References, shout-outs, homages, and plagiarism

Well I guess it really depends how you define all of them...

What would you consider a reference and a shout-out? I'm not really sure what would count as a "shout-out" in a novel. There are all kinds of different ways to pay homage to something or someone. And then where would an allusion fit in?

For example, in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, there is a character--and old, blind librarian--named Jorge of Borgos. The character is an homage (or tribute or reference?) to writer Jorge Luis Borges, who was a strong influence in Eco's writing. The library the character looks after is extensive, labyrinthine, and contains hundreds of thousands of ancient texts, an allusion to Borges' Library of Babel and other stories. I'd consider all of this an "homage," but it's clearly no plagiarism.

Recently, I wrote a modern re-telling of Othello, that I suppose is an homage to the original, but I'd hardly consider it plagiarism, since I've changed so much as to make my take on the story unique and very much my own (I think).

I guess I'm having some trouble seeing where the lines blur. Perhaps it would be easier if you could give a few examples of what kind of writing you consider blurring that line between references/homages and plagiarism?

I suppose if I had to answer right now, I'd say homage is a nod toward another work with a show of respect and admiration toward it, while making your own work unique and powerful enough to stand alone, while plagiarism is a sign of laziness to do that.

I think the difference between plagiarism and the others is that plagiarism is a deliberate attempt to pass off someone else's work as your own. Paying homage, referring or shouting out to something else is done very deliberately, with a nod to the source material. It is done with the intention of either using the original work to comment on yours, or to use your work to comment on the original. It serves an obvious purpose, and is not meant to be deceptive.

The line can certainly blur, but I think the author's intention comes through the work in subtle ways. You can most often tell when someone is paying homage vs just plain stealing.

Plagiarism is really specific- taking someone else's work and saying that it's yours. It's no accident.
Something can be really derivative. It can be similar. It can even have close to the same plot. It can use sited quotes or 'refer to' the work. But.
Plagiarism has no blurred lines. It's word for word copying.
Really.

Hey toothpaste and i posted at the same time. Great minds think alike!

I don't think plagiarism must necessarily be intentional, though. Certainly it's at its worst and most obvious when it is.

But if you know a novel or story very well, and it inspires you, and have read it enough that it lies in your subconscious... I think it's perfectly possible that you could accidentally write a passage that's almost word-for-word similar to something you've read and admired before without realizing it.

It's never happened to me before with novels, but I write songs in my spare time off from writing, and I've certainly written a lyric that I later realized I'd lifted from a song I'd heard before (and changed it, of course). Or a composed a melody that I thought was good and original, only to listen to a song and realize crap! that's where it came from!

Cato said:

Well, if anyone followed the whole Cassandra Claire plagiarism thing, she attempted to pass it off as a 'homage' to some book, by paraphrasing certain passages. Didn't give credit to the author I guess and it bit her in the ass. She would literally take whole conversations of dialogue and rewrite them in her story.

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I would consider that plagiarism, because I don't think she tried to really make it unique and different enough to call her own, separate creation.

However, I do think it's possible to go so far as paraphrase other writers without it being plagiarism. For example, say a character is faced with an important decision that mirrors Hamlet's, if that character were to have dialogue very similar in message and thoughts to Shakespeare's "To be or not to be" speech, yet had a sufficiently different, unique, and completely new take on it, I would call that a proper homage.

Plagiarism is lazy. Change a few things and repackage it. It's really the same thing, just in different wrapping.

It's like the difference between a sex scene being 'obscene' and 'pornographic' and being a meaningful contribution to a passionate novel. If what you write is distinct enough, is unique enough, is a creative and imaginative departure from the original that it has literary merit as a separate piece of writing--then it's no longer plagiarism.

But it has to be substantively the same. Cassandra had book after book and pages of material from the same source. Yes a line or two can be accidental but I doubt whole pages are. The whole point is if you make money off someone else's work then you have a problem- if you are unpublished - then it's moot.

This is situational, but it's also a know-it-when-you-see-it deal, which is why plagiarism cases can be contentious (see the Rowling thread).

