Finding the Line between Inspiration/Homage and Plagiarism

 All beginning writers, having first gotten the urge to tell stories because of their early and persistent love of reading and watching films and TV, are bound to “borrow” from the writers they love. Storytelling luminaries Neil Gaiman (who legacy is now in question; I wrote this essay in 2014) and Stephen King often write and talk about their early influences and how they emulated them, sometimes only realizing years later that they borrowed from their heroes quite freely. King has done pastiches of Sherlock Holmes and has said that if there was no Dracula, there would be no ‘Salem’s Lot. The heavy influence of Shirley Jackson is clear in many of his books and teleplays.

My writing mentor in college used to tell us to “steal all you can.” A man of high principles and the chair of the graduate writing program, he certainly was not talking about Plagiarism, and we all knew it. Some writers, on the other hand, such as William Faulkner, were quoted as saying that writers are immoral and stealing is just what they do—there is critical evidence that, especially in his early works, as he was finding his vision and voice, his imitative fiction at times crossed the line. Another writer guilty of the same was William S. Burroughs, who used the acronym GETS—“good enough to steal”—in the margins of books he read. Sentenced marked GETS would often wind up in his own tales, virtually unchanged.

Plagiarism has always been a problem. Books like Thomas Mallon’s Stolen Words are a sobering illustration of its prevalence in the storytelling arts. And in some ways we have come full circle. In the 1800s, copyright did not extend across the ocean, so European writers were shamelessly stealing from and copying American writers and vice versa. Plagiarism was happening with just as much regularity as copyright infringement. Part of the motivation for Charles Dickens’s tour of America in the 1840s was to rectify this.

In the age of the Internet, Plagiarism is rampant on both college campuses and among academic journals. Having worked as a copyeditor for nearly two decades for some of the biggest academic publishers in the world, I have seen dozens of retraction letters and increasingly stringent Plagiarism guidelines published in the leading journals. Long-time US senator, two-term vice president, and eventual US president Joe Biden is an infamous plagiarizer. 

https://pjhollis123.medium.com/joe-biden-neil-kinnock-and-presidential-plagiarism-f3d10d909338

When one considers Genre, and the elements and tropes that come with working in any one of them, where the line is begins to get murky. There are only so many ways to tell a vampire story, or a story about Westward expansion, or a Victorian murder mystery and chances are, if you are writing in these Genres, you are intimately acquainted with the masterpieces of the leading writers who came before you. 

A colleague of mine says, and I have seen it in action during our collaborations, that an audience can only handle about 10 percent that is new in any story. Given this pretty small window of opportunity to do something unique in the two kinds of stories one can tell—“stranger in a strange land” and “boy meets girl”—we are all bound to borrow, to riff on, to reconstitute our inspirations in the form of homage.

In the world of filmmaking, inspiration and homage are particularly prevalent. If one were to look at the regularity with which filmmakers base their shots on the work of Alfred Hitchcock, or especially Orson Welles’s groundbreaking techniques in Citizen Kane, it would be clear that we are all standing on the shoulders of giants. With practice, one can clearly see from the angle, the lighting, or the camera movements which filmmakers influence which. Musicians are also famous for stylistically emulating their heroes.

I would now like to consider an example of where the line was said to have been crossed from Inspiration/Homage to Plagiarism by a television writer several years ago.

In the summer of 2014, strong accusations of plagiarism were made against Nic Pizzolatto, the writer of season 1 of True Detective, starring Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey. An overview of the controversy is available here:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/08/06/true_detective_plagiarized_no_nic_pizzolatto_did_not_plagiarize_thomas_ligotti.html

In summary, the core of Pizzolatto’s story was Nihilism, a fairly narrow field with a limited number of ways to describe the condition. The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, a nonfiction book about the dire straits of the human condition by horror writer Thomas Ligotti, was one of Pizzolatto’s main inspirations, a fact that he was up front about from the start. He was also clear that many other writers, from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche, had plenty of similar things to say on the subject. 

I first published a version of this blog article in 2014, but the subject is of continued interest to me because of the way I create many of my works, such as Minor Confessions of an Angel Falling Upward (and several other works in which the lead character appears). 

Similar to King and Gaiman, my reading is voluminous. I also do a lot of TV, movie, and documentary watching followed by or during stream of consciousness writing, which I then use for my stories, songs, and poems. Through this process, I never want to cross the line into Plagiarism, so I have to stay vigilant.

The line in the sand is easier to see and stay away from when I write adaptations, such Three Gothic Doctors and Their Sons (a musical and novel that is partially derived from Frankenstein, Moreau, and Jekyll) or my one-man Edgar Allan Poe show. 

It is also easier to credit source material, especially when lines are taken verbatim from public domain works, but in a post-postmodern work like Minor Confessions or True Detective, what we might call "metafiction," it is a slippery slope for a writer to defend what is Inspiration, Homage, and raw material passing through our own Vision and Voice to be "reconstituted" and to defend against accusations of Plagiarism. The source material/inspirations for Pizzolatto’s work, created as it was for television, would be much harder to credit in any formal way, as the article referenced above points out.

As content creators, we must always be conscious of where we are standing in relation to the line between what Inspires us, to whom we wish to pay Homage, and borrowing or taking too freely from their words.