Bend it again, Opal Mehta
***Update***
Associated Press reports that Vaakya Viswanathan’s publisher Little, Brown and Company has asked book stores to pull “How Opal Mehta…” off the bookshelves and return all copies to the publisher.
***End update***
I love the smell of plagiarized-driven outrage and outrage moderation in the blogosphere. It smells like… I don’t know what that smell could be, but if my first two Opal Mehta posts weren’t enough, here comes number three!
(Spot the unattributed pop-culture references so far in this post!)
In high-end real estate it is apparently not uncommon to give listings insane For Sale prices, like $60 million for a Long Island mansion. The actual sale price might turn out to be something far less impressive, like $30 million. But both buyer and seller benefit from the deceptive price tag: The seller gets publicity and the buyer can show the world what a hard-broiled negotiator he is (plus, in the minds of many, he’ll still be the guy who bought a $60 million mansion, which clearly means his is bigger than yours). Similar tactics were used in the dotcom bubble, where Merger & Acquistion deals or other contracts were given headline-grabbing dollar amounts. In fact, the announced price was pure bull and the real price much less dramatic thanks to financial or markets goals that were deliberately set to be impossible to meet.
With such contract-size manipulations in mind, I’ve been wondering whether Kaavya Viswanathan’s $500,000 contract was really a $50,000 contract, but, no, I haven’t seen any reports indicating that the “half-a-rock” deal is really just a few pebbles.
I have a feeling that the Opal Mehta story is going to have legs well into next week. Here’s where we are right now:
Writer and editor Lee Kottner can’t believe the treacherous path down which Miss Kaayva Viswanathan was lead by her counselor, agent, packagers and editors:
Viswanathan… is a very young, untried, uncoached, first-time author, and her account of how her book came to be is an appalling tale of publisher’s greed and editorial negligence. Her editor claims that “We went through a couple of drafts.”
My jaw dropped when I read that, only because this was “a couple of drafts” based on a manuscript of 4 chapters and a synopsis (largely unheard of in fiction publishing, where agents usually want to see an entire manuscript) after they were bought by the publisher. After! Forgive me if I’m a little shrill, but everyone I’ve ever talked to in publishing, everything I’ve ever read by professionals has said in no uncertain terms that you need to have a complete, professional, edited manuscript of your novel before even thinking of writing query letters. This means a couple of drafts, at least, before anybody but you and possibly your writing group sees it.
What the hell was going on there? A crash course in creative writing? This poor young woman is sucked in the door by a “book packager,” handed off to the William Morris Agency, who then secures her an absurd advance (half of which went to the “book packager”) where she’s paired up with an editor who doesn’t know anything about Young Adult fiction. Another editor, one more familiar with the genre, might have caught the similarities before the book went to press. But the real point is that Viswanathan is an accidental author given next to no guidance. Hello? No wonder she’s in trouble.
In Ms. Kottner’s eyes, the circumstances exonerate Miss Viswanathan, or at least give her the benefit of doubt.
In yesterday’s post, Bend it like Viswanathan, I quoted a high school teacher lamenting widespread acceptance of cheating. Livejournalist montchan is Teacher’s Exhibit A:
God knows during my school days I plagiarized plenty. Why bother struggling on my own when others, much more qualified to do so anyway, had already done the work? Rarely, if ever have I written an essay which was my own. No excuse really, other than the ever-present pressure to achieve. However my readership was limited to 1 person, and Ms. Viswanathan apparently missed that point. Or maybe she did think she was smarter than the rest of us.
High school english teacher Michael Hobson sees in Miss Viswanathan a “real-world example” for his students. He also quotes two articles to illustrate the young plagiarist’s fall from grace.
Bill Poser at Language Log tries to make the case that Miss Viswanathan didn’t plagiarize. He doesn’t come close to persuading me, but perhaps he can sway you:
The question is, is there any plausible parallel scenario in which, if we assume, for the sake of argument, that Ms. Viswanathan is dishonest but of normal rationality, she would have plagiarized the passages in question?
