Plagiarist, Heal Thyself

So this happened.

For those unwilling to click on links:

A young author -- they're almost always young authors -- wrote an essay explaining why she'd plagiarized bits (not sure how many) in her debut novel, which was cancelled when the plagiarism was revealed.

A few hours after the essay was published, it, too, was cancelled because parts of it were plagiarized.

Being outed as a plagiarist isn't self-healing, by the sounds of it.

And by the sounds of it (I haven't read the essay, nor heard of the author, nor was aware of her upcoming book) she took the typical outed plagiarist track: I was under SO MUCH PRESSURE to write this novel and I had no applicable life experience for what I was writing I had to go to other sources for inspiration and I PROMISED myself I'd go back and fix things but one thing led to another and now my hubris-laced apology is no more because I stole that too.

Have I ever plagiarized, I can hear you asking. Yes, I have. But that got pounded out of me very early on because I have a highly-developed guilt complex. Also, no pressure to perform at a young age.

My reaction to the news, posted on a Facebook post by a friend who shared the news: [Laughs and sobs in Gen X, because even if I won't amount to anything, at least *all this* is my own work.]

It all comes back to what Chuck Jones says: If you want to write well, you have to fill your head. In some ways I'm still filling my head. And not letting hubris get in the way of me writing a mediocre story.

Also:

Jonathan Bailey, writing about the situation at Plagiarism Today (in part about this author's plagiarizing of something he'd written about plagiarism) hits on something revelatory (emphasis mine):

"But the issue with her plagiarism isn’t her mental health. It’s how she writes. An author should never paste the works of another into their paper without immediately citing it. Notes need to be kept in a separate location. Furthermore, citation should never be left for the editing process and, instead, be part of the original writing process.

If Bello had done that, her pressures and issues may have hampered the book, but would never have led to plagiarism.

However, it’s pretty clear that this is simply how she writes. We know this because of what happened in her essay. That style of writing bears all the hallmarks of “paste and rewrite” plagiarism that she described in the essay itself."

Heady stuff, worth thinking about for writers of any age.