When authors are using research to create cultural background, however, I don’t expect them to name their sources.  At the same time, though, I don’t expect them to be moving sentences or phrases from a secondary text to their fictional work without attribution.  And truly, I don’t think that’s an unfair expectation.

“liz: Google Janet Daily and Nora Roberts, and you’ll understand the
reference.”

Azteclady -

I was being sarcastic to JC. No google needed, but thanks.

Now I feel like an idiot…. *blushing*

Like can we at least agree on a baseline where copying or closely paraphrasing original non-fiction research into a fiction novel is a no no and then go from there?  Is that a fair baseline?

Uhm. I’ve used at least one more or less verbatim quotation from a 19th century guidebook: “The Rhine below COlogne is a most uninteresting river, with high dykes on each side, which protect the flat country from inundations and intercept all view, save of a few villages, church steeples, and farm houses, painted of various colours, which are seen peering above them” from Murray’s Hand-Book—Northern Germany of 1845, became “... and she enthused all the way from Rotterdam to Cologne when high dykes on each side of the river had intercepted all view, except for a few church steeples which had shyly peered over them.”

What follows then is an extremely condensed version of one of the Rhinish panoramas in Anna Seghers’s The Seventh Cross, which I intended as a sort of personal homage to the author. But since it strongly echoes some of Seghers’s phrases, somebody else might argue I stole them from her book.

See? Paranoid author!

I think Ian McEwan owed Lucinda Andrews more attribution, too, because he was clearly relying on her written work of experiences personal to her.

I thought so, too, especially because he used her autobiography.

~*~

After several of similar online discussions, I’ve certainly become more sensitized to what readers might want to see acknowledged in the author’s note. So in my next novel, I’ll mentioned several of my sources, especially since I use verbatim quotations from a 19th-century shilling romance. :)

especially since I use verbatim quotations from a 19th-century shilling romance

For a book in the book, that is.

Candy, are you being fer reals? Because this plagiarism could hurt a LOT of people and cost TONS of money. Ugh.

Apologies for assuming you were talking specifically about Ms. Edwards.

And, Sandra, I should be clear that my frustration and exasperation WAS specifically about Ms. Edwards. Not you. *g*

Yeah, regardless of what Ms Crusie may infer, I agree there’s a responsibility of acknowledgement here.

I’m currently expanding an sf romance novella into a novel. It includes quantum mechanics. Well, I know *some* qm, but not enough to get me out of trouble with a scientist. So I used an example from a well-known reference book, changing around the example a bit, breaking it up with dialog and dialog tagas, but still using the same parameters.

You bet I have it referenced at the end. Credit where it’s due.

And, Sandra, I should be clear that my frustration and exasperation WAS specifically about Ms. Edwards. Not you. *g*

That’s all right. I’m so tired by now that I didn’t even see your initial comment. *g* I’ll totter off to bed now. Good night!

,i>That’s all right. I’m so tired by now that I didn’t even see your initial comment. *g* I’ll totter off to bed now. Good night!

Well, thank God. I thought you were too furious to respond! Sleep tight. ;-)

Candy, are you being fer reals? Because this plagiarism could hurt a LOT of people and cost TONS of money. Ugh.

But that should be the result, no? I mean, you can’t just take somebody else’s work and not expected to pay the price. If you plagiarize, it should cost you money, and it should embarrass you.

Forgive me if that seems unkind, but I’m an academic, too, and I get so frustrated with students who don’t see why this issue is a big deal. It is, and “big deal” authors need to be held as accountable as anyone else.

But that should be the result, no?

Sure, but I was just thinking of the people NOT strictly responsible who will be hurt. If she’s got a hundred books out, she’s had lots of editors, many of whom have been replaced since the books were published, etc. I’m saying this will be a huge, painful headache for anyone even peripherally involved and also for those who’ve been unknowingly handed the bag.

Not saying the shit shouldn’t hit the fan, I’m just sympathetic to those in the downdraft.

