What are your thoughts on the "Opal Mehta" story/scandal?

Cafe Society
61

I’m not sure if this is a pile-on or just plain incompetence demonstrated by Viswanathan. In an interview from a Hindu magazine, she made the following statement after being asked if she had started work on her second book:

Sounds like she might have had that feeling already.

I’m beginning to feel very bad for this girl. I think the punishment is going to be much, much more painful than whatever benefit she might have accrued as the author of a mildly-interesting chick lit novel. I mean, I imagine every South Asian in the country knows who she is and knows about the story. The money will have to be given back to DreamWorks. Her status as a student at Harvard is probably in jeopardy. (Especially given the most recent allegations that the book is heavily plagiarized from multiple sources.) I think she has one big payday, the inevitable Barbara Walters/Diane Sawyer confessional interview, and then she continues life as pariah. No-one has ever hit the right tone of contrition and sympathy in one of those interviews yet.

What’s really weird is that she’s apparently a business whizkid. No real interest in literature. She would have been better off starting her own business or buying stocks (like this kid I interviewed once did. He had been playing the stock market since the age of eleven and had amassed about a quarter of a million dollars by age 17. Nice. He even gave me a stock tip back in '97 - he said the Chinese airline industry was going to grow rapidly. I think he’s probably right.)

62

Now I’m thinking that she should follow the example of rappers and license all of her samples.

63

Well, generally, fiction authors who are found to have plagiarized are never published again. There was a case in the science fiction world back in 1988; the author who plagiarized has had nothing in print since then.

It hasn’t hurt nonfiction authors, who can claim they didn’t footnote correctly. I’d be very surprised if she ever had another book out.

64

BTW, I heard on the radio that Little Brown has basically trashed the book for good and cancelled the contract for the second one. So I guess she doesn’t have to worry about if she can write it. No surprise there.

My prediction is that the next thing that will happen is that someone will say she cheated on her tests in school.

65

Well, yeah…

66

Yep.

Also, it seems the newspaper she worked for as an intern is examining her work for evidence of plagiarism. As Voyager notes, everything she’s ever done is now under scrutiny - tests, columns, etc. Hell, even her former teaching fellow trashed her:

Ouch!

Don’t forget, plagiarism in the newspaper is what cost Blair Hornstein her admission to Harvard a few years ago. (Until this, Harvard’s most unpopular recruit.)

67

Just out of curiosity, who was the author?

68

…But wait, there’s more! The Harvard Independent says it has found another unwitting contributor to “Opal Mehta.”

They list a number of them in detail, but to give you an idea what they’re talking about…

69

Every TA’s dream - to get back at one of them!

70

I’ve only one little comment to make that hasn’t seemed to been voiced before, but - in all the coverage I’ve seen of this story so far, one glaring swipe (IMO) in Mehta’s books seems to have been conspicuously overlooked by everyone - the title.

If I had heard of the book before I knew anything about the controversy , I would have suspected it was heavily lifted from other sources just based on the similarities of the title.

71

The author’s name was Craig Strete. He actually showed talent, and claimed the entire thing was just a giant mixup, but the story I’ve seen online did not match his story at the time*. In any case, since it happened in 1988, he has not had anything published in the SF field (though it looks like he published a children’s picture book in 1999). This April Fools Day 2003 column in Locus makes fun of the situation (2nd paragraph)

That’s not a sign of anything. Titles are not copyrightable, and some types of books often have similar names as a marketing tool.

*He took another author’s book and handed it to his editor to meet his deadline. He claimed at the time he told the editor what was going on, and it is possible the editor forgot (the editor had lost his child a few months earlier, so the tragedy probably affected his work).

Strete claimed the book was a “placeholder” for the publisher to work on until he finished his – an explanation that didn’t make much sense. When the book came out, the actual author, Ron Montana, sued and won, getting his name on the book. More recently, I’ve seen him claim that he had the two manuscripts and accidentally handed in the wrong one. :rolleyes:

72

Many book titles are created by the publisher, either by the editor or the marketing department. Titles are more for sales purposes than for creative writing.

Hundreds of books have derivative or homage titles. About a million have rock song titles or lyrics as titles. (A million may be more than hundreds, but that’s what it feels like to go through the reviewers copies table at B&N.) A million more reference other books, works of literature, classics or the Bible. You could do fifty threads about title themes.

IOW, titles are next to meaningless when it comes to saying anything about a book. It’s like discussing the cleaning ability of a detergent by its name.

