Ethics, Please!

There's been a big bru-haha among the romance author loops following the accusation that Cassie Edwards committed plagiarism. OK, so I am not going to get into a debate about guilt or innocence. What I think is appalling is how little all the writers in my tiny little universe seem to know about what copyright is, what plagiarizing is, and what good manners are. What's up with that? Ideas are copyrighted. Titles are not copyrightable (but of course you're a boob if you think you can use "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" as the title of your book, even if it is about a shy man getting a date from an outcall service. But I digress.

Aren't we all writers because the creative impulse makes us want to share our particular, individual and unique view of the world with others? Where did it come to be that a writer wants to share the particular, individual and unique view of somebody else as their own? When I was in high school, I wore a great dress to my senior prom (unlike the one I wore when I was a sophomore and got asked to that senior prom, which dress resembled something like my grandmother's bathrobe). Anyway, my science teacher's (Mr. and Mrs. Schrager, where are you?) wife wife wore the same dress in a different color. Of course, we both looked great :) but we were mortified to be even that close in fashion. So why does someone not want to be the most unique writer they can be?

C'mon, folks. Let's not use I was too busy; I was too stressed; I was trying to share a wealth of knowledge with the unwashed tribes as the excuse for sloppy writing. If you are going to need to research historical data or other factual details for your writing, distill it down and put it in your own words. Otherwise not only are you a sneaky cuss, but it will sound utterly wrong in the middle of your story!

If you don't know the law, learn in. You know how the cop that pulled you over didn't buy it when you said "I didn't see the stop sign, officer?". Well the writing community doesn't swallow it either when you say you didn't realize you'd plunked a few dozen paragraphs of someone else's writing into the middle of your book.

And the quote of the day: You can fool some of the people, some of the time, but you can never fool all of the people all of the time.

You roll the dice and you takes your chances.