Not to mention the hurt caused to the people plagiarised.

Uhm. I’ve used at least one more or less verbatim quotation from a 19th century guidebook: “The Rhine below COlogne is a most uninteresting river, with high dykes on each side, which protect the flat country from inundations and intercept all view, save of a few villages, church steeples, and farm houses, painted of various colours, which are seen peering above them” from Murray’s Hand-Book—Northern Germany of 1845, became “… and she enthused all the way from Rotterdam to Cologne when high dykes on each side of the river had intercepted all view, except for a few church steeples which had shyly peered over them.”

What follows then is an extremely condensed version of one of the Rhinish panoramas in Anna Seghers’s The Seventh Cross, which I intended as a sort of personal homage to the author. But since it strongly echoes some of Seghers’s phrases, somebody else might argue I stole them from her book.

Perhaps because I’ve been doubly trained to cite (law is even worse than literature in this regard), I’d probably have expected some attribution for the Seghers’s and a rephrasing the guidebook or at least attribution.  But again, I think it might be worth parsing out what any of us think is the appropriate use of secondary sources.  The guidebook, especially, is a grayer area, IMO, than the sources pointed out in reference to Edwards.  Not that I’m right and you’re wrong, of course; just my opinion about where I’d draw the baseline.  I obviously thought it was more neutral than it is.

“I guess I’d draw the line somewhat like this:  I don’t think an author needs to attribute when she uses facts, dates, modes of dress or food or other aspects of daily life, historical events, common ideas of the day, or other cultural artifacts.”

aka common knowledge.

”  But if, for example, she wants to write a novel based on a controversial historical thesis, for example, written by a particular scholar, I think that deserves attribution. “

not common knowledge.

I need to think a lot more about this, but I think the common knowledge test is pretty good, especially if you contrast it with what I would term “creative knowledge.”  That is, does the secondary research contain any element of originality or creativity in content or presentation?  Those elements of creative knowledge are not, IMO, fodder for transcription into fictional work, at least not without specific attribution. 

And maybe the test could be even simpler:  if someone copied a sentence from my work into theirs without attribution, would I feel violated or be uncomfortable?  If the answer is yes, then I’d say that’s a pretty good indication that the author of that source might feel the same way. 

Can and does unintentional plagiarism take place?  Oh, yeah, and it’s something every writing community—fiction, non-fiction, academic—struggles with.  It’s why, IMO, we shouldn’t string people up or throw around accusations lightly, and why some folks can recover from discovered acts of plagiarism, especially if the mass of their work is original and significant. 

I don’t see plagiarism in and of itself as a moral failing at all, although when someone intentionally copies I think the analysis shifts.  In this case, it’s not clear what happened, only that quite a few similarities were discovered with almost no time or effort by a few readers.  And the fact that it’s so often readers who do find this stuff IMO makes this a topic of equal interest to readers and authors.

Did Cassie Edwards run over your dog?

I doubt it, but writing a crappy book and having paid money for said crappy book is just as bad as running over someone’s beloved pet.

In a way I understand where this comment is coming from (JCs). Cassie Edwards hasn’t been spared on this site.

Lets look at it this way if an author they lurved had done the same thing I’m sure they would have been just as many post supporting alleged accusation of plagerism. As I’m also sure they would have been a WHOLE lot more snark involved. Nothing worse than an author who you lurve betraying your belief in their writing.

“I guess I’d draw the line somewhat like this:  I don’t think an author needs to attribute when she uses facts, dates, modes of dress or food or other aspects of daily life, historical events, common ideas of the day, or other cultural artifacts.”

aka common knowledge.

This sounds pretty in theory, but it doesn’t quite work this way when you’re actually writing a novel. Aspects of daily life are common knowledge? Do you know how many books on aspects of daily life a writer of historical fiction usually owns? If I think of the many mistakes I’ve seen in romance in regard to the wearing of stays / corsets alone ... Do you know what the interior of White’s looked like? What would you say if somebody uses a watercloset in the Regency era?

