IN GOOD COMPANY!

Visual Artists use each others’ work all the time. As the starting point of their own. Not just as studies in art college, or as part of their learning and development, but to make complete and public works. The relationship between their work and the source work is often not so obscured that the original cannot be seen in the new work. Francis Bacon with his ‘Head VI’ series used Valasquez’s ‘Pope Innocent X’ painting; Picasso with his ‘Les Menines’ closely references Velazquez’ 'Lan Meninas’; and Dali’s painting ‘Velasquez Painting the Infanta Margarita’ uses Velasquez’s work ‘Infanta Margarita’. With art it is acceptable to appropriate the work of others, not as mere copies (obviouly that would just be fraud) but as a springboard to doing your own thing with the subject,

With writing, however, it seems that it is very different. Writers get very upset when other writers use their work, even where the original is not so obviously there in the new work. I was in a writers’ group once and a writer there wrote a flash fiction piece that was based on a real historical person, 100 words. It is apparently alright to take from history for no objection was made to that. I was so fascinated with this historical person and hungry to know more about him that I went away and researched in some detail the facts of his life. In doing so I had a great idea for a short story. My written piece had the same starting point as the other writer’s flash, namely the historical person, but that was all. My piece was 4500 words long and was a fiction about love and infidelity and revenge, subjects that are of interest to me in much of what I write, and nothing to do with the 100 word flash that had been written. I was excited enough with my piece that I couldn’t wait to share it with the group and particularly with the writer who had written the flash. I thought she would be pleased that I had been so inspired by what she had written. I subsequently resigned from the group because some of the writers there were made uncomfortable about publicly sharing their ideas. I thought it odd that it was alright to be inspired by history but not alright to be inspired by each others’ writing.

The line between inspiration and just theft is, you would think, an easy one to recognise. However, the issue of plagiarism continues to be (both inexpertly and expertly) very hotly debated in all sorts of circles. It is recognised that writers do not create in a vacuum, free from the influences that they run into every day. Something overheard on a bus, something seen in a film, something read in a book – these can all be the springboard for a writer’s imagination. I read part of a book one day whilst waiting for a friend in a bookshop. It gave me an idea. But I wanted people to know that I had taken my inspiration from the original so did not attempt to hide that fact. I even had a character in the story who had the real writer’s name and he walked around the setting supporting my character; I thought the point was obvious. The story was about writing and copying and the imagination and me, so the central character was called Mr Escritor (Mr Writer). It seems that some people only saw the similarities between my work and the original and were incensed by the idea that it might be theft, rather than something altogether more complex and more clever. Perhaps that is my failure in the writing in this case.

One of the writers most upset by the idea of this kind of misappropriation, has herself written a story that was inspired by another well known writer’s short story. In her story she takes the domestic setting of the original and the two characters from that story. She has the same basic plot and a similarly odd but different twist at the end. She did insert a third character into her piece, a character who was present in the original only by being absent and who has some of the OCD qualities that in the original belong to one of the other characters. The same things happen in both stories and many of the details that feature do so in both stories. The voice however is different. The inspired work makes a nod to the original by having a similar title. I do not think this is theft. I think this is legitimate inspiration. Others might disagree. I think this illustrates some of the difficulty in defining what is theft and what is inspiration.

I used another writer’s story to shape a work of my own. I took the opening setting and the reverse chronology that was used in the story and the climactic event. I gave my character a similar name, so similar that I thought people in the know would recognise where I had found my inspiration. However, all the other settings in the story were mine and all the characters were mine including the central character, and the voice of the original is not the voice of my story. My story is about infidelity and love and the revenge (of fate) and as such differs significantly from the source work. My story also had a very important extra quality which gave a very different dimension to the story and which gave it a very original twist at the end. Read the original and then read mine and you would see there is a relationship between the two. I could have tried to hide my source better, to have been more sneaky in concealing my debt to the original. I am not sure if doing so would have been quite honest; it would certainly, in retrospect, have perhaps been less naïve. See only the similarities between my story and the original and you will think it theft on my part. See the differences and you will see that my work is something creative and vibrant. The writer of the original admits that she is finding writing a little bit more of a struggle these days as she is worried that some of what she writes might inadvertently owe a debt to something else. With the two stories I have discussed something of the origination of my ideas is clear. However, sometimes in what we write it is not so clear to us, though it might be to others, and what we write might seem to be wholly original when it is not. Again the problem of where our ideas come from and who can be said to own any one idea can be seen to be tricky.

I was recently asked by a writer I had collaborated with, and who had now fallen out with me, to give assurances that I would not use any of the work that she had produced in a collaborative novel we had worked on. I gave these assurances willingly but let her know that I put no such restrictions on her use of the work I had produced in the collaboration. Her work in the project would not exist without my having worked with her, and the same for my work on the project. I have only asked that my words remain mine. That seems to me to be right and reasonable. The completed novel had heart and the potential to be something incredibly big; I have faith in the creation and respect for what we made, and so I would not wish to see it torn into two and become something lesser. But this sort of work, collaboration, throws up another problem in the discussion of ownership of ideas.

I believe as writers we are products of everything we have ever experienced. We owe a debt to everything we have ever read or seen or heard. Our ideas come out of that experience. It is one reason why writers sometimes hit on the same story quite by accident and this should not be surprising given that we are all subject to similar influences. I think ownership of ideas is a very difficult issue to have hard and fast rules on. What I can say is that I have never hidden my sources and have never appropriated another’s words. Nor have I stolen wholesale a story written by another writer. I look at Picasso’s Les Menines and I can see Velasquez and I can see Picasso in the work; I read Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and I know that the plot and the characters are not original, are indeed lifted out of several other sources, but I can see that he has given the whole piece his own voice and made it into some other than what it was; and I think that when anyone honestly looks at the stories I have discussed above they can see something of the original but they can also see me and I hope that people seeing that will not think me a thief and a villain, but consider me a creative artist.