THE COLLECTOR

THE COLLECTOR

I have remained fairly quiet on this subject, but since big noises are being made against me again it seems I am called upon to once more defend myself. I am a writer. I write even when no one is there to read what I write. Witness that I have on this site published more than 18 flashes in the past weeks that have received not one single comment and that I have a whole novel of these planned and will continue to post them here. It is the writing process that is most important to me.

As a writer I am also a reader and in my reading I collect things, both intentionally and unintentionally. In life I do the same. Something overheard on a bus, a family story or something seen in the news or on the tv. Some of these collected things quite obviously end up in the writing. That’s natural too. And sometimes they are changed beyond all recognition and sometimes they are not.

There is a line between what is allowed and what is not allowed when it comes to ‘borrowing’ in your writing. It is not always a clear cut line, hence the ongoing debate and the falling into disgrace of some good writers. I am a good writer. I regularly win competition prizes for my work (more than 80 competitions have recognised my work in the past three and a half years). Yet my reputation is now in question. I have never stolen another writer’s words and passed them off as my own. It is in the realm of ideas that I am called upon to justify myself.

One of the biggest 'noises' raised against me earlier this year confessed to borrowing herself from the great and the established in the writing world and admitted that examples of this kind of borrowing were “legion” in her work and legitimate. I want to learn and so I looked into her examples. She said she had borrowed the profession of a character of hers from a character in one of Raymond Carver’s stories and that the title of her story was a nod in the direction of Carver – though she also somewhere admitted that she would change the title of her story if she was to do it again.

I read Carver’s story. It is about a vacuum cleaner demonstrator called Aubrey Bell. He is an unattractive character, fat and bulky with a ring around his head where his hat had been. And he is pushy in the manner of salesmen and over familiar. He arrives at a house to give a free demonstration. The lady of the house is not there. There is a man who lounges about on the sofa. The man does not want the demonstration but the demonstrator is very insistent. Aubrey Bell is also a bit OCD in the area of cleanliness, feels sick and headachey as a response to the house. Bell puts the vacumm cleaner together, all the hoses and scoops and bits, and fits a filter to the machine. Then, raising a hand to quieten any disagreement, he pushes his way through to the bedroom and vacuums the pillows on the bed and the mattress, changing the filter as he goes and showing the man, with undisguised distaste, what has been collected, the dust and hair and grainy things (“He pinched some of the dusty stuff between his fingers”). Then he vacuums the carpet in the livingroom. He dismantles his machine and puts it all away in a big case and leaves having pocketed a letter that had arrived for a Mr Slater, the absent householder. The man in the house is not sure that Bell should take what is not his, but Aubrey Bell leaves having made no sale, but having completed his demonstration.

I then compared this story to the one by the writer I knew. The title does indeed nod towards Carver and she has used the profession of vacuum cleaner demonstrator for her story. But to say that is all that links the two stories is a little disingenuous. The arc of the story is the same. A vacuum demonstrator arrives at a house, unpacks his machine, vacuums the livingroom and the mattress in the bedroom, changing filters between jobs to demonstrate the dirt he finds (he “takes the filter away from the hose with two fingers, holding it up for inspection”). He makes no sale and leaves with “a white paper wallet” of stuff that does not belong to him, despite the quiet protests of the person he has demonstrated the vacuum to.

The character of the demonstrator, compared to a spider in this second story and completely bald, owes something to Aubrey Bell in his unattractiveness and his pushy salesmanship, vacuuming the man’s chair (where he has been sitting) against the man’s protests and then completing the job with the mattress in the bedroom.

But we must be careful before we cry ‘thief’.

I read in an article somewhere* something about the ‘imitative element’ in the creative process. That it is something normal. We all do it. It is obvious that the visual arts are comfortable with this idea (see an earlier post of mine below); but writing does it too. I recently challenged a writer to say that she had never been ‘influenced’ by something she had read in another’s work, that she had never found an idea in someone else’s writing, an idea that she then explored in her own writing. I knew I was on safe ground in declaring that I was certain that she had. Note that I am not calling any of this plagiarism, or any of the above either, because I think this sort of ‘imitative element’ is a legitimate part of the whole process of creating and writing. Of course straight copying of another’s words is something different and something we should stand against. But we must be careful when judging a work and looking for instances of plagiarism. The same article I read pointed towards a warning by GK Chesterton which I think speaks sense: ‘To see the similarities, without seeing the differences, seems a dangerous game.’

And there are differences in the story that nods towards Carver’s with its title. The woman missing from Carver’s story is here and the marriage, though unstable is intact. The OCD qualities of Aubrey Bell have been transferred to the woman. The voice is original and not even Carver-esque. There is a greater emphasis on the dirt and the grime. But read the two stories side by side and the debt is there and obvious.

So I am not any wiser as to what is acceptable in the area of creative borrowing.

I have written over 150 stories and over 400 flashes. I am being called to account for two stories and one flash. The flash was independently judged against the work that it was claimed I had borrowed from and the publisher saw fit to publish it without any sense of risk. Ask why and there can only be one answer. The aggrieved writer even admitted somewhere that it was on reflection changed enough for it not to be plagiarism… but only after she had kicked up a storm and sent her story for comparison to the original competition judge.

As to my two stories that owe a debt to other works, I have dealt with them in a post below. In one I do use the structure of the original and the climactic moment, and the opening setting and (in a nod to the original) a name for my central character that is similar to the original. I have made no attempt to hide my influences. But my character is a married man, where the original is a student. My character’s marriage is failing and he is having an affair. In the original the ‘boy’ is timid and tentative and on the brink of beginning a relationship with a young girl. Aside from the opening hospital setting, all the other settings are different and all the characters are different. The student suffers memory loss from having been struck by lightning; the married man suffers synaesthesia form being struck by lightning. The other author got her idea for this from an article in a science journal; I got my idea from my son who reported to me that he had just read on the net that Synaesthesia was sometimes caused by a person being hit by lightning. Synaesthesia is the clever twist to my story providing a secondary climax. The voice is different in both.

If you look for the similarities without seeing the differences, then I am as guilty as the vacuum cleaner story writer has to be.

I have removed the offending story from public view out of deference to the writer who feels wronged by my borrowing and is very upset. I have apologized to her, for the hurt caused - I am sorry for that. I do not think my borrowing was wrong, but am prepared to accept that others will think so. I am resolved to not borrow in this way again. I can do no more to make this right.

So why are two people so doggedly set on shaming me further publicly for this, even to the point where I am constantly misrepresented and made to appear the worst of all creatures.

One has spent almost £1000 in legal fees getting no greater assurances from me than I had already given to her in e-mails. She sees me continuing to succeed in writing competitions and does not think that fair. The other, I had the temerity to question on an editorial decision she made on a project she had high hopes for. This project has since floundered and she bears me a grudge. This is of course conjecture and if I do these people wrong in this, then I apologise. At least I have the good grace not to name these people in my blog. Because I do have values and am not the beast they would have you believe. 

(* I am sorry that I cannot point you to the actual article which expounded at some length on the imitative element in art and literature)