Same goes for historical events: you might know all the dates of the important battles of the Napoleonic Wars, but if you want to set a story in these wars, with your hero running around and about the battlefields of Europe, your research will necessary go beyond the bare dates and you will have to read about the daily life of the soldiers, to read detailed descriptions of the different battles, etc.

I’d probably have expected some attribution for the Seghers’s

But this is intertextuality. Look at Pratchett’s Witches Abroad, in which the three witches travel through different stories, among them The Wizard of Oz: it gets windy, there’s a yellow brickroad, a farmhouse drops on Nanny Ogg’s head, and afterwards there are lots of dwarfs dancing around the house and singing a ding-dong song (And they want her red boots, too!). Should he have attributed this passage to the film?

The difference between intertextuality and plagiarism is that the sort of thing Pratchett is doing assumes that the reader will recognise that it’s a reference to another source. It’s not formally attributed, but the whole point of it is reader recognition of the allusion.

With intertextuality, the author is hoping that the reader will notice what’s going on. With plagiarism, the author is hoping that the reader *won’t* notice what’s going on (or simply doesn’t care if the reader notices).

It can be hazy, and difficult to pin down exactly what was in an author’s mind. But I think in the Edwards material covered in this series of posts, there’s no excuse for not having at least an acknowledgements page or bibliography. The sources she used aren’t ones that her audience could be expected to be familiar with, and it’s word for word rather than reworked.

I don’t see plagiarism in and of itself as a moral failing at all

Not perhaps a moral failing per se, but certainly a moral issue. Plagiarism can easily exist without there being a legal issue - copying Cato the Censor is still plagiarism.

Jules, as I said, I wasn’t talking specifically about Cassie Edwards—most of these examples are clearly copy and paste—, but I was talking / wondering about what should or should not be attributed in more general terms.

Sandra, I’d say that one test as an author is—do you intend the reader to recognise the source? The example text you quote from the guidebook is getting a bit iffy, in my opinion. Your version is too close to the original for comfort, and if there was a lot of that without attribution I wouldn’t look kindly on it were someone to pick up on it. But it wouldn’t take much more rewording to use it safely.

The Sehgers homage—how likely would your readership be to pick up on it being a homage? If most of them would, you might want to cover yourself with an attribution, but it wouldn’t be unreasonable to use it. But if you use it in a context where much of your readership is unlikely to recognise both the source and that you intend them to recognise it, you’re on dodgy ground unless you make explicit acknowledgement of it somewhere.

(I should point out that my day job is science, so I’m having the same academic-type “cite your sources, plagiarism *bad*” reaction to this that some of the other commentators are, and my standards for citation are biased by that.)

Not perhaps a moral failing per se, but certainly a moral issue.

To me it’s an ethical issue, and the difference is significant in my mind because so often morality seems to be associated with religiosity and black/white bad/good, while ethics have more to do with community standards of right and wrong.  Since plagiarism hasn’t always been seen as a wrong, it does have its foundation in the community.  But in any case, we may only be talking about semantics here, yes?  In any case, it’s definitely something of great importance to discuss in a community based around writing.

But this is intertextuality. Look at Pratchett’s Witches Abroad, in which the three witches travel through different stories, among them The Wizard of Oz: it gets windy, there’s a yellow brickroad, a farmhouse drops on Nanny Ogg’s head, and afterwards there are lots of dwarfs dancing around the house and singing a ding-dong song (And they want her red boots, too!). Should he have attributed this passage to the film?

Jules Jones has said much of what I would have said if I had seen this sooner, Sandra, but I guess what I would add is the question of how obvious the reference is to your audience.  I, for example, wouldn’t necessarily know The Seventh Cross right off the bat, but I’d know a Wizard of Oz reference (sad, I know, but there it is). 

