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Published
in Gulf News, May 9, 2006
Scintillating
cut and paste
As
a
writer, internalisation is my worst nightmare. I have, without a
qualm, watched my plays being rehearsed for weeks, and then halfway
through opening night, I undergo a Moment. One in which I go hot
and cold in a frisson of fear and think, "My God, I've read
this somewhere! I've copied all of this!"
Luckily
reason sets in before I run screaming from the theatre - and the
fear has always been unfounded. But lingering underneath is the
dark doubt: How many copied lines have I let through in my career
without even realising it?
I once
wrote an article that had a metaphor that was quite clever, and
I felt really pleased with myself. Then two days after I sent off
the piece, my wife wore her blue T-shirt again, and I froze in fear.
There was my clever metaphor, nearly word for word, written on the
front of her T-shirt.
The
ongoing plight of author Kaavya Viswanathan makes this fear worse.
Of course, the scale of her situation is beyond the most pessimistic
writer's worst nightmare. If you believe her explanation that is.
It's hard to swallow this degree of internalisation, but it's equally
hard to see how somebody clever enough to get into Harvard would
be stupid enough to copy from so many popular novels.
The
nightmare is made worse by the glee with which the media have fallen
upon Viswanathan. Reading the investigative reports that dig out
one book after another she supposed to have stolen from, you get
a feeling of hardened writers who would never see anything near
$500,000 for their work, taking it out on this teenager. Let's show
this chit of a girl what it's like to mess with real writers.
Of
course, it's not actually internalisation that is the problem. Internalisation
is how an author takes ideas and makes them something else, something
bigger. It's having all this internalised stuff come back out without
subtle enough translation that's created all the furore.
Writers
are internalising all the time. They are constantly tossing things
into a giant soup pot simmering in their heads. When they write,
they can only pray that their soup's ingredients have changed enough
to become their own. If Viswanathan's claim is true, she has shown
that photographic memories are not good for writers. At least I
have one thing to be grateful to my shocking memory for. I must
remember to thank it tomorrow.
This
debate reminds us yet again just how much copyright and intellectual
property are in the news. The harder countries and companies crack
down on infringements, the more we become aware of a generation
of people that has had free information access for all of its sentient
life. And as these people hit their creative years, we're likely
to get some interesting takes on the ownership of ideas.
Recently,
a friend dissected a novel on his blog, theunknownindian.blogspot.com,
that had used articles verbatim from a range of uncredited sources
on the internet. I contacted the author to ask for his reaction
to the blogpost and he told me that the internet was "open"
and that copyright didn't apply in the same way it did for the print
media. Apparently lots of people of all ages hold onto this notion
as they cut and paste their way through the internet, loading up
their blogs with the spoils. My friend has coined a word for them:
the blopycats.
It
seems we have a growing population that says, why bother with all
that internalisation when you can put a nice external control-C,
control-V to good use?
I feel
another play coming on already.
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