Why Plagiarists Do It (Between the Sheets)
(That's an old Lipton tea bag joke, by the way.)
Jack Shafer has a nice piece in Slate today on why plagiarists plagiarize. (I'm tempted to say "because they can.")
Among the reasons Shafer lists: writing is hard work, ambition exceeds talent, and contempt for the business.
I'd guess that Kaavya Viswanathan matches those three descriptions, and I'd throw in one more: In over her head. A young woman who dreams of being an investment banker—what kind of 16-year-old dreams of becoming an investment banker?—is told that she writes really well and she should write a novel. "I had only vaguely thought of becoming a writer," Viswanathan once admitted. But a book publisher throws money at her and says, We'll hook you up with some people who can help you with this....
The young writer gets the idea—probably not without reason—that everybody in the business employs ghostwriters. And so she isn't morally troubled by the fact that she's out promoting a book largely written (I'm guessing) by unknown scribes who "produce" content for the Generation Y market. And there you have it—the perfect ingredients for a literary scandal.
Viswanathan should have known better. But the ultimate responsibility here lies with Little, Brown, which was committing just as great a fraud as James Frey and Nan Talese at Random House....
What's the difference? Well, Frey and Talese were deceiving people who suffered from addiction. Viswanathan and her editor, Michael Pietsch, were pulling the wool over the eyes of teenagers.
Which is worse? Does it matter?
