On Plagiarism

A shining example of good writing practices. Not.

Here’s a situation…You wouldn’t go to a bakery and expect people to reinvent the recipe for sausage rolls every time an order came in, right? It’s the same with dress-making. Would a tailor make a dress from scratch for each customer, without modifying an existing pattern? A mechanic wouldn’t take each engine on a case-by-case basis, working it out from the engine itself rather than drawing upon past experience.

For some reason, writing is seen to be different. When I was at university we were warned about software that would trawl the web looking for similarities in what you wrote, and that of other people’s publications. If I take an existing set of words and modify them for a client, it is seen as bad practice.

I don’t understand! Building on something which already exists must be good practice – this is how humanity evolves. Originality comes from the small twists and nuances in a paragraph, not from someone deciding to create the alphabet from scratch every time they sit down to write.

I’m all in favour of plagiarism. The web makes it so much easier to cheat. There are guidelines for how much existing material you can use in a piece of text before it constitutes a breach of copyright.

Jeffery Archer made his fortune from plagiarism. I’m not holding him up as a shining example of literary genius, but the man had a point.

OK, that was a terrible example. Let’s look at Shakespeare, with his winning formula for writing. It’s like baking – a pinch of tragedy, a couple of star-crossed lovers, a pound of (well, in his case, flesh) and there you have it. A perfect, new, exalted play.

Shakespeare had the right idea. The next time someone asks me to write, I’ll still sit down with a blank sheet of paper and produce something original. But hold it up to the light, and you’ll see a myriad other voices screaming for attention between the words. Because we only have 26 letters to play with, and one day, like crude oil, the combinations might run out.

And on the domestic front? George learned the hard way, through practical experience this week. If you roll about in cow poop on the bank of a river, very close to the edge, bad things happen. Apparently he can’t swim very well.