Take, for example, a commonly repeated line: "Tomorrow is another day." Is it really necessary for your character or your narrator to point out the origin of the line? Not really. On the other hand, people will cry foul if you work it in such that you somehow assert that it the line was your unique idea and you're brilliant for penning it.

Woolly said:

Take, for example, a commonly repeated line: "Tomorrow is another day." Is it really necessary for your character or your narrator to point out the origin of the line? Not really. On the other hand, people will cry foul if you work it in such that you somehow assert that it the line was your unique idea and you're brilliant for penning it.

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Similarly, in Pamela Dean's Secret Country books, people speak occasionally in Shakespeare lines and other classic quotes. There are story-specific reasons why they do so, some characters comment on it, and the end reveal of why is rather wonderful. It's clearly a mixture of homage/shout-out and ... er... plot. Part of what makes it obviously not plagiarism (and a good example here) is that the lines are recontextualized and used in Dean's own way.

Similarly, Jo Walton's "Tam Lin: A Barrayaran Shakespeare Play", which takes the plot of Pamela Dean's Tam Lin and the feel and rhythm of Shakespeare, and claims the play exists in Lois McMaster Bujold's Barrayar (universe), is very much a shout-out/pastiche.

So plagiarism is not just sharing of plot, or lines. It has something to do with not bringing in anything new. I just don't know how one could make objective rules about how that works as a process, though "sharing big chunks of prose" is a pretty good legal definition.

If I'm making no sense, blame the 1am bug.

Having a character who has to make similar decisions to Hamlet or Rosalind is just good writing. That's what we do. "Good writers borrow, great writers steal" - unattributed quote.

So what needs to happen in order for something to be proven as plagiarism? First it has to be recognized as substantively similar in tone, wording and verbiage to something else that was published prior, and then someone has to get upset about it.

Of course we're going to have bits and pieces of the craft floating around in our brains. Part of being a good author is reading everything. I've read so many things that sometimes I'll be talking with acquaintances, colleagues and friends and a plot will come up. I'll say how funny that is since I have a very similar plot in my idea file. I'll then expound on the plot for a while, only to realize that it's actually from a book I read in high school.

The probability that if one of those ideas were to make it past the vetting stage and into production my work would be similar enough to the original ithat someone would comment is very low. (Unless that comment is the ever vaunted "So and such is reminiscent of so and such" that you see on so many novels these days. I mean, really. Jim Butcher and Laurel K. Hamilton? Well, I guess they both have vampire sex in their novels about detectives, so obviously they're linked). It's just not how plagiarism typically functions. A plagiarist sits down, copies a passage from another work, changes it just enough that the verbiage isn't exact and then moves on. A nod, reference, homage, or shout-out studies the work they seek to set themselves in conversation with, and then reproduces an element: tone, style, punctuation, formatting, etc.,. The author making a reference or paying homage wishes for their work to be easily reminiscent of another's work. The plagiarist does not. The plagiarist wants to pass the hard work of someone else off as their own.

P.S. Toothpaste, I'm having a total geek girl moment. I just picked your book up from the library for "read widely" research purposes. That is all. Continue with your regularly scheduled program <ducks out>

Yes, if you pass it off as yourself.

Jokes are trickier, some jokes are just common knowledge. I would google any jokes and see how often they are told, I imagine "Man walks into a bar. Ouch." is probably up for grabs. Quotes, well that depends. Some people are quoted so often that a reader would know the reference: "I can resist anything except temptation" is very well known to be an Oscar Wilde quote. Still if you can mention the source, might not be a bad idea.

However things people said, thoughts and points they made on message boards, no you can't just copy them into the work verbatim without citing the source. Well you could, and probably no one would know, but you have to ask yourself if that is how you want to go about being a writer. Now a concept, like is someone says "jam is better than jelly" and you find you agree, and you can rephrase it as "jelly is worse than jam", that could be okay. But even that you need to be careful. In university for essays I had to cite not only actual quotes, but concepts that I had summarised of others.

Cato:
if you take things online friends have said in conversation on message boards or what not, then it's not alright?