I submit that there is not. On the one hand, unlike term papers and obscure academic journal articles, best-selling novels are read by a lot of people, and novels of the same sort are likely to be read by the same people. The risk of detection is therefore fairly high. On the other hand, what had she to gain? Remember, the passages in question are a miniscule part of her book and of no particular importance or salience. What could she possibly have hoped to gain by copying a few passages out of an entire book? With the risk of detection high and the potential gain nonexistent, to believe that Ms. Viswanathan engaged in plagiarism requires us to believe that she was utterly irrational.
What’s irrational about desperately wanting to finish a book that got you half of a $500,000 book contract? Especially if you convince yourself that by changing a few words you’re nore really plagiarizing anyway.
Heck, what rational good did rampant plagiarizing do Ben Domenech?
There is a good deal of jealousy and schadenfreude out there, and I don’t begrudge it one bit. I write for fun, not for profit, but for aspiring and made authors alike, it must be frustrating to see a nobody with not even a finished manuscript - not even a concept of her own - snag a big contract. Well, frustrating it is, apparently, and Livejournalist ribbonbelt isn’t afraid of saying it.
Donny B. in Chicago takes a shot at the edu-cultural Ivy League East Coast elites:
(On somewhat of a side note, I understand that a college sophomore with a huge book deal makes for an interesting read, but I don’t see the New York times profiling a lot of young writers, especially teenagers, in general. The incestuous, insular nature of New York and Ivy League schools (both with each other and in their own circles) is just plain annoying. There are plenty of young, talented writers with book deals in this country who actually write their own material. Rea Frey of Columbia College, my alma mater, wrote a well-received book while graduating as the valedictorian - where’s her profile?)
Not that Columbia isn’t a tad Ivy League, a tad East Coast, and a tad New York. Except Donny said Columbia College and not Columbia University. Donny’s point stands and mine is obliterated.
But there’s, understandably, also sympathy out there for Miss Viswanataha.
My Pet Goat notes two of the many irregularities we’ve witnessed at Harvard over the last few years:
I’m not saying that what Viswanathan did was OK, but I wonder to what extent she reflects her surroundings.
She also has a fun little parody song. Let’s call it “Springtime for Opal”
Livejournalist Rachel is singing a similar tune:
[S]he was SEVENTEEN when this whole thing started. I see a bright girl with dreams of being a published author. I see her parents putting incredible pressure on her to do well in school and become a doctor or lawyer or whatever it is that pushy parents want their daughters to be these days. I see her being approached by an agent, I see her seeing numbers on a check followed by lots of zeroes ($250,000, if we are to believe the news reports). I see a girl who didn’t know what she was getting into.
When you’re seventeen or eighteen it’s easy to believe that these editors, agents, and whatnot are “helping” you. I see a crowd of money-grubbing adults using a weak-minded teenaged girl to get them rich. Even if you don’t buy into the conspiracy theory, Kaavya Viswanathan was used.
Sure, she was used, but she also used. She used her parents’ money to buy successful Ivy League admissions coaching that also landed her a book and movie deal. It seems to me that she was fully engaged in the game until it steamrolled her.
But, yes, ages 17 - 19 aren’t exactly the peak years of one’s decision-making ability.
At the very heart of this scandal lies an issue much, much bigger than plagiarism, namely the mad scramble to get into an Ivy League-leve college. If you get in, the doors of opportunity swing wide open. If you don’t, you either have to find a way to leap-frog the thousands of students who are walking through those doors, or you likely won’t join the most elite of circles, you won’t get the kind of connections that can help elevate you from Vice President to CFO or COO and beyond.
Which brings us back to Miss Viswanathan. Had she not been caught plagiarizing she would have remained a celebrated genre-best-selling prodigy, maybe to the point where she could simply have stamped her name on her next book without having to worry at all about its “concept” or actually writing it since such mundane tasks can be done better by seasoned ghost writers. Instead she could have spent her time on the cicuit, selling her book, building her brand name, adding connections while becoming a connection herself for ambitious, young Harvard students or wannabe Harvard students.
There’s a lot more to this than a young woman who made a serious mistake than just a young woman who made a serious mistake.
That’s why I think this story wil be staying with us for a while.
