It’s such an interesting change of pace here at Smart Bitches: for once, Sarah is the one getting all cussy and indignant, and I’m the one who’s feeling more mellow and contemplative.
One of the more irritating yet predictable reactions I’ve seen after the whole Cassie Edwards kerfuffle has been the idea that because it concerned romance novels, the issues surrounding unattributed usage don’t matter because, hey, romance novels are recycled drivel to begin with. They’re all the same, anyway, the argument goes; How can you even tell one of them has copied another book? None of them express a single original thought.
I saw this in an extended slapfight in one of the many, many comment threads when the Edwards story first broke (I can’t, alas, remember which thread it was), in which some clueless twat attempted to claim that all romance novels plagiarized to one extent or another (OH EM GEE THE UNORIGINALITY IT BURNSES US PRECIOUSSSSS). And I saw it again when I read Jane Henderson’s comment (“In the romance genre, it’s sometimes hard to tell one author from the next”) on Urban Fantasy Land.
There seems to be some confusion regarding the status of ideas in copyright law. You can’t copyright a plot or an idea. You can only copyright the specific expression of that plot or idea as recorded in some sort of tangible form. Think about the nightmare of attempting to nail down and legislate a plot or idea for a story. How specific would you have to be before you could declare something unique enough to copyright?
“An angst-ridden story about a vampire falling in love with a human.”
Dude, if you can copyright that and collect a small fee every time somebody published that story, you could have your own giant pool of gold coins to swim in, Scrooge McDuck-stylee. (Side note: doesn’t that sound like a painful idea to you? Because it always has to me.)
“An angst-ridden story in a contemporary setting about a vampire warrior falling in love with a human woman.”
OK, that’s a little bit more specific, but c’mon. (Also: goddamn, think of all those germs on all those coins. There is a reason why we call it “filthy rich.”)
“An angst-ridden story in a contemporary setting about a vampire warrior with superfluous Hs in his name falling in love with a human woman who eventually heals his pain.”
You guys know exactly what I’m talking about now, but really, it’s entirely conceivable that somebody, absent any influence from JR Ward, might write a vampire romantic comedy about a vampire named Hhoratio who used to be a warrior but is now a chartered accountant for Dark Yet Comic Reasons falling in love with the babe in IT, who, as it turns out, is a former superhero but turned to systems administration to hide from her Dark Yet Comic past. (I suppose you can circumvent the germ thing if you insist only on newly-minted gold coins. Still sounds horribly painful, though. Gold is heavy, and hard compared to our tender, tender flesh.)
And going back to an old point I’ve made: Yanking plots, plot elements and ideas may not be illegal, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re ethically in the clear. Novelty of ideas is paramount in academic research, which is why using somebody’s framework or idea without acknowledgment is a form of plagiarism. Fiction, however, has a lot more leeway. Academic research is concerned with exploring a new idea, refuting an old one or expanding on the body of knowledge of an existing one; fiction is more about grabbing an idea, making the idea your little bitch and creating an entertaining story along the way. Not to say there haven’t been books that were rip-offs, but you have to work a lot harder before people legitimately cry foul. So yes, that means plots and premises sometimes become repetitive. It can sometimes mean they share significant elements in common. But fiction is about the individual re-working and expression of those ideas; God is quite literally in the details for this one. Henderson, in my opinion, was over-reaching juuuuuust a tad in her statement that Marr’s work was a knock-off of Hamilton’s
Fairies who Fuck
Merry Gentry series; God knows her assertions made the article much more scandalous. I mean, seriously, if we’re going to say “books about human females being tempted by fairies” is an idea unique enough to engender infringement issues, J.R.R. Tolkien’s estate might as well sue every high fantasy novel, ever.