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If you take things verbatim, then definitely not as you're infringing their copyright. However, even if you're not taking it verbatim, the conversation needs to be in context for the scene and it actually needs to be doing something in the scene (i.e. it's either advancing the plot or demonstrating character or helping to set the scene or world build). If you're deliberately taking lines or conversations held in a RL context, then it's difficult to see how you can change them enough to fit into the more artificial framework of what a novel is (not that it can't be done, but it's usually pretty obvious).

Like Toothpaste said, you need to be careful if you're taking sourced material. I've got a scene in my novel which involves a certain well known actor, a shapeshifter and said shapeshifter using a phrase commonly associated with that actor. It works in context (I think) so that it's attributable and not infringing and hopefully it also works as an tongue-in-cheek joke because people are familiar enough with the actor to get it. But even though I've agonised over it, I'm still prepared to kill the darling if it turns out on revision that it just doesn't work.

MM

Momento Mori said:

If you take things verbatim, then definitely not as you're infringing their copyright. However, even if you're not taking it verbatim, the conversation needs to be in context for the scene and it actually needs to be doing something in the scene (i.e. it's either advancing the plot or demonstrating character or helping to set the scene or world build). If you're deliberately taking lines or conversations held in a RL context, then it's difficult to see how you can change them enough to fit into the more artificial framework of what a novel is (not that it can't be done, but it's usually pretty obvious).

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But then we have to talk about all the great writers that have written about real-life conversations, sometimes word-for-word, in novels, poetry, etc. What about Jack Kerouac who often tape-recorded full late-night conversations he had with Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, etc., and then used them in his writings?

Or what about one of the most famous quotes of all, in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, when Daisy Buchanan says, "I hope she's a fool. A beautiful fool," which he stole from Zelda's own words when Scottie was born?

kuwisdelu:
What about Jack Kerouac who often tape-recorded full late-night conversations he had with Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, etc., and then used them in his writings?

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I haven't read Kerouac so can't really make an informed response about this - e.g. I don't know about context, whether he had permission to use them or anything.

kuwisdelu:
Or what about one of the most famous quotes of all, in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, when Daisy Buchanan says, "I hope she's a fool. A beautiful fool," which he stole from Zelda's own words when Scottie was born?

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That falls within my context point and whether it was said or written.

MM

How about this?

Ca. 1990, I was sitting at a table with several other people, and two of them had a brief spontaneous exchange of four lines of dialogue that I found quite witty. Can I give those four lines to a couple of characters I invented?

Are these random people? People you know? Acquaintances? In conversations with friends and family, if there is a bit of conversation/dialogue that is simply fantastic [and that I want to pointedly use later on], I will jot the info down as I'm asking/telling them that I want to use it in my book. They are usually quite amiable to that suggestion [read: they are humbled, honored, and oh so happy that they will be in a book]. Then I usually give kudos/credits to friends and family in the 'Dedications' page [if I feel it is noteworthy due to importance in the novel].

During an edit of my fantasy novel my sister came up with the best retort in the entire novel. I give her kudos each time I see her. She blushes very attractively.

writersprite said:

Are these random people? People you know? Acquaintances?

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I would say acquaintances. I knew them at the time, but we weren't close friends.

If by chance I happened to publish the work those lines would appear in, they might recognize my name, or maybe not.

Whether they would remember something they said 20 years earlier is another question.

kuwisdelu said:

Or what about one of the most famous quotes of all, in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, when Daisy Buchanan says, "I hope she's a fool. A beautiful fool," which he stole from Zelda's own words when Scottie was born?

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Fitzgerald lifted whole passages out of his wife's diary. They also had a royally screwed up marriage.

If an editor/agent gives a suggestion on a re-write of a sentence/paragraph and we like it so much that we use it almost verbatim, is that needing to be quoted as a source?

This is essentially what my sister did. She helped me with the edit of one line of dialogue. To me, a dedication is generous.

Woolly said:

Fitzgerald lifted whole passages out of his wife's diary. They also had a royally screwed up marriage.

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Yep. Many of his short stories are purportedly hers, too. A screwed up marriage, yes, but having read their letters, they did love each other...

Anyway, that would clearly be plagiarism. I used the particular example since it was something said in real-life. So is it okay?

By the way, I'm personally guilty of using real-life conversations in fiction.