My Fear of Plagiarism

The mixed values of a safe and original set of words.

Courtesy: leeds.ac.uk

(CALGARY, Alberta) - As a writer I have a deathly fear of plagiarism. It begins immediately with my hyperawareness that every word in my sentences have been published elsewhere, by someone else. Am I putting myself at risk by reusing them? I think individual words are probably okay. They are in the dictionary which, I hope, makes them public domain.

Before copyright protection, an author could publish an original work and others could reprint it and resell it at their own profit. There was no recourse for the original creator. Although never proven, the rumour still exists in fringe literary circles that the plays and sonnets credited to William Shakespeare were not actually written by him but were in fact written by another man of the same name!

Then there is what I call inverse plagiarism. In the 1970s, when Arthur Hailey was at the height of his popularity, he received a letter from a man in India asking him to confirm that he had not written a book,The Sinner. He was a great Hailey fan and was sure the book wasn’t authentic. It wasn’t. Subsequently, two other “Hailey” novels appeared, Hospitaland A Night To Remember. Hailey got copies and they looked authentic including a bio and a picture. There were just no names and addresses for the publisher or distributor.

This gave me a great idea—an inverse novel.

What if I took a best selling novel, like Ken Follett’s World Without End and wrote an opposite book. That is, for every word or phrase he wrote, I would replace it with its opposite. He begins: “Gwenda was eight years old, but she was not afraid of the dark.” My book, Ending Without Beginning opens: “Brenda is not yet eight years old and she was afraid of the dark.” As I went on I soon realized that in doing an inverse novel, I would also achieve least-sellerdom. In fact, from the logic of my original idea I would be writing a non-novel . Scratch that idea.

Next, I keyed in my first novel, Gone With the Wind, and realized that it had such a well known title that I quickly retitled it to Where the Breeze Goes. A friend who read the book, pointed out the likelihood of being accused of plagiarism, so I took out all the potentially risky words, leaving me with four words—my own title.

Then I thought of public domain works and was about to key in a novel that I was going to call Withering Altitudes, but realized it would have very limited appeal or potential for sales. Who today, after all, knows or even cares what a “moor” is?

So I returned to the idea of individual words. That is what a book is—a collection of individual words strung together in a unique fashion. Maybe I’ll be safer if I assemble the right combination of “safe” words and string them together into a great book.

I remember when in junior high school and the in thing was to know the longest word in the English language. It was and still is antidisestablishmentarianism at 28 letters. It did not exactly roll off the tongue and none of us knew what it actually meant. We must have asked teachers but obviously they didn’t know either, and didn’t care enough to find out. It prompted a game that some of the more unruly of us would play. We would ransack the dictionary and find some obscure word, then “innocently” approach a teacher asking if they knew what it meant. I remember one day asking Mr. Hillman if he knew what feces meant. Would that teachers today were limited to such onerous disciplinary problems.

Antidisestablishmentarianism, by the way, means opposition to the belief that there should no longer be an official church in a country—specifically the Anglican Church of 19th-century England. It’s a noun but is really hard to use in a sentence because, I now notice for the first time, that it’s a double negative. A simplified meaning is that it is the belief that there should be a state recognized church. If it weren’t such a cumbersome word, it could be used to describe the beliefs of many people in Middle East countries, as in: The majority of the citizens of Saudi Arabia are antidisestablishmentarianists. Hooray! A meaningful sentence using the word. Maybe it will catch on.

Staying with a book, here is a draft of my book proposal.

First, the title. My new book is going to be called Faces. The theme will be around the German word backpfeifengesicht—a face looking for a fist. The potential cast of characters is almost as big as the phone book. Some of the characters will be rebarbative (unpleasant) and others will be gormless (stupid).

The protagonist will be a woman, Brenda, (not the same Brenda from above) who has putzfimmel (a mania for cleaning). It’s difficult to visit with her because if you put your unfinished cup of coffee down and look away for a moment, she will snatch it up, wash it and put it away. My inspiration for this idea was a woman I knew, years ago, who took my unfinished coffee cup and did just that. As a result of her putzfimmel, Brenda will have difficulties finding meaningful romantic relationships so that she carries around a lot of kummerspeck (literally means “grief bacon”—the extra weight gained from the overeating of “comfort food”).

As a result of Brenda’s emotional travails she will spend much of her life on a virtually continuous bummel (a journey with no particular schedule and no particular destination) looking for Mr. Correct. The places she will visit will range from the scrofulous (I don’t even have to define this word; it just sounds gross.) to the magnificent.

Brenda had a career in the Mines of Moria and the book ends sadly when she dies of pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis (some lung disease—enough said about that).

As for me, I’m still alive, looking for that safe book that will make me as rich as Bill Gates.

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Daniel Johnson was born near the midpoint of the twentieth century in Calgary, Alberta. In his teens he knew he was going to be a writer, which explains why he was one of only a handful of boys in his high school typing class—a skill he knew was going to be necessary. He defines himself as a social reformer, not a left winger, the latter being an ideological label which, he says, is why he is not an ideologue, although a lot of his views could be described as left-wing. He understands that who he is, is largely defined by where he came from. The focus for Daniel’s writing came in 1972. After a trip to Europe he moved to Vancouver, British Columbia. Alberta, and Calgary in particular, was extremely conservative Bible Belt country, more like Houston than any other Canadian city (a direct influence of the oil industry). Two successive Premiers of the province, from 1935 to 1971, had been Baptist evangelicals with their own weekly Sunday radio program—Back to the Bible Hour, while in office. In Alberta everything was distorted by religion.

Although he had published a few pieces (unpaid) in the local daily, the Calgary Herald, it was not until 1975 that he could actually make a living from journalism when, from 1975 to 1981 he was reporter, photographer, then editor of the weekly Airdrie Echo. For more than ten years after that he worked with Peter C. Newman (1979-1993), Canada’s top business writer (notably a series of books, The Canadian Establishment). Through this period Daniel also did some national radio and TV broadcasting with the CBC. You can write to Daniel at: Salem-News@gravityshadow.com