73

So this was the first novel officially written by COPY & PASTE. Cool! (I’m imagining the little hand or quill icon popping up to say “It appears you are plagiarizing material from Salmon Rushdie and Meg Cabot. May I suggest some adverbs to help you splice them together and obscure the source?”) Supposedly she’s getting on with her life and is already writing a sequel, How Opal Mehta Got Back In Her Groove.

She’s actually lucky that it came to light now before the movie was in production and the book was a really major bestseller. Thirty years ago Alex Haley had to admit plagiarism and pay $650,000 of his Roots earnings to Harold Courlander in an out of court settlement (the court verdict may have been harsher) over an offense nowhere near as blatant (and that possibly really was a case of “I didn’t realize this was copyrighted material”). Had this happened after the book was huge it could had left her and Alloy bankrupt and deeply in debt.

74

I really would need to see the examples that are supposedly plagiarized. The only example I’d seen before tonight was a sentence that says something similar to a sentence in a McCafferty book, with one two-word phrase repeated. Derivative? Sure, but it’s genre fiction! Who cares?

Then they weren’t copied. They were adapted.

…

OK, I’ve looked through some of the list on the Crimson site. Yeah, that’s really highly derived-from. I guess that’s plagiarism. Sort of. But… the sentences are used in different contexts, & they’re rewritten pretty heavily. It’s like a composer taking an existing motif & expanding & improving on it.

To attack this girl for borrowing ideas & structure, while making the story her own, seems wrong to me. Lots of books are derivative of other writers. Lots & lots. There are writers who make their living cranking out glorified fanfic of other people’s characters, & are acclaimed as geniuses! (Alan Moore, I’m looking at you.) But this girl is being attacked for … what? She had a distinctive plot, her own characters… but, first novel, in a genre different from what she originally started out to write, she looked at a the sort of book she was hired to imitate (I can’t emphasize that enough) for ideas about phrasing.

Well, if I were writing a book, I might borrow someone’s basic plot structure to start. Is what she did that different?

To call this plagiarism, or to talk like she infringed on McCafferty’s copyright, is chilling.

75

I agree. Attacking her for stealing other author’s writings word for word, however, is I think quite granted, and there are way too many examples on wikipedia alone to show that she did just that. Writing a play about a Puerto Rican girl in love with a Polish-American streetgang member with the basic plot of Romeo & Juliet is borrowing ideas and structure and making it your own; she cut and pasted whole sentences. She deserves to be under fire.

It’s literary so it will pass and she’s 18, she’ll survive. It was a stupid stupid thing to do for a Harvard student. If it was subconscious, she has a learning disability (which is actually a possiblity- I’ve heard of cognitive problems that make students think something they overheard or read is their own thought, though I don’t know how valid or common this is, and admittedly it’s usually associated with plagiarism accusations [such as the one about Helen Keller, who plagiarized other people and seemed honestly not to realize she had done so, but then none would deny she had an unconventional style of learning]).

76

Yeah, the one I heard on the TV news was the “sweet & woodsy” passage. Hence my, “You’ve got to be kidding me!” response.

Now, the one with the pink Playboy Bunny tube top, that was pretty blatant. There was one other that was way too similar: “In a truly masochistic gesture, they had decided to buy Diet Cokes…” Those are really obvious imitations.

And there were plenty that I am also convinced were in conscious imitation, but she might have been able to get away with if not for the number of others. It’s not the individual passages, but the preponderance of influences from a single author.

Then again, it appears that the packager asked her to write something “just like McCafferty,” so she did.

It does bug me. If a friend of mine tried that level of imitation while writing a book, I’d call them on it. But, if I were on a deadline, I might also be tempted to do it myself.

And I think the media is being careless in defining what makes plagiarism. Claiming that this, for example, is plagiarism–

–is absurd.

Writers learn to write, to some degree, by studying other writers. Sometimes they lift ideas from previous authors. and genre fiction is imitative almost as a matter of course.

Viswanathan did go a little too far, but let’s be clear. This is not copyright infringement, even if it is heavily (even offensively) derivative writing. It is a sin of excessive imitation. She did not pass off unaltered passages as her own. She took existing motifs & remade them for her own work. That’s not a crime.

77

Yes. It’s hugely enormously different from borrowing a plot structure.

All a writer has to offer are words. The words create the plot, the characters, the story, the atmosphere, the experience. The very essence of plagiarism is the taking of someone else’s words.

