This is the first I’ve heard of this “author”, but I’m not seeing what there is to pity, here. Suppose the worst-case scenario befalls her: She has to turn over all of the profits from the book to McCafferty, and she doesn’t get into Harvard. How does this make her any worse off than any other kid who doesn’t write a book and doesn’t get accepted at Harvard? Yeah, she’s got bad publicity nationwide now, rather than just in a small circle. But when she was getting good press, that was nationwide, too, and that was no more fair. At most, you could pity her for being just another cog in the bestseller-publishing machine, but that was just as pitiable before the plagiarism was discovered.
Here is a fuller view of my take on things.
The publishing house involved is a well-known author farm. She “wrote” this book in the same way that the Backstreet Boys “write” their songs- she may have been the one typeing, but everything she typed was “suggested” by a comittee armed with piles of carefully targeted market research and run by a handler. She was chosen not for her talent (which no doubt is there, just not to the point of 500k boook deal), but for the fact that she hadn’t yet reached the critical point of 18 and would look good and seem topical when she visited Oprah. She was a packaged sensation. A friendly face selected by a vast marketing machine. This thing was in motion well before she stumbled in to it. They promised her- and more importantly her family- all their dreams is she would play along.
And in the end, there was a human being under all of that. Perhaps when she was put alone in a room with a computer after hours of conferences, meetings with her “handler” and press releases, she found she didn’t have it in her. Maybe the deadlines were looming and she couldn’t bear to let everyone in her world down. Maybe she was just sick of the whole thing and cribbed out of adolescent protest at being used. Maybe she realized that the whole thing was fake and didn’t see the difference it would make to add another layer of fake to it.
She was a kid. She should have been worrying about her history tests and if she’d get a part in the school play. Instead, she had shitload of money, a company, Harvard, the media and no doubt her parents and family all weighing down on her to be “great” 24/7. It’s hard enough to be a smart kid with pushy parents without a book deal involved. You lose your right to be average. You lose your ability to do anything for yourself- everything is about other people’s expectations.
Not everyone is cut out for fame. Those that are earn it by clawing their way to it. When you just thurst it on someone it can get ugly. A good documentry to watch about this “Overnight”, about the bartender turned screenwriter who wrote Boondock Saints. He chosen by the studios in a carefully crafted campaign to make him in to a “working man does good” story to grab a few pages of good PR for the studio. He was given a record breaking sum to direct his movie. It turns out he just wasn’t a movie director. But at that point everyone was in too deep, and his world fell apart spectacularly.
In the end, she didn’t know what she was getting in to and she probably didn’t have much of a choice. She didn’t have a reasonable way to back out of it. It was a dumb thing to do, for sure. But you can’t expect smart things from a trapped teenager who has been molded by her parents in to a super-teen all her life and has probably made very few independent decisions. It was an unfortunate thing for everyone involved, bu this shouldn’t ruin her life forever. I’d much rather it ruin that shark-like publsihing house.
I first heard about How Opal Metha Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life in a local newspaper, since the author is from Franklin Lakes, where my mother works. Good for her, I said to myself. She’s young, she’s from New Jersey, and she’s a published author. When I found out some of the passages were similar to those in other books and she released a press statement commenting that she loved the author from which she unrealisingly plagarized from, I said so what? It’s likely. When I read that the book was possibly ghostwritten by a house which creates novels that appeal to teens, and that Viswanathan never mentioned McCaffety as one of her favorite authors until after the plagarism came to light, I thought, “she didn’t write this book at all.”
Note to future authors: if you’re going to write a book as part of a plan to make money to get yourself through Harvard, be sure you actually write the book.
Cool.
How can I get signed on with an author farm? It sounds perfect.
-FrL-
When I heard about her publisher Little, Brown recalling “Opal Mehta,” my first thought was, “That’s a switch. Somebody on the SDMB will say Goodbye, Opal!”
Well, if you’re trying to appeal with teen girls, you could always contact Alloy Entertainment, which is the company Viswanatahn worked with.
Even as one of those overpressured first-generation Asian overachievers, I don’t think that any pressure she felt at the time should be taken as a mitigating factor. She always had the option of not publishing the book, or publishing it sans flashy phrases.
Not only were the 40 passages copied, but they were changed to fit in with her story.
For instance, the original had a passage “the braces came off and my boyfriend got on,” and her version had “the braces came off, and a long line of boys got on,” - which is awkward, to say the least. I think we can conclude that she didn’t remember these passages with her “photographic memory” but deliberately copied them and modified them to fit.
I don’t buy that the packager did it. They may be hacks, but they’re professional hacks.
My wife, who is studying this, says that the Crimson’s take is how she could have been so stupid to not realize she’d get caught. That should be enough for Harvard to toss her out right there.
Oh, and a board she visits has someone who claims she has a source that says the deal was $500,000 best case. It starts much lower, with adders of up to $500K for movie deals, etc. I believe Dreamworks has backed out. Does anyone think the revised version, with the copied passages removed, will ever come out?
And I’m struck that the extensive Times coverage has never mentioned her parents. Hope they’re happy with what they got for their $20K.
Does anyone have a link to something that gives specific examples of passages she copied?
Here are some examples from the Harvard Crimson.
