The Finer Points of Plagiarism

I debated for nearly a week with myself. Did I really want to talk about plagiarism? After all, I’m no expert, and I haven’t really thought much about plagiarism since I was in college, writing papers. But then I thought maybe you haven’t, either. And maybe we should revisit the topic, considering recent news.

Of course, if you have anything to do with writing romance fiction, then you’re probably aware of Nora Roberts and what she eventually addressed publicly. If you haven’t heard—or you don’t know the whole story—then zip over here to her blog post where she writes in detail about her experiences with being plagiarized. And no, that’s not a typo. Roberts has had multiple experiences of plagiarism!

So maybe you’re thinking, like me, plagiarism in romance novels? Because isn’t plagiarism more prevalent in the academic world? Or in media? College students or high school students, reporters and journalists, that’s who plagiarizes. It’s about leaving out citations, or not paraphrasing properly, or making up sources to support a story, right? But it turns out that fiction writers plagiarize, too. And not just in the romance genre. Kidlit writers plagiarize, mystery writers, too. Probably even soulful, baring-their-truth poets plagiarize. Whenever someone steals someone else’s work, that’s plagiarism.

Sometimes, it appears to be clear-cut. A thief can’t be any more overt than copying other people’s sentences or whole passages word-for-word and then signing their name to it. But other types of plagiarism (yep, there are five to ten different types, depending on who you ask) are a lot more difficult to assess because honestly, people don’t really understand the finer points of plagiarism. That probably explains the accidental plagiarism category, but sadly, accidentally or not, it’s still plagiarism.

So what’s a writer to do? Should you go out and copyright all the manuscripts that are gathering cyber dust in your laptop to protect your work against plagiarism? Nope, not necessary. As long as you have your work saved, you can always prove which words belong to you if they somehow show up in someone’s book.

If, on the other hand, you have reams and reams of hand-written stories, poems, and novels, you have a couple of choices: You can spend a lot of time scanning or taking digital pictures of your work. Or you can do nothing.

Because for most of us, plagiarism on a gut-wrenching scale like Nora Roberts experienced is unlikely. We don’t need to worry too much about scofflaw writers stealing our work—words or ideas--though I suspect with self-publishing becoming so accessible, plagiarism may become a huge problem in the future. Still, I don’t think we need to start adding lawyers to our writer’s toolbox just yet.

But it wouldn’t hurt to brush up on the finer points of plagiarism from a professional source now that you know it’s out there. And also because you don’t want to be an accidental plagiarist yourself. Like I said when I started on this topic, I’m a writer, not an expert. And like you, I’m just trying to make an honest living with words. Wouldn’t it be great if that were the case for all of us?

~Cathy C. Hall