A dozen people could write coming of age girl-makes-good novels all day long and no two of them would have exactly the same sentences. That is what writing is, why people read different authors. The subjects may be similar but the words are not. Replacing a word or two in a sentence written by someone else is not adaptation: it is merely the clumsiest and most obvious sort of school-level plagiarism.

You can read additional examples here:

Plus 40 more, from who knows how many authors?

This does not correspond to anything I have read about her history. From everything I’ve read. she was not hired to imitate anything. She wrote a proposal for an original pair of books and was given a contract for them. (We don’t know exactly how much because the contract was dependent on many things.) Later on, a book packager was apparently used to help her with the book. What they did remains completely unclear, despite the speculations made in this thread. No major publisher pays a 17-year-old six figures to imitate another book. That kind of money can only go to a major new, promotable, talent. I have seen no evidence whatsoever that she was hired to imitate another book. You need to back up this amazing assertion.

Assuming that the remainder of the passages are as close to the originals as the ones that have been revealed, this is most definitely plagiarism. The only thing chilling is your attitude that nothing wrong has been done.

78

Well, the alterations aren’t exactly that great.

McCafferty:*Bridget is my age and lives across the street. For the first twelve years of my life, these qualifications were all I needed in a best friend. But that was before Bridget’s braces came off and her boyfriend Burke got on, before Hope and I met in our seventh grade Honors classes." *
The same words in the same order with differing portions omitted:
____was my age and live ___. For the first ______ years of my life, th_se were _____ qualifications I needed in a best friend. … But that was before ____s came off
*McCafferty’s book, page 6: “Sabrina was the brainy Angel. Yet another example of how every girl had to be one or the other: Pretty or smart.”

Viswanathan’s novel, page 39: “Moneypenny was the brainy female character. Yet another example of how every girl had to be one or the other: smart or pretty.” *
_______ was the brainy _____. Yet another example of how every girl had to be one or the other: Pretty or smart.

*McCafferty: Finally, four major department stores and 170 specialty shops later, we were done."

Viswanathan "Five department stores, and 170 specialty shops later*

_____department stores and 170 specialty shops later…

*McCafferty: but in a truly sadomasochistic dieting gesture, they chose to buy their Diet Cokes at Cinnabon.”

Viswanathan: “In a truly masochistic gesture, they had decided to buy Diet Cokes from Mrs. Fields…” *

In a truly _____masochistic gesture, they ______ to buy Diet Cokes from ______.
In all of the above cases (and there are several more) the _____ is a trivial difference (“two blocks” instead of “across the street”, “Angel [female fictional character in an adventure series]” instead of “Moneypenny” [female fictional character in an adventures series]", braces instead of glasses (both things that teenaged girls would find sexier when they came off), Cinnabon instead of Mrs. Fields (both well known chains that specialize in fattening sweets), etc…

These are more than simple style borrowing. I’d have flunked any student who did this.

79

It doesn’t say much for her writing that every “original version” I’ve seen has been better. And it supports the idea that she made meaningless cosmetic changes to many of the passages.

Yes, it is. Before I answer the question, let’s remember the lying. Rather than admit to borrowing or give a reasonable answer like some of the things you proposed, she said something about a photographic memory and ‘internalizing’ bits of McCafferty’s books. That was hard to swallow at first; now it appears she ‘internalized’ bits from six different novels. Before that, she denied that any other book inspired her novel.

Moving on: thousands (millions?) of artists have painted the Madonna and child or played a I-IV-V 12-bar blues song about a cheating woman. Creating a piece of artwork with similar themes or style to someone else is not plagiarizing. Viswanathan borrowed some general themes, but she also borrowed a large number of details, many of them almost unaltered, from the work of others. That’s where it turns into “claiming someone else’s work.” The alterations she made did not change anything of substance, so I don’t think they meet your valid criterion of changing and improving on a motif. What they are is a writer doing the bare minimum to duck a plagiarism charge - making passages just barely non-identical. That’s grade school stuff.

One example I haven’t seen cited in this thread:

Same “never… acknowledged each other’s existence before,” same (a) (b) alternatives, similar context - boy she’s seen over a long period of time without knowing well, and she’s unsure what to do when he talks to her.

You can borrow someone else’s framework and still create a new piece of art if your alterations change the meaning. But here? Or in the Rushdie passage where all she did was change “speed” to “drink?” She’s not creating, she’s disguising. Some of the discovered plagiarism is not particularly similar to the originals, but she’s invited that kind of nitpicking.

80

OK, I concede the point.