PLAGIARISM

I once asked a writer who holds strong opinions on most things a searching question on how much a writer can borrow from another writer. There is no doubt that this happens and on a grand scale, all the time. There is no doubt that borrowing is natural and as much conscious as it is subconscious. So I wanted to know… how much can you take? This writer, Vanessa Gebbie, said she did not know. I know she borrows sometimes: images, characters, plots… conceals them enough that they might be said to be hers. I also know she openly condemns this borrowing if it is not concealed and a person is caught out. It seems to me there is something seriously unresolved here and so it is no wonder that

a) writers sometimes fall foul of the undefined rule,

b) that the public, not understanding, are so quick to be led to condemnation of the borrower/thief.

But the question, I think, is a real one and one that needs answered. And once it has been answered then we need to shout it from the rooftops… so everyone knows and understands. That seems reasonable. But that is unlikely to happen. Instead we have the wicked witches sticking pins into the backs of the unwittingly condemned and undermining the credibility of writers who may or may not have done wrong, but even if they have done wrong have done only what the great and the good in the literary canon have done and always done.

I have read a lot of articles on modern writers who have had to defend themselves from the label of ‘plagiarism’, but I read something recently that had something serious to add to the debate: Houellebecq, a French writer from the current crop of good writers, told an interviewer that lifting passages word for word was not theft, so not plagiarism, so long as ‘the motives were to recycle them for artistic purposes’. He was offended by the use of the term ‘plagiarism’ to describe what he had done. But the important thing he said was: "This is a skilled insult. Using a big word like plagiarism... always causes some damage. It will always do lasting damage, like accusations of racism." I don’t think the witches are ever mindful of the serious damage they do with their free use of such labels. The accused is as much a victim as the person who feels their work has been borrowed from, more so if we consider that there is so much sympathy and support given to the one who has been borrowed from and who protests their hurt.

I have been called a plagiarist by some people who I know ‘take’ from other writers in their own work. These people cannot give a definitive explanation of what can and cannot be taken, what exactly is plagiarism. They continue to ‘stab me in the back’ in secret, writing to places where I have work accepted to discredit who I am… and all because they have decided I plagiarized two years ago. I have made apology to these writers; not because I admit to doing wrong because I don’t, but because I have hurt their feelings and I would never want to inflict hurt… that’s not who I am. I am a fierce defender of the act of self reflection and I have looked deep into what I did… I read widely on the subject, trying to understand what I did that was so wrong. I do not now take inspiration in what I read, not any more, and I have avoided doing anything of the same since 2009, but I still write. I am no nearer understanding what is allowed and what is not, given that the writers who shout loudest against me do themselves say things like: ‘I have been struggling with a story but I read a story today that gives me a structure that I think will allow my story to be told’! (This is a paraphrasing of what Tania Hershman said in a blogpost, and yet she feels so wronged by someone borrowing from her story!) But now, at least, I am more careful.

When a person does wrong, breaks the law (and I haven’t done that… have never stolen another person’s words and passed them off as my own) we, as a society, support the notion of rehabilitation. We forgive the thief and the criminal and the wrongdoer… so why is my reputation still attacked when no one has been able to say ‘he is still doing it’ (and they can’t say that, because I am not!)?

Last year I sent three flashed pieces to a site looking for contributions to help a charitable cause (100 Stories for Haiti). All three of my pieces were accepted and then, because someone had secretly and threateningly written to the organization and the publisher, two of my pieces were withdrawn, and then after another spite-filled communication the third was withdrawn… I am not even allowed to do good.

And this week my work was removed from a blog because the owner had obviously been contacted by someone who felt that my voice should not be represented… what kind of censorship is being endorsed here?

I am a good writer and even if you think I have done wrong, I have paid the price for that, a high price. How long does a person go on having to pay? I’d like to know. I know my blog is read, and I know it is read by some of those who 'are keeping an eye on me' and so I appeal to them to give me some kind of answer to what I ask here - and they can do it anonymously... or they can continue to hide behind an unattractive and nasty cowardice and say nothing.

