Plagiarists Keep On Keepin’ On
We heard about this on ‘Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me!’ yesterday while driving, but here’s a screenshot of a blurb about it from the New York Times. The headline sums it up, but basically a publisher pulled the plug on the debut novel of writer Jumi Bello after instances of plagiarism surfaced. We’ve all heard this story before one way or another, but in an even weirder twist, Bello’s apology/explanation was pulled from Literary Hub because it, too, was plagiarized in parts.
Listen, in no way am I making excuses for Bello. Like, at all. Plagiarism is bad and not ok! Especially when you keep doing it! (Hello?) But for anyone who doesn’t operate in the creative world in any way (and maybe doesn’t know how to value creative output…i.e. people who dismiss it as “easy”), I would just like to point out that producing written content is hard work — and it’s not always the kind of work that you can train your brain to do on a 9-5 schedule or on demand. Even something that one wouldn’t bill as “creative” (i.e. a grant application or even a promotional email) can be more taxing than meets the non-trained eye. Anyway, the reason I bring that up is that I’m going to venture that “plagiarism” happens all the dingdang time in every industry, but we sure do like to demonize writers. And that’s probably because we’ve all been trained to sniff out copycat writers but let others slide in the name of power-brokering. For instance, a little birdie tells me that as more corporations are trying to embrace “sustainability investing,” many of the reports — which represent something “new” — look awfully similar. And then of course there’s the age-old story of a higher-up stealing an underling’s idea and work because That Is Just The Way It Goes. It shouldn’t be done anywhere, by the way — in case you needed to be told that — but just something to ponder the next time a writer is in the news like this. (Because of course it will happen again.)
Signed, someone who has had social media content lifted word-for-word. (Oh, and they used the exact image I created as well. 🎉)
originally published on instagram