In fact, I came up with a table showing you how repetitious plots and premises can get in fiction. It’s by no means comprehensive—I got tired partway through (and I also didn’t bother covering mysteries, horror or SF)—but I think you get the idea.
| Title and Author | Basic Premise/Plot | Genre |
| Something Wonderful by Judith McNaught | Plucky young miss shows jaded aristocrat the meaning of love, and proves to him that Not All Women Are Evil | Romance |
| Lord of Scoundrels by Loretta Chase | Plucky miss shows jaded aristocrat the meaning of love, and proves to him that Not All Women Are Evil | Romance |
| Dreaming of You by Lisa Kleypas | Plucky miss shows jaded low-born gambler the meaning of love, and proves to him that Not All Women Are Evil | Romance |
| The Windflower by Laura London | Innocent young miss (who becomes plucky…eventually…sort of) shows jaded aristocrat the meaning of love, and proves to him that Not All Women Are Evil | Romance |
| The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien | A plucky group of ragtag misfits defeat Evil and thus save the world. The short ones provide occasional comic relief. The world is forever changed. | Fantasy |
| The Belgariad series by David Eddings | A plucky group of ragtag misfits defeat Evil and thus save the world. The short ones provide occasional comic relief. The world is forever changed. | Fantasy |
| The Dragonlance series by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman | A plucky group of ragtag misfits defeat Evil and thus save the world. The short ones provide occasional comic relief. The world is forever changed. | Fantasy |
| Most of the books in the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis | A plucky group of ragtag misfits defeat Evil and thus save the world. The short ones provide occasional comic relief. The world is forever changed. | Fantasy |
| The Sword in the Stone by T.H. White | Scrawny, gormless boy enjoys a series of wacky adventures and eventually finds out that he’s actually King | Children’s Fantasy |
| Stardust by Neil Gaiman | Scrawny, gormless boy enjoys a series of wacky adventures and eventually finds out that he’s actually King | Fantasy |
| Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman | Scrawny, gormless man enjoys a series of wacky adventures and eventually finds out that he’s actually the Hunter | Fantasy |
| Memory, Sorrow and Thorn series by Tad Williams | Scrawny, gormless boy enjoys a series of wacky adventures and eventually helps restore the throne of the rightful King | Fantasy |
| David Copperfield by Charles Dickens | Scrawny, gormless boy enjoys a series of wacky adventures and eventually triumphs over adversity | Dead White Dude fiction |
| Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens | Scrawny, gormless boy enjoys a series of wacky adventures and eventually triumphs over adversity | Dead White Dude fiction |
| Great Expectations by Charles Dickens | Scrawny, gormless boy enjoys a series of wacky adventures and eventually triumphs over adversity | Dead White Dude fiction |
| Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert | A woman dares to make the mistake of evincing sexual desire and unconventionality, the punishment for which is death | Dead White Dude fiction |
| Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy | A woman dares to make the mistake of evincing other people’s sexual desire, the punishment for which is death | Dead White Dude fiction |
| The Awakening by Kate Chopin | A woman dares to make the mistake of evincing sexual desire and unconventionality, the punishment for which is death | Dead White Woman fiction |
| The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen | Holy shit, this family is fucked up, and I can’t look away | Literary fiction |
| Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy | Holy shit, this family is fucked up, and I can’t look away | Dead White Dude fiction |
| Music for Torching by A.M. Homes | Holy shit, this family is fucked up, and I can’t look away | Literary fiction |
| As You Like It by William Shakespeare | Two couples attempt to sort out love amidst various hijinks. Cross-dressing ensues. | He’s motherfucking Shakespeare. He doesn’t need a motherfucking genre classification. |
| Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare | Two couples attempt to sort out love amidst various hijinks. Cross-dressing ensues. | He’s motherfucking Shakespeare. He doesn’t need a motherfucking genre classification. |
| Shadow Dance by Anne Stuart | Two couples attempt to sort out love amidst various hijinks. Cross-dressing ensues. | Romance |
| The Masqueraders by Georgette Heyer | Two couples attempt to sort out love amidst various hijinks. Cross-dressing ensues. | Romance |
I luuurve that graph.
GRAPH?! Is that a line in the accountant vampire novel?
I looove dark yet comic. Give me. Please.
And, OMG, Candy. At the beginning of your post, I immediately started thinking about how all the commonalities within any type of genre fiction.
Then you said it all in a brillaint, succinct, hilarious table. Absolutely inspired.
You guys better have a book that’s better than this *is not putting on any sort of pressure. At all*. I’ll have to import it all the way from the UK…
Assorted comments:
Trix, I really liked the original Belgariad. I thought it was well written and had interesting variations on the traditional themes. But he just didn’t know where to stop.
I guess my favorite “band of ragged misfits etc.” after Tolkien is Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain. And he has an interesting twist on “proves to be the rightful king” WARNING. SPOILERS.
Taran becomes king because he’s proved himself capable and worthy. And the final revelation of his birth is that the wizard found a naked baby near a battlefield, the sole survivor—so there was no way of knowing WHO his parents were.
