No: 9: Pressure to Plagiarize
The Conscious Art of Being Original
It’s Oscars night and I’m not paying attention to who wins.
Instead, my mind’s on a strange footnote I caught in the news this morning — that the film The Holdovers has been accused of brazen plagiarism. Specifically, a line-by-line lifting of a screenplay from 2013 called Frisco that the director apparently had direct access to and reformulated into the critical hit film starring Paul Giamatti that’s up for Best Original Screenplay.
Like many plagiarism battles in Hollywood, this is just allegation and will likely play out in the courts. We won’t know the true story, on and off the page, until it’s all said and done. But it did get me thinking about the pressures of making art — successful art — and the conscious/unconscious strains of plagiarism that come with it.
Plagiarism, to me, always begins with fear.
The terror of failure.
In the case of The Holdovers, Alexander Payne was nearly 20 years off his last hit — did pressure get to him? The same way it got to Melania Trump, when her 2016 Republican Convention speech was an echo of Michelle Obama’s, eight years earlier? Or when buzz for Lady Gaga’s sophomore album was at fever pitch, and the lead single “Born This Way” ended up sounding a whole lot like “Express Yourself,” Madonna’s iconic hit from two decades earlier?
If your #1 goal as an artist is to churn out a hit, then pressure can drive you towards something familiar in your own past work or the work of someone else. In familiarity, there’s safety, assurance. The embrace of old ghosts. A port in a storm.
This is often a curse of early work, when you have no clue what you’re doing, which is why I think fanfiction is such a welcome and abundant training ground. A place to hone your own voice while playing in someone else’s sandbox, until you develop the confidence to rip free and boldly forge your own worlds.
That said, I never wrote fanfiction when I was a kid. For one thing, the forums didn’t really exist in the same way. And more importantly, I never really had any fandoms. I liked Young Indiana Jones, but he was buff, white, and blond. I liked My Little Pony and the Care Bears… but those were branded for girls. I watched pro tennis obsessively, but even there, there weren’t any Indians on the up and up. I just felt like such an outsider — brown, gay, so skinny that it was commented on constantly — that I couldn’t find refuge as myself anywhere. So my only hope was to design my own fictional worlds, whether it was doodles in a notebook, little scraps of stories, or a parade of dolls I used to make out of Kleenex tissues, each with a name and backstory. In this creative hideaway, the School for Good and Evil was born — a hot-blooded, goth-punk, rebel-rage refuge from the tyranny of Disney hot-hunk blonds — and it bloomed as a world I’d wished I could live in.
It would be decades, though, before I could actually write the story down, and namely because Harry Potter had made even the thought of creating any other magical schools sacrilege. By 2012, when I started, though, Rowling’s books were five years past and the movies almost done, and that peculiar narcissism of being in your 20s gives you the courage to think that maybe, maybe there’s room for your story. One thing I knew for sure, though — if it felt like a Potter rip-off, I’d deserve whatever came my way.
And yet… I had zero fear.
SGE was an expression of my own personal weirdness. Where Potter had its heart in order and morality and the hero’s journey, the heart of SGE was in the storms and chaos of renegade hearts. The proof came in the books’ reviews — in the ten years that I wrote the SGE books, any comparisons to Potter were hardly mentioned. The series just had different vibes.
(Funny story: I pitched the project in a competition in film school. When I went into the professor’s office hours, he ripped into a script about an Indian family, telling me how cliched it was and how I could do better — and then talked about this “psycho fairy tale one” that should win because the girl who wrote it seemed so fearless and unhinged. I pointed out to him that the Indian family script was not mine and that I’d written the psycho princess one. The stare he gave still lives inside me.)
Let’s talk about this new novel I’m working on. Like SGE, the book is its own hurricane of idiosyncrasy. But unlike SGE, which we could pitch to publishers as some kinda mishmash of Potter, Wicked, Frozen, whatever buzz words got them hyped at the time… this new book has zero comps.