Also, this was the sentence that caught my attention in your initial post:  But since it strongly echoes some of Seghers’s phrases, somebody else might argue I stole them from her book.  Whenever it comes to language, or at least language beyond almost universally recognizable bytes, I say go for some sort of referencing, even if it’s only an author’s note explaining the homage.  Obviously it’s a judgment call, Sandra, and I think we’re clearly in a gray zone (I have such a weakness for paradox, lol), but when it comes to using language, I think it can be a real close call.  JMO, of course.

Oh, one more thing I wanted to say about the issue of “common knowledge.”  To me—in this context—the common refers more to “of the community/commons” than to that of being well known today by everyone.  Historical elements of times past are community property in that they are born of and possessed by the community.  But creative knowledge is at least born of an individual within the community, and I think we have to share in that knowledge a bit differently.  I don’t know if that distinction makes sense, but it’s the only way I can think of to articulate the difference I see.

Is it bad that I look at the title of this novel and I keep reading “Savage Longjohns”? <.<

That’s… really my only contribution, since everyone else has already said my thoughts. X3

It’s my understanding that copyright refers not to information or ideas but to their expression.  Usually when you’re writing you do research to get the information and ideas, then you express these in your own way.  That’s not plagiarism.  But simply copying chunks of text word for word as you’ve shown quite clearly is plagiarism.

My tutors taught us that 5 consecutive words was a good rule of thumb to identify plagiarism (though if you had a particular professor you should limit that to 4).  Of course it’s not hard and fast.  Sometimes individual words or very short phrases are distinctive enough to require acknowledgement.  In other cases, expression is generic enough not to be attributable.  But the repeated use of lengthy verbatim quotes you’ve shown is unquestionable and unacceptable.

And yes, plagiarism charges will cause lengthy and expensive lawsuits.  But, you know, if you don’t use the law, it’s not worth having.  And in this case the law quite clearly protects the work of the little people.  I think it’s great that someone’s standing up for them.

How convenient. I have a final on plagiarism and copyright infringement tomorrow (and so I really should be studying and not reading this, but what can you do).
To me, this seems like a blatant case (blatant cases) of plagiarism, and more seriously, copyright infringement.
Plagiarism is bad, to be sure, but it’s not a legally punishable crime. The only punishment open for plagiarism is tar and feathers, being shunned by her peers etc.
I think she’s left herself wide open for copyright lawsuits. I mean, she didn’t even try to cover her tracks by using a friggin’ thesaurus (which would still be plagiarism, but it’d be a lot less noticeable). 
I hope she doesn’t play the old “I researched and made notes, but I conveniently forgot to note that they were notes, so I thought they were my own ideas and yeah… please believe me?”-card.

I hope she doesn’t play the old “I researched and made notes, but I conveniently forgot to note that they were notes, so I thought they were my own ideas and yeah… please believe me?”-card.

Even if she does, it’s no defence.  It’s her responsibility to make sure she didn’t steal someone else’s work, even by accident.

I’m going to weigh in way too late (as usual). But I wanted to pick up on something Robin said, about how she is sensitive to proper attribution as an academic, and even more so as a lawyer… I’m paraphrasing, because I’m too lazy to scroll up. (Ironic, no, since we’ve been talking like the lazy thing is to NOT paraphrase?)

I’m a 3rd year law student, and yeah, proper citation has never seemed so important. Or so tedious. I want to do something really violent to my copy of The McGill Guide to Uniform Legal Citation. But I’m not careful because I’m afraid of the Big P. I wouldn’t steal. I’m just afraid of being wrong, so I go back to my source an nail down the exact paragraph, statute, line in Hansard, whatever.

When I’m working on Regency-era novel writing projects, I’m doing something very different and I’m not afraid of being wrong. You can beef your book up with all the facts in the library and/or Internet, but some of them are simply inaccurate, impossibly bereft of context, tainted by changes in langauge (“lovemaking” anybody), and seen through a modern lens (or, if you’re using late-19th c. English sources, seen through a Victorian lens).