I think the whole trope goes back to the pastoral romances of the Hellenistic era, where the protagonists are raised by shepherds and turn out to be kidnapped or abandoned royalty (cf. A Winter’s Tale by M. F. Shakespeare), and the fairy tales in which the lazy youngest son wins the princess and half the kingdom.
As for “ragged misfits,” how about “The Bremen Town Musicians”?
Holy shit, this family is fucked up, and I can’t look away.
My second short story sale was a transcript of a trashy talk show featuring the House of Atreus as the Most Dysfunctional Family Ever.
Christine, Dorothy L. Sayers wrote an essay on why the detective story was the only extant modern form of fiction that followed the strictures of Aristotle’s Poetics.
Point well made. Ideas are ephemeral. No idea is truly original, in a world of 6 billion people, there are bound to be at least four or five who have the same idea.
It’s what you do with that idea, and how you put it together that counts.
I wrote a short story for an anthology, where the writers were all given a story set-up. A gyspy, an enchanted object, a huge fee for the services etc, to try and find true love. We shared research and ideas, yet the stories we came up with were all completely different.
On a side note, it’s very sad that this has happened in the first place. I don’t think there are any winners here.
Gormless boy. Loved it.
But gormless means stupid.
I must concur with putting Flowers in the Attic under the Holy shit, this family is fucked up, and I can’t look away category. Actually, as soon as I read the I was expecting to see “All VC Andrews” as the next one listed.
You’ve got to wonder what kind of family that woman grew up in.
Poison Ivy: yeah, I probably used “gormless” in a way synonymous with the American “clueless”—i.e., it’s not a fatal or permanent state, and is fixed by en-gorm-ation. But I’m not sure if that’s standard usage.
Glad y’all enjoyed the table.
TeddyPig: Your Shakespeare comment made me motherfucking snort with motherfucking glee.
The suggestion about classifying Flowers in the Attic under the “Holy Shit! Fucked-up family cakes!” category was genius. Oh my god, those books were terrifying and crack-like.
VC Andrews- All incest, all the time. WTF was up with that woman and making that a plot point, in like EVERY book?? Has anyone written a bio on her..cuz duuuuuuddeeee… I mean, since she is dead and all…wouldn’t it be about time?
Eddings- Am I the only one here who has a big problem with how his male characters treat just about all of his female characters like wayward children? Even the queens seem to be figureheads, while the men “get things done”. The women are cardboard, for the most part, who tend to toss their hair, stamp their feet and pout, when they don’t get their way.
Charts-mad, wicked cool.
“Holy shit, this family is fucked up, and I can’t look away” addition- Fall On Your Knees.
talpianna, I didn’t mind my first read of the Belgariad either, despite the jaw-clenching sexual politics (which were much worse in later books), but yeah, he certainly didn’t know when to stop. Mind you, people kept buying them.
Meggie, you’re so right about female characters in Eddings. Of course, there’s the other them of the women “managing” the men with their secret womanly wiles rather than just being up front about their aims (cf. Polgara). I find the whole cliched “battle of the sexes” thing tiring in the extreme, in any venue.
Actually, gormless doesn’t necessarily mean ‘stupid’. A person can be intelligent and still appear gormless. Think of a dozy shop assistant, looking blankly at you when you ask a question, because his mind is miles away and he has no interest in his work: that’s gormlessness. He looks, and is, inefficient at what he is supposed to be doing, but may be perfectly competent in other respects. A gormless expression is one in which the eyes are slightly unfocused and the mouth slightly open – looks daft, but this may be deceptive.
Most people stop appearing gormless, if they ever did, once out of their 20s. Any older person who still goes around gormlessly probably IS stupid.
May I say that I love the language tangents in these discussions?
‘cause I do.
OK, not a book but Star Wars episodes 4-6 are right up there with Tolkien as the most well-known “plucky group of ragtag misfits defeat Evil and thus save the world. The short ones (umm, non-human ones) provide occasional comic relief. The world is forever changed.”
Yeah, srsly, what is up with VC Andrews? I picked up Flowers in the Attic in 6th grade (mid-80’s here) and after several books quickly realized that the author was probably fairly intimate (no pun intended) with incest. It creeped me out. It creeped me out even further when I heard she was in her 30’s or so when she started writing the books, and still living at home with her mother. I think there was something, too, about her not going out of the house….I haven’t read them since 8th grade as the subject matter is just really uncomfortable, and the plot is the same for each series. boring. and icky.