Flash 2

(This piece was done in a flash, with hardly time for breath or thought. I posted it unedited (as it is now) in some writerly place and an erstwhile writer colleague asked if she could use it as part of an essay she was penning about flash fiction. It was for a text book she was contributing to. I said yes, of course. Why wouldn't I? I give things away without a thought and can't really understand those who don't. It's just words, ideas, a story... why wouldn't I gift them to someone else? That's the whole point. And so I gift them now to you, whoever you are, reading this blog. I hope you might find something in what I have written, something that touches you and inspires you and makes you want to write about horses in a barn, and an insensitive father, and a woman who has dreams but dare not tell them, and a girl who is always the same distance away.)

DANCING WITH COBWEB

I am there in the barn, small moonlight breaking through a high window, the thick air warm, and the horses snorting derision. There is music playing, my papa’s fingers fluttering like frightened birds over the holes of his chanter and my mother singing at the sink, or at the oven. I can see in my head her hair pinned back, but a miscreant lock of grey falling limp across her face and her cheeks flushed and her eyes full of out-of-reach dreams. And she is singing, my papa hunched forwards in his chair, one foot tapping on the wooden floor, and blowing familiar music into the night.

And I am dancing, there in the barn, always dancing when there is music, my feet following the rhythm of my papa’s drumming foot, and me dancing in and out of the blue light of the moon, like it is a dream. And it is a dream, for I am holding someone in my arms and she moves with me, her feet in step with mine, shuffling through the spilled straw, and my hand at her waist, or where I imagine a girl’s waist to be. And I wonder if there is someone other than my heavy-footed father dancing in my mother’s head, if that is the dream I see moving behind her eyes when she sings.

And there is a girl in my arms. I can feel one small hand clasped palm to palm in mine, can smell her hair if I lean close, and the music turns us from one end of the barn to the other. And my faint heart runs breathless ahead of me, so that my head spins and the dirt-floor tilts and I fall. And she falls with me, and I hear laughter, my mother laughing And the music broken, and the horses still stamping their impatience.

And the girl’s hand down the front of my trousers then, with my hand, and there on a bed of straw in my father’s barn she gifts me make-believe kisses. And I see spiders in her mussed up hair, her breath smelling something sweet, like new-cut straw, and my own breath snatched.

And when I close my eyes I can see her, a girl I follow to school most days, my steps in hers only at a distance. Every day for almost a year now, the distance never shortened. She moves away from me and that is a kind of dance, too, though there is no music playing. And I hurry after. But though I see her plain as though she was really there in the barn and it was day, though I see her in my head, every dress she ever wore, the movement of her hair as she walks, the way she holds her books pressed to her chest as though she has dreams, too, hidden , there where her heart is – though I see all of this clear as though she is there, I do not know her name.

What you always dreaming for, my papa always says when he catches me. There’s work needs doing, and you always dreaming. Like you was a girl. You want to clear those cobwebs out of your head and see sense, boy. No dream is gonna get you a woman to cook for you, and to wash for you and to keep your bed warm.

And my mother’s eyes, still blue, filled with unspilled tears when she hears him say this. And the girl in my head, I call her Cobweb just for fun, and there in the barn, with the horses quiet again, and my father paused for breath and no music playing, I call her name and feel my body arch and the dream is warm and wet in my hand.

(PS The text book, in case you are interested, is The Rose Metal Press's 'Field Guide to Flash Fiction' and the essay is by Vanessa Gebbie)

SHORT CHANGED

SHORT CHANGED

I have been involved in a debate going on at flashfiction.net regarding Hemingway's famous six (not to be confused with Enid Blyton's famous five!). The six in question are words: 'For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn', and the contention is that these six words constitute a story.

I am unhappy with this as an analysis of the six words. I maintain that the reader creates the story out of the six words and that the six words may be counted as highly evocative or art or poetry, but that the stories that might be inferred from these six words can be completely contradictory: story of a baby who died without leaving the hospital; story of a baby born with outsized feet or no feet or three; story of a couple who could not conceive... etc. The limit of these stories stretches as far as the imagination of readers or writers, which is very far indeed. It also underlines my point that the story is an invention of the reader not Hemingway the writer... that of themselves there is insufficient in those six words for us to say that here we have a story in any acceptable sense of what is a story.

