Exactly. Someone should have told her that filling in a MadLibs based on someone else’s book isn’t creative writing.
Ukelele Ike, the official story up to now was that she was going to revise the borrowed passages. No surprise that it got cancelled, but it does finish her off.
Now for the movie - anyone have any suggestions about a DVD she could stick a new label on and call hers?
At this point I’d feel more sorry for her if she owned up to her mistakes and asked forgiveness. She’s still very young afterall. I can only imagine the pressure she must have been under. But she hasn’t so I’m still in schadenfruede mode.
Has she been kicked out of Harvard yet?
I so wish you hadn’t said that now that I’ve watched the Juliette Lewis episode of My Name Is Earl because now I’m having to fill in the blanks like Randy would.
_(BUTT)was my age and live _____. For the first (BUTT) years of my life, th_se were {BUTT} qualifications I needed in a best friend. … But that was before her {BUTT} came off
Who of course still lox his door.
I don’t buy that for a minute. I agree completely with Exapno Mapcase on this issue.
Granted, I write nonfiction for a living, and that’s a different world. But there are still two major points you seem to be overlooking.
1: A publishing company doesn’t pony up a $500,000 advance unless they expect the author to do the work. If they’re going to have a group of editors in a manuscript mill produce the book, there are a whole lot of hacks that would do the “writing” for 1% of what they gave Viswanathan.
2: Yes, major publishers make mistakes. I had a major international publishing house put a copyrighted photo on the cover of one of my books without getting permission. It was a mess. But that was a one-time mistake, made by a subcontractor. What happened in Opal Mehta was a campaign of plagiarism. A professional editor would realize that such extensive copying was bound to be spotted in such a high-profile book. I can’t imagine the Little, Brown editors being so stupid. It’s a career-ending move.
That was the story back when she was only suspected of stealing 40 passages from McCafferty. Once it got out that she was swiping from everyone from the Shopgirl writer to Rushdie to the Sacramento telephone book, there was no way that Little, Brown was going to let her off the hook.
Which is one of those things that have me rolling my eyes… if you’re gonna make that kind of an upfront investment, there must have been SOMETHING that would lead them to believe she could deliver… Yet all I see points to her being, very obviously, still a learner who had not found her own voice, unready for prime time.
The alternative, an attempt to** fabricate** a writing star sort of like “teen pop idols” are fabricated, does not make sense either since as mentioned before, any half-decent book factory should be able to invest a moderate amount on a team of ghostwriters who would know to not fall in these traps.
I was trying to protect his identity by misspelling the name to protect him from those who don’t know the fatwa is lifted. Great going Cervaise! You’ve now only endangered the greatest author ever to have written a book I have thought about maybe reading sometime…
An LJ entry can be found here that attempts to make sense of the time line. I can’t vouch for it, but it poses interesting discussion points.
This does seem to explain why an experienced packager would make amateur mistakes. It doesn’t address how the Ms. V got an agent to begin with, although there must have been an impressive chapter and outline for a 17 year old.
There is definitely novelty value/sales potential for teen authors. Consider the weird case of Christopher Paolini, who became a bestseller for Eregon despite the worst reviews in the f&sf community I’ve ever seen. And not so great ones elsewhere.
A beautiful nonwhite teenager, with some talent, a fascinating background, and obvious smarts, is a publicist’s dream. She would be worth spending large sums of money on. She doesn’t have to be original or have a real voice either. All she needed to do was not take the words of others and change a few to shoehorn them in. She’s an alchemist in reverse: gold to fool’s gold in a touch.
What I wonder is, had KV been left to her own devices, would she have had anything original to say? I mean the overall story, not just the stolen phrases and paragraphs. There are currently so many variations on the “I had no life until I learned to wear designer everything and be a bitch, and then I got a boyfriend, which of course equals having a life” theme, I can certainly see why a publisher would be more interested in creating yet another of those “but with an ethnic twist!”. But what I’m not sure of is, was this really the book KV wanted to write? If she hadn’t been pushed into publishing before she turned 18, if she’d been able to take her time and accumulate more life experience, might she, five years from now, completed something entirely original, not only in text but in plot and theme? Or did she just get an overdose of the Queen Bee genre, think it was brilliant, and want to do one of her own? And then realize, when it was too late to call it off, that she didn’t have an entire book in her?
I prefer the Spanky Ham version:
Penis was my age and live_ penis. For the first penis years of my life, th_se were penis qualifications I needed in a best friend. … But that was before her penis came off.
(emphasis added)
Oh, certainly, lest anyone be confused – I fully understand that the idea is to find someting/one that can be sold big, just for the very sake of selling big; actual quality being a pleasant-surprise bonus if you can find it. A quick look at the bestseller rack clues us in on that.