Never mind how boring that is. That, by the way, is what struck me about the Cassie Edwards excerpts.

I’m also just plain making stuff up where the historical record has a gap, and hoping I’m clever enough to fool an attentive reader. It’s fiction. And the fact, for me, are part of world-building. I want to do a good job of it, but the last thing I would do is put a footnote at the bottom of the page to remind the reader that I did my research (lazy?). I want the reader to forget, so far as possible, that I wasn’t THERE (in a God-like omniscient third person kind of way). The second-last thing I would do is lift a passage out of a source and plunk it down in my narrative (lazy).

I DO forget my sources (lazy again). All I remember when I’m making my notes is where I’m going to use a “fact” in a story, how it’s going to work in the plot or fill out a character.

What I think of CE’s work is that it’s just bad craft. But it’s not like she is… oh, trying to mislead a Court about a legal authority. I’m not saying plagiarism is always a victimless, er, no-no.

From the many examples here, the Cassie Edwards copying appears to be pretty extreme. But it’s tricky extrapolating that to general statements of morality and ethics in writing fiction. I think Sandra Schwab points out an important dimension to writing, particularly in historical fiction. There’s a well-established space between intertextuality and plagiarism. There’s a long tradition of using a previous writer’s (thinker’s, etc) words, often without attribution. This can be done in homage or to add historicity (e.g. a fictional soldier speaks words from an historical soldier’s diary), and it’s not necessary that the entire audience get the reference. Those who do are expected to smile in recognition, not judge it as plagiarism.

To pick a romance-related example of homage, think how many books use the phrase:
“It is a truth universally acknowledged”
(but without the quotes)

and continue with some variation on:
“...that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife”

That’s a gross oversimplification because it’s such an obvious homage to P&P.  But the reference isn’t clear to every reader, so perhaps it does make my point after all.

Again, I’m not at all excusing plagiarism.  But historical fiction is an odd space that has often relied extensively on unattributed sources—and been praised for it, rather than condemned.  So I can’t say I know how to declare a hard line between authenticity and theft of intellectual property.

Again, I’m not at all excusing plagiarism.  But historical fiction is an odd space that has often relied extensively on unattributed sources—and been praised for it, rather than condemned.  So I can’t say I know how to declare a hard line between authenticity and theft of intellectual property.

But look at the Ian McEwan Atonement controversy.  How was that not intertextuality but what Sandra’s talking about is (not necessarily saying you’d make that same distinction, just positing it for the sake of the question)?  And he even offered some form of attribution.

Sandra, but I guess what I would add is the question of how obvious the reference is to your audience.  I, for example, wouldn’t necessarily know The Seventh Cross right off the bat, but I’d know a Wizard of Oz reference (sad, I know, but there it is).

Granted, I didn’t expect that most readers would pick up the Seghers reference, but the person for whose amusement it was intended (my German professor, as whose student assistant I did all the tedious work for the new critical edition of The Seventh Cross) did pick it up.

The Wizard of Oz passage in Pratchett is a rather obvious intertextual reference and no doubt most British and American readers will pick it up. But I doubt that most people will recognize the parody of Tom Brown’s School Days in Pyramids. And before the release of the Beowulf film, most readers wouldn’t have caught the Beowulf references in either Pratchett’s Guards! Guards! or in Tolkien’s The Hobbit, would they?

But look at the Ian McEwan Atonement controversy. How was that not intertextuality . . .

Well, first of all, that was not fictional text to fictional text. And secondly, most of the controversy stemmed from the fact that he had used an autobiography for research and based relatively large parts of his novel on somebody else’s life. And that person wasn’t dead yet when he wrote the novel. So it would have been only polite to stress this point more strongly in the author’s note or acknowledgments or whatever else he included in his book.