Note: Publishers always want comps. The same way movie studios do. They want a simple elevator pitch that makes it easy to distill your book into [X] meets [X], which lets them know you’re operating in the realm of the known. That same feeling of safety, assurance I mentioned before. That embrace of old ghosts. That port in a storm.
It’s your job, then, as a writer to create something original within the poles of existing hits and deliver an even bigger hit.
(And you wonder where the terror that comes from that can tilt a writer to making… poor choices?)
So for this new book, I was upfront: no comps. This kind of book does not exist, I said. I have no reference points for it. I’m inventing from a big, black hole of trust inside myself and I’ll see you on the other side.
Godspeed, my editor said.
Which is how I began writing 14 months ago (taking Jun Sekiya with me into the cave, who you’ll hear from in future entries, since he’s hard at work on the visual side of things).
There’s a few guiding lights to chasing originality, though.
1. If you hear it in your head, often it’s the ghosts of something else.
When I was a younger writer, if I heard something in my head, then I’d think that was the thing. I’d write it down excitedly — but inevitably I’d revise it. Time and time again, the words in my head are proven to be an echo from elsewhere. The original stuff seems to be more like a thrum in my chest that only reveals itself in the moment. Hard to explain, but check out this very early zero-draft paragraph:
From under the table, I see Mom flouncing towards me, in a hot-pink coat, her hair frat-girl blond, her skirt so tight she has to collapse into her seat. She touches the menu. “I’ve never had Indian before.”
That was me coughing out some mothballs while I figured out who Mom is. Mom as Elle Woods. Mom as Barbie doll. Mom as Marjorie Taylor Green. All kinda amorphous pulls from my consciousness. Little by little, I honed, the words sank down from head to chest, until I began to see in the dark:
From under the table, I see Mom striding towards me, fussing with her ironed, peroxide-blond hair, swinging beaded earrings and a beaded necklace, in a white-fur frock and matching alpaca coat, like she thought Indian meant Indian and she’s come for teepees and dogsledding.
Now she’s a character and I’m off and chasing her (not on a dogsled).
2. The amount of work between that first passage and the second passage is… (puts head in hands).
With every revision, it feels like you’re summoning more ghosts, more things you’ve seen before. At first, you’re going nowhere first. But don’t despair. You just summon and summon, until all the old recycled stuff is gone, and then all of a sudden, instead of recycling, you’re conjuring, and instantly, you start to see the real thing, the thing in the dark that’s yours and no one else’s. (Sophie in SGE is a prime example — on the surface, she seems familiar… and yet, she is the only Sophie. And thank god, because the world couldn’t handle two.)
3. Don’t be afraid to ask your beta-readers and editor if anything feels too familiar.
Writers, especially newer ones, often feel shame at the idea that they’d have unconsciously borrowed. Don’t! Working through your influences is a natural part of art. I explicitly ask anyone who test-reads my book: does anything seem like you’ve seen or heard it before? I want the book to read as ruthlessly original, which means not just interrogating myself as to anything that feels “done-before” but also asking readers to mark anything that feels familiar to them. Sometimes as a writer, you might include explicit homages (there’s a big one to Breakfast at Tiffany’s in SGE 1, for instance), but you want your references to be intentional and not unconscious.
4. Keep a diary.
The key to originality is voice. A diary is the best place to hone the art of talking to yourself. I’ve honestly loved keeping this one — it’s made me a little less precious about every word and lets me drive with my emotions. I’m enjoying the freedom to be “more you,” as Tedros might put it, a freedom which hopefully will play into more areas of art and life.
On that note…
Tell me about your thoughts on originality. Have you every been afraid of being too derivative? How do you stay true to yourself and not be pressured to deliver a hit?
Until next week…
This head-on deliberate attitude towards originality seems so brave to me! I get in my head when I think about it too much. When I do I think about this CS Lewis quote: "Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it."
I think really though it's all getting at the same thing--being unabashadly yourself, and true to your own vision, without letting what others may or may not think about it color or shape your work.
"I pointed out to him that the Indian family script was not mine and that I’d written the psycho princess one. The stare he gave still lives inside me.)"
This KILLS me, i laughed so hard. What did he say after???