How to Build a Writing Career the Quick and Dirty Way.

I know that writing a novel is hard work. Hell knows I failed at it more than once. That being said, I admire young writers that persevere and make it all the way to the end of such a journey, and to those who get published with their first book, well, more power to them.

Of course, you sometimes hear the word “plagiarism” come out, and it shakes the publishing world a little each time it happens. The newest scandal of this kind is How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life, by 19-year old Kaavya Viswanathan. A fellow author, whose work she was intimately familiar with, discovered through her fans the stark similarities between certain scenes and dialogues in both of their work. What is more stunning is given the litigious nature of American society and copyright holders, no one has threatened a lawsuit yet. Kaavya’s school paper, the Crimson, also busted her pretty hard.

As a small side note, and this goes somewhere related to this topic, I remember reading about a rather informal study regarding the readership of certain books. As an experiment, a group of researchers stuck cards deep into various copies of a long, turgid yet popular novel with a phone number and a message saying that if the reader reached that point in the book, they could call and receive a 100 dollar prize. A few people called, but given the size of the sample, it said a lot about the buying habits of readers and the fact that they may buy a book just because of its cache (or infamy).

Maybe Ms. Viswanathan was counting on people buying her work and then never reading it. Though perhaps I am being a little too hard on her. She claims it was accidental, and that she is embarrassed by the whole incident. But how much you want to bet that her professors at Harvard are going to be looking at her papers for similarities to other work in her field a bit more thoroughly than they may have before.

And to think, she probably could have made a lot of this negative press go away by saying those few phrases(and from my research, they are small bits of text that were appropriate), were used as an homage to Megan F. McCafferty. That may have gone over just fine. She may have even been able to use the Fair Use defense.

But you all know how that old phrase goes: “'good writers borrow, great writers steal'”. I guess time will tell which, if any category, Ms. Viswanathan belongs in. Of course, there is another phrase that may also be applicable, “There is no such thing as bad publicity,” because I wonder how many of us would have heard of this 19-year old girl before any of this happened, and how many people will now buy her book after it has been re-edited… even if they never read it.