It seems all sides are not at each other’s throats – the people whose books were copied from are not suing at this point, see below – so the thought that occurs to me is: Why not work out a royalty or authorship agreement for the new work? Then the books sales and movie development could continue and everyone will benefit from the readers to the authors. All the authors. Why are books being pulled and movies halting development?
Just like when George Harrison was convicted of plagiarism for My Sweet Lord, which was judged to have taken significant elements from He’s So Fine. The song wasn’t pulled or banned, but now the royalties go to different parties.
IANAL, so I confess I don’t know exactly how similar passages have to be before they are judged plagiarized. And don’t nobody pile on me for just suggesting this, but…
Looking at those passages side-by-side reminds me (slightly) of The Bible Code, where a large number of items are compared to another large number of items and (surprise!) a limited number of similarities are found. Especially if you squint.
You must admit it’s not like exact, letter-for-letter, word-for-word, entire chapters were lifted. And on the other end of the spectrum, surely ANY two fiction books chosen at random will have some words and short phrases identical and more that are similar. Especially if you squint.
So the question is, how similar and how many? Where do you draw the line?
Just wondering… :dubious:
Absolutely not true. One random example, maybe. But 40? From the same author? There is no possible chance that all those examples are coincidence.
IANAL either, nor am I a publisher, but I read a lot, and more to the point, I read a lot of books in that particular market (teen girl angst), and I was convinced by those examples that they were lifted intentionally. The only one that struck me as unsubstantial is the “sweet and woodsy cologne” – both of those words are frequently used in cologne advertising, so they’re in the stable of common usage.
I don’t think you need to squint at all to see the similarity between the majority of those examples.
I agree with delphica–the plagiarism is blatantly obvious here.
Perhaps, but it seems to me that the differences in Viswanathan’s works to the McCafferty books seem quite forced, as though she’s thought ‘OK, what can I do it make it not look like plagiarism?’ I still get that vibe with the cologne excerpt and, with the rest of the plagiarism in mind, find it difficult to give her the benefit of the doubt.
“OK, I’ll add the extra adjective ‘spicy’, and, um, I’ll drop cedar shavings for, hmm, what is different enough to cedar shavings, ah, ‘sandalwood key chains sold as souvenirs in India. Makes the word count for that sentence much higher too! Score!’”
Urgh, it rubs me the wrong way. And while the list form of ‘x and y and z’ is acceptable prose, Viswanathan’s ‘sweet and woodsy and spicy’ seems fudged considering the context of the more obvious lifting seen elsewhere.
Exhibit B: The ‘INVADING MY PERSONAL SPACE’ passages.
First off: the ‘definitely’? That’s blatant, redundant padding. The substitution of ‘Human Evolution class’ for ‘Psych class’ in relation to personal space? Nice try. Also, look how McCafferty narrates the action of sitting back in a chair as ‘I instinctively sank back into the seat’. Simple and effective. But in order for Viswanathan to steal it, she’ll need to obfuscate it with a sprinkle of additional words. ‘I instinctively backed up till my legs hit the chair I had been sitting in’ - that’s just bad writing. LOL ‘the chair I had been sitting in’? All this time I was thinking about the chair that you had been standing on, aren’t I the idiot? Add in the description of grommets and knees and embossed leather and it’s hook, line and sinker.
It’s like a schoolkid’s attempt at plagiarism: first copy it verbatim, then skim through and add the odd extra adjective or noun and colour the prose a little more purple, then think that all of a sudden it’s magically unrecognisable!
In my experience, they’re more likely to think all of a sudden that it’s magically acceptable. The standards in many high schools are so low that many students begin college sincerely believing that changing a phrase here and there is “putting it into your own words” and therefore not plagiarism, because they’ve never been taught otherwise. This is why I don’t care to condemn the kid as much as some people here are doing; this is a concept that an incredible number of college freshmen struggle with, and it’s not nearly as instinctual as experienced writers tend to believe.
Oh, yeah, I essentially agree with you. I guess my point was that if I was the one building the case against her, that’s the example I’d leave out because it isn’t ironclad. It could be coincidence, like let’s say you and I both wrote books that described a cup of coffee as “hot” and “bitter” – on its own, no significance. What I’m saying is that no one needs the sweet and woodsy to claim plagarism, as the other examples already knocked that one out of the park. I would strike it from the list because I wouldn’t want anything that could be easy to debate.
And yes, I get the same vibe as you do about the single word or phrase changes. If it was sort of similar, it could be a young writer who was struck by an image or a concept in a book and it later appears in her own work. But by switching a word in a sentence that remains the same in all other respects, it reeks of deliberation…
She gets no sympathy from me. I detest plagiarism and I think she deserves every bit of misery she’s getting. It’s nothing less than contemptible to steal another artists work and try to present it as your own. Her age is not relevant to me. If a 17 year old steals a car we dom’t say he should get a break because of his age. Plagiarism is just a different kind of stealing and she was more than capable of understanding what she was doing. I also don’t think she deserves to make a cent of profit from her theft of McCafferty’s work.
I look at things like that, and shake my head.
If I ever have a child, I’ll make sure I tell her: “Yes, you CAN achieve great things in your life. But you’ve got a whole lifetime to achieve them. Take the time to get it right and enjoy the trip.”