I do suppose that as we speak there’s any number of volumes of genre fiction around that are just as full of swipes, but that are not being noticed since they’re going straight from first print into the remainders pile with a whimper.
On what basis is this supposition? :dubious:
Because I’ve never heard of a case of this happening elsewhere in fiction*. Oh, sure, writers use similar tropes, themes, and plots – that’s not plagiarism. But no one so blatantly copies sentences and paragraphs from other works.
If by “any number,” you mean “less than five,” perhaps. But if you’re saying this thing goes on routinely, you don’t really know much about publishing, and you’d should be prepared to cite examples.
*There have been some high-profile nonfiction claims of plagiarism, but they have primarily been due to not properly attributing the source.
The plagiarism is bad enough, but I think what is worse is that it is such BAD plagiarism. Focusing (mainly) on the best lines from one well known (in the genre anyway) book dozens of times, and only changing a noun here or adverb there is so…dumb, even for a teenager. She might have gotten away with it if she had stolen one or two passages from 100 books, rather than 100 passages from one or two books. That way, a similarity can look like an “accident”. No way you can cliam an accident in this manner.
Ashlee Simpson gets plenty for “singing” her songs. They key is how good she’ll look on the book signing tour and how much press she’ll get for being an “inspring story”.
Check out the sordid tale of Abigail Vona for more about the super sleeze factor that comes in when publishers are looking for a teen prodigy.
Entirely none whatsoever, I’m engaging in WAG speculation. Put down the damn ax, have a decaf, and properly correct me as necessary.
Ashlee Simpson is an author? What book did she write? Amazon only lists CDs.
Bringing her in is completely irrelevant.
Now, there are celebrity autobiographies. That’s a completely different case; many autobiographies are ghostwritten. (Several sports figures, when criticized for things they “wrote” in their autobiography, candidly said, “I never actually read it.”).
There also are some celebrity novels that are ghostwritten. One well-known Emmy winning actor/popular singer with a toupee had an entire series of novels ghostwritten for him, though he did contribute the outline and also acknowledged the ghost, if you knew how to read it.
But you can’t lip synch a novel.
Wow. It’s on a blog. What an unimpeachable source. :rolleyes:
I don’t see any reputable source that indicates any issue with the book, other than the fact that Vona’s ex-boyfriend claimed Vona instructed him to send an e-mail so she could use it in the book to show how nasty he was. That report appeared in the gossip pages of the NY Post (maybe Vona refused to pay the editor’s shakedown money).
However, I can’t find anyone who made any claims that Vona didn’t write the book. As for publicity, that’s what publishers do.
I do feel kind of sorry for her, just because of the fact that she is so fucked now and everybody pretty much hates her. That’s gotta suck, especially because she’s so young.
But, I do believe that she stole other people’s work. The only one I have a point of contention with is the descriptions of Indian food - there are only so many ways to explain the amazing smell of spices when the food is cooking, or how to describe meat that is so tender it’s falling off the bone.
But yeah, everything else - plagiarized.
I think the analogy is apparently. Ashlee Simpson is of limited musical talent. But she has a nice face, a compelling story and a shitload of backers and packagers behind her keeping the media buzz up and the money rolling in. Thanks to the power of lip synching and serious audio sweetening tools, she is able to play the role of the star. When she was revealed not to have the talents she purported and to indeed be a figurehead of smoke and mirrior thought up by some executive somewhere, it was embarrasing.
Ms. Viswanathan is is of limited literary talent. But she has a nice face, a compelling story and a shitload of backers and packagers behind her keeping the media buzz up and the money rolling in. Thanks to the power of ghost-writing and apparently plaguerism, she was able to play the role of the literary prodigy. When she was revealed not to have the talents she purported and to indeed be a figurehead of smoke and mirrior thought up by some executive somewhere, it was embarrasing.
She did write the book. It just sucked big time. It was nowhere worth the rediculous amount of money she was paid for it. But she got it published because she had the right connections and was under twenty and had some good potential daytime talk show appearances in her. If you dig around, you can find the mechinations they went through to get her book out before the critical point that she turned twenty and stopped being able to milk the “teen author” thing. The whole thing is a sordid look at how some publishing companies take young would-be authors and do whatever it takes to make a buck off them, leaving them used and over by the time they are 21.
Vona thought she was fiesty enough to use the system against itself and win, but she wasn’t. So she got smeared publically. When they stopped being able to market her as a prodigy, they decided to market her as a slut. Sad story.
I’ve been following this closely-agree with ascenray that I know this type of kid. I’m torn between pity and schadenfreude.
Yesterday I read that Alloy Entertainment shares the copyright with her. My biggest thought on the whole thing was whether that allows McAffrey and Kinsella to go after Alloy (and Delia’s which owns it) for copyright violations.