Thanks for pointing out the mystery thing! I always use that when someone attacks MY genre as being basically the same book over and over and over just because every book ends with a happy ending. Hello? Are all mysteries the same because every one ends with the mystery being solved? I mean, are Rita Mae Brown’s Jane Arnold books interchangeable with Sharon Kay Penman’s The Queen’s Man books and are both of them interchangeable with The Cat Who books and the Stephanie Plum books?
I don’t think so.
And I don’t think most people would argue that they are (unless they disdain/dislike the mystery genre and so to them the books ARE all the same).
You forgot:
Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling
Scrawny, gormless boy enjoys a series of wacky adventures and eventually triumphs over adversity
YA / Fiction
The table is the best, wish my English teachers had used something similar—would have been more fun.
The Docs over at Teach Me Tonight blog had a similar discussion a few months ago—about how many novels are regurgitations of the same tropes and that people find comfort in that. (Maybe someone who’s tech-savvy would be able to find and provide links to that discussion?)
Speaking of story regurgitations—I discovered P.C. Cast this weekend (“Goddess of the Spring”): it was wonderful. A fresh take on the Hades/Persephone story, with a heroine in her 40s and a not-so-perfect body.
spamword: heavy57. Is that my cue to think about losing my winter weight and begin slimming down for bathing suit season . . .
>Holy shit, this family is fucked up, and I can’t look away<
Candy, how did you read my diary?
Seriously, great chart. I shudder to think how you’d describe Robert Heinlein’s juveniles…or his other books. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of his, but not a completely uncritical one.
Teddy Pig, you’re right about science fiction. Taking the classic themes and adding a new twist creates some truly awesome stories.
Sigh. The older I get, the more I value true originality because there’s so little of it.
First of all, I have to say I found your site today and I found it to be the best source of entertainment I’ve read in years…
Second of all, weighing in on this whole repetitive issue – I am both an author and an editor (for a small e-pub) and I can tell you from experience that publishers want to see manuscripts that are a re-hashing of the old tried and true plot lines. As editor, we categorize manuscripts according to plot elements being existent or not. If certain elements are not in place, then the book is either rejected or “suggestion” made to the author to revise. Personally, I don’t agree with this. As a reader, I don’t want to read the same story over and over again, I want something fresh and unique. As an editor, however, I can see why publishers, especially small ones, only accept the tried and true stories, as they are the ones that are saleable.
Ultimately it is up to the reader to make a change. Only when readers stop buying mass market paperbacks that cater to their desire to see the happily ever after ending and the old boy meets girls stories will books change.
So, yes, I would boycott Cassie Edwards because of her plagiarism – that’s just pure laziness and nothing to be proud of. And yes, as a reader I will refuse to buy the same old boring stories. As an author, I strive to put a different spin on every little subtle plot twist.
And yes, Candy, Shakespeare don’t need no stinkin’ category, he’s in a category all his own.
Thanks for the laughs, girlz!
I read _The Heroine’s Journey_ by Maureen Murdock, too.
Was not impressed.
It is, in fact, a more specific case of the Hero’s Journey—with which I have my arguments, but she doesn’t address them.
For instance, she claims the Heroine’s Journey _starts_ with the Hero’s Journey, but what she is describing is the Ordinary World. Just because you Do Stuff, you are not therefore on the Hero’s Journey.
Article about V.C. Andrews: http://www.slate.com/id/2179380/pagenum/all/#page_start
She spent most of her life in a wheelchair due to a back injury after a fall down a flight of stairs.
I’ll be back soon—I’m just running out to buy cairngorms for all the gormless guys I know…
over94—-Hey! NO! I just turned 66!
loved the chart… i’ve got a guide to writing science fiction/fantasy book that says pretty much the same thing. but… where’s Guy Gavriel Kay? if ever there was a band of rag-tag misfits, it was the group of Canadian students attempting to save the world in the Fionavar Tapestry.
Emelye, would that be DWJ’s The Tough Guide to Fantasyland? That one always triggers snorting giggles for me—
We need one like that for Romancelandia—
I’ve just finished laughing long enough to type this comment. Well done. That chart needs to be required reading for all writers.