Beg, Borrow, or Steal?

If there's one thing English teachers agree about, it's that plagiarism is bad. Very, very bad. Kick you out of school and pile on the shame bad. Which is why most of us work ourselves into a bulging-vein froth when we INSIST that our students CITE THEIR FREAKIN' SOURCES, for Pete's sake. Doesn't always work, but that's not for lack of trying.

So I have to admit I was a bit gobsmacked to read that Cassie Edwards, a multi-published author of historical romances, has been found to be--how should it put it?--leaning a little too hard on her source documents. As in, incorporating whole paragraphs with no citation leaning. I can feel the vein bulging as I write.

My first book was an historical, set in Renaissance France and Scotland (which probably explains why it hasn't yet been published). You know, the kind of thing you need to research a lot. I got some killer notes from some crusty dusty public domain books from the Rollins College library. One of them was a great bit about a woman disguising herself as a nun to escape from Paris during the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. She nearly made it, but she had on red shoes. They caught her. Great detail, right? I borrowed it. Put my heroine in a nun's habit, totally forgetting her red slippers. She got spotted, but she got away.

Leaning on the research? Of course. Plagiarism? No. I lifted the detail, but the context differed. Most importantly, the passage I read bore little resemblance to the one I wrote. That's how research should work. I don't see this kind of thing in the examples cited for Cassie Edwards. Ethically, I have a problem. As a reader, I have a problem. Ms. Edwards' paragraphs incorporating her research read just like the source works. There's little attempt to smooth the prose, make it sound natural when a character relays the information through dialogue. In any writing situation, that's a bad idea. It's especially bad when the clunky prose ends up that way because it's been badly grafted onto your storyline.

The whole sordid tale, including examples, can be found at Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books (one of my fave book blogs, BTW). There's even commentary from La Nora herself, who as you probably recall, was at the center of a nasty plagiarism suit with Janet Dailey a few years back. It'll be interesting to watch this story develop, although I doubt it'll get the kind of media attention showered on Kaavya Viswanathan. Then again, Ms. Edwards is a septugenarian, and not a Harvard hottie.

Too bad. Plagiarism makes them equally ugly, from a writer's point of view.