I don’t think there would have been such a controversy if he had written a novel about a 19th-century courtesan and used Harriet Wilson’s memoirs.

I should perhaps add that quite a number of references in my novels are strictly for my own amusement. I mean, not in a hundred years would anybody recognize a character calling his wife the “Doodlechick” as a reference to a character from a German children’s novel. :)

Did Cassie Edwards run over your dog?

Wow, so the only reason women might be interested in bringing a plagiarist’s crimes to light is because they have some personal, emotional grudge against the author? If this were written by a man, I’d say this statement was misogynist.

The guy is Dangeresque, DangerESQUE! The mighty oak has fallen. If moooovies have taught me anything, he’ll get the giiiiiirl… OR MAYBE NOT! Dun nuh, dun nuh. Stick to the man! Stick it to the man! Dun nuh, dun nuh. Cool glasses, cool glasses. Stick it to the man! Stick it to the man! Cool cool glasses.

Ahem. That’s all have to contribute.

The Wizard of Oz passage in Pratchett is a rather obvious intertextual reference and no doubt most British and American readers will pick it up. But I doubt that most people will recognize the parody of Tom Brown’s School Days in Pyramids. And before the release of the Beowulf film, most readers wouldn’t have caught the Beowulf references in either Pratchett’s Guards! Guards! or in Tolkien’s The Hobbit, would they?

Whether or not the average reader would catch a Beowulf reference, Beowulf is a foundational text in Western society (of course I had to slog through it in Anglo-Saxon, so I might be a bit biased here). 

In any case, as a literary critic, I adore intertextuality, but as you know because you do it, it’s quite a sophisticated thing and requires deep understanding of the texts alluded to. 

I had been trying to put together an informal list of fiction authors who provide some sort of referencing even when they’re doing intertextual writing, but Meezergrrrl found one online and posted a link in the Signet response thread (Pratchett’s on it, btw).  Anyway, I’m not suggesting that every authors who writes intertextually needs to be providing footnotes and biblios.  But OTOH, I can see readers who aren’t used to reading texts like that being confused or even thinking that something has been lifted, especially if the text doing the alluding doesn’t itself appear to be very original or transformative.  Because that’s a big part of intertextuality, too, the transformation of those other texts as they are woven through another author’s voice.

Mostly, though, I wonder how many people are even familiar with intertextuality, since I’ve seen some comments from both authors and readers suggesting that what Edwards was doing is intertextual.  So while I agree with you in the main, I can also say as a reader that I can see instances where I’m not convinced that something is being used to create that intertextual conversation (at the very least it requires, IMO, a relationship of trust with the author and that may need to be built up over the course of several books).  Like what about that Eppie-nominated book that was basically Jane Eyre in m/m form.  Is there, for example, a difference between homage and intertextual conversation? Adaptation and homage?

Also, to return to the McEwan thing, I think it’s kind of telling that many lit fic authors didn’t seem to think it was a big deal, while Romance folks did.  I don’t know where that difference comes from, but IMO it adds another shade of gray to all this.

Sandra Schwab beat me to it on the McEwan flap.  So I’ll skip over to this aspect:

Also, to return to the McEwan thing, I think it’s kind of telling that many lit fic authors didn’t seem to think it was a big deal, while Romance folks did.  I don’t know where that difference comes from, but IMO it adds another shade of gray to all this.

And many lit fic authors didn’t seem to think James Frey’s fictionalized autobiography was a big deal, while Oprah viewers did.

Ergo, Cassie Edwards’ novels are experiments in lit fic.

Couldn’t resist. :P
Actually I have some thoughts on why we see that genre gap in expectations—but suffice it to say, there are a lot of different viewpoints out there.  Often I try novels that are recommended as fascinatingly referential and layered, and I might feel they’re not so much intertextual as just repeating tropes from other books.  Hard to say where to slice it.

Wow, its kind of pathetic that she copied the entries in those Cheyenne Indians books, and THOSE still turned out more interesting.