Then Randall Brown of flashfiction.net challenged me to add to the six words sufficient for me to accept that now we had a story. I am not a fan of brevity for brevity's sake and see this drive towards absolute minimalism as gimmicky and uninteresting. So, instead, I took Hemingway's six (and by the way, in the end they are probably not Hemingway's, which I am pleased about as I esteem his writing a lot) and in keeping with the idea of flash (short short fiction) I created two 'stories' out of Hemingway's six words. One piece is traditional and one is experimental and I hope they both are sufficient for a story to be 'seen'. Here they are:

FIVE HANDWRITTEN CARDS IN A SHOP WINDOW (Handwriting the same)

1) For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.

2) Home Sweet Home - missing all the 'sweet'. Looking to share with tenant of a kindly disposition and gentle words. Terms and conditions negotiable.

3) Genuine18 carat gold wedding band - no longer required. All offers considered.

4) Heart: used once, needs mending. Answers to the name of Ed. Barren women only may apply.

5) Baby name: never used. Rolls around the tongue, like hard candy, tastes sharp like lemons or onions, and brings tears. Will consider exchange for some other name.

And flash story number two:

ENOUGH (with a debt to Hemingway or whoever)

"For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn"

He held the card at arm's length, reading over what he'd written. He wondered if it was enough, if six words told the whole story of those shoes - Emmy's shoes, small as a doll's, and he dreams sometimes, sees Emmy in the dark of dreaming and her impossible first steps, the ones she might have taken, her tiny feet, soft as snow or clouds, and slipped into those shoes. He hears the hesitant dream-click and click of her breathless step and step, moving towards his outstretched arms or moving away, his hands clutching at only dark.

"For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn"

He set the card down on the kitchen table. He wrapped the shoes in pink tissue paper and laid them together, heel to toe in the box and the lid placed on top so they were in the sudden dark once more - another box-dark like the one where Emmy danced in breathless dreams or slept and did not dream, not ever.

"For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn"

He wondered if those six words were enough.

Flash Example 1

(This is a flashed piece written in about twenty minutes. A once-upon-a-time writer friend that I was sometimes eager to impress was running a workshop for writers new to flash fiction and she posted up the prompt 'Tattooed With Mermaids'. I stumbled across her post and wrote this for her.)

TATTOOED WITH MERMAIDS

He didn’t like the sea, not really. Was sick on boats and couldn’t swim, that’s what he said.

Same as fishermen, I told him. Some of em don’t swim. I know, it don’t make sense, but I heard that.

He was nodding, a glaze to his sea-blue eyes that told me he wasn't really listening. But he was interested. Not in the things I had to say, but in me. He kept his hand on my waist, under my top, his fingers stroke stroking the skin.

So if you don’t like the sea, why? I asked him.

He shrugged.

His shirt sleeves were pushed up to the elbows and he was tattooed with mermaids, inked in blue and green with red nipples and coiling fish tails. There were dozens of em, swimming in a shoal, from his wrist to the shirt cuff, and disappearing there, up the rest of his arm, maybe.

I seen one before, or two, sitting proud, hands in the hair and breasts thrusting, like girls in magazines. But this was different. He had a whole sea-catch of them, like he had sunk his arms in a bucket of fish, right up to the elbows, and they came out covered in the silver scales of cod and sardine, and no skin to be seen, ‘cept the backs of his hands and his fingers.

How many?

He couldn’t say. Got em when he was drunk mostly, and he was drunk a lot, he said, his head swimming, the ground tipping and all sense drowning. If he flexed his muscles they moved, some, like they was in water, the way things seen through water change shape, rippling.

Don’t you ever fancy something else, like a heart with a sword through it? I seen that on a man’s arm and a curl of ribbon unfurling across the red with his girlfriend’s name written on it, only she wasn’t his girlfriend no more, just someone he fucked, used to.

He laughed at that.

If you was to guess, how many? I said.

You could count them if you like, he said, finishing his drink. It felt like a line, when he said it, one he’d use to catch other fish than me. I got mermaids swimming all over, he added, and winked so everyone in the bar could see, and kissed me on the forehead, like I was a child.

He was right about all over. I stopped counting at a hundred and ten, not sure if I had counted some twice. They were everywhere. Twisting into every pouch of him, pooling over his chest, and across his back, no two the same, their tails flicking every which way, some swimming towards his neck and others diving down into his shorts.

Jesus, I said. He was passed out on the bed.

Aside from the mermaids, he wasn’t much of a catch. His name was Lou or Lewis. We drank him towards another two inked bare-breasted fish tails, fucked once, and then I moved on, to deeper waters.