It Never Ceases To Amaze Me

“People lie…all we can count on is the evidence.” (Gil Grisham, “CSI”)

It never ceases to amaze me the ease with which some people lie and how easily the lies can be accepted by others. Just spotted this on the blog of a writer I once knew; she was talking about writers using other writers’ ideas:

"I really object to the word 'stealing' here. Having been the victim of a real thief of published and unpublished work, who went on to subject an erstwhile close working colleague to a couple of years of abuse in one way and another, I can tell you that theft really is a ghastly thing. When people are talking about 'inspiration', I wish they'd be wary of calling it theft and thus encouraging people like this.



Not that it is relevant, but my treatment, after going out of my way to give this man professional encouragement, help, and a platform for his work in the form of publication in a text book, among other things - knocked me back so that I could not write for the best part of a year. I am not young - and time is something I do not have. My abuser found my upset hilariously funny and stupid. I was ridiculed in public for months, by a professional man who ought to know how to behave better. Misogyny perhaps? Certainly a deeply cruel person. I would not wish that experience on anyone."

I am the mysoginist ‘thief’ she refers to. She once called me ‘kind’ and ‘soft’ and ‘dear’; now I am cruel. She several times described herself to me as ‘unkind’ and ‘not nice’ and having ‘teeth’ that can ‘bite’… but here she says I am cruel!

Anyone who really knows me (and this writer does not) would laugh at the labels 'mysoginist' and 'cruel', really laugh. I am considered a very very gentle man, and driven by equality in everything, and non-judgemental, and fair, and thoughtful, always seeing both sides and always trying to be understanding of all differences of view... all this I am considered, to a fault, by people who know me and by the pupils I teach. So, let me get to the evidence, the lies, that demonstrate the untrustworthiness of what this woman writer says so you might know too: see my bullet points below.

She says that she could not write for the best part of a year. A quick perusal of her two blogs will tell you otherwise. (You can look for yourself!)

• In the time she is talking about (Aug 2009 until August 2010) this writer posted more than 150 blogposts and some of these run to a thousand words or more.
• She went on numerous writing retreats during this period where she said ‘What did I achieve? Lots!’ That’s what she said on her blog. (The year before any of this happened, she reported once that writing was going slowly and on another occasion she had done none at all and had only read books – both of these occasions involved breaks away from the world.)
• During this ‘lost year’ she said she worked hard on her poetry, something that was new and she was developing.
• She also promoted, with over 15 blogtours, her textbook on short story writing, as well as promoting it in the real world with various live events.
• She put together and published another edition of a magazine she edits.
• She was a competition judge for probably the biggest fiction comp in the world, and for another very big comp only six months later.
• She put together a complete collection of flash and micro fiction of her own, which she has so far had placed with two different publishers.
• She put together another collection of short stories for publication and this has now been published.
• She worked on her novel, which involved adding tens and tens of thousands of words to what she had, and then extensive rewrites over the period.
• She applied to the Arts Council for a grant and following the success of her application was involved in even more intensive and extensive rewrites.
• She contributed fiction and poetry to very many publications over this time and had many pieces accepted.

I do not begin to touch on the business of the rest of her life, suffice it to say that she is never still for long and had a lot of personal difficulties to deal with in this time.

But how can this writer claim that she could not write for a year and suggest that I somehow stole a year from her when the years are so precious to her now that she is older? There aren’t many writers who could claim to have done as much as she has in the same period.

She lies about herself quite spectacularly; how much more easily does she lie about others?

Her mentor and writing guide, the person who taught her so much, runs a writing camp thing. I once considered doing a spell at this camp. I asked her what she thought. She said the man who ran the operation was a great teacher and I might learn a lot from him, but that he was also a bully and probably a misogynist too. He was, she said, after falling out with him, the reason she set up her own writing place called ‘The Fiction Workhouse’, a gentler more friendly writing club. If she doesn’t like you, if she falls out with you, then her default setting if you are male seems to be to label you a mysoginist.

I did not steal from this writer as she claims. She says everywhere that I stole very specific ideas from her, but she nowhere has specified what those ideas are and no one seems to have picked up on that. I worked very closely over the internet with this writer. We wrote a novel together spread over nine months, a novel of letters winging back and forth; and several stories we wrote together, too, and we critted each others’ work in close detail. If I absorbed stuff from her work then I did no more than a good writer does. One of her favourite novels is ‘Austerlitz’ by W G Sebald. In it there is a moment that looks into a window in Tierzin, one of the Nazi Death Camps near Prague. In the window we see a box of seashells. This collaborating writer in the novel we worked on together and set in Prague and the surrounding country, was writing about Tierzin and a woman incarcerated there. The woman owned the same box of seashells. At the time I read this I thought it was a lovely piece and strange and magical. Then I read ‘Austerlitz’ and was surprised by the shells in the window. I do not say that she stole from Sebald, but can see that she absorbed from him something from his book, and that in writing about the same place, Tierzin, the shells crossed over into her writing. This, it seems to me, is normal and natural and not theft. I have not stolen from this writer as she claims. If I had, she would have sought legal representation in suing the pants off me – that’s what she would do and that’s what she didn’t do, that's the teeth she would bite me with.

I look forward to the publication of her upcoming novel so that I might then openly discuss what she claims I stole from that work and which I also hotly deny.

I find it hard to believe anything that this writer says now... but others swallow her lies with surprising ease. Check the evidence - it is all that we can count on.

This writer I write of is called Vanessa Gebbie.