The royal road to research

Plagiarism: passing off another's work as your own. It's a tricky issue, and one highlighted with aplomb in an article recently posted by Alma Alexander on the Science Fiction and Fantasy Novelists blog. To paraphrase Ms Alexander, plagiarism is an emotionally-charged word whose darker connotations should not be, er, connoted in the case of those carrying out specific forms of research. Novelists, for example.

For the most part, I agree with Alexander's post, though I wince at this sentence:

Academia puts it thusly, that lifting information from just one source is plagiarising; lifting from many sources is research.

Indeed we do not. I've spent several tedious (but necessary) two-hour seminars with my first year psychology undergraduates setting out the parameters of plagiarism. [Side note: On the mid-course evaluation questionnaire, students were asked: 'What would you like to see more of in this seminar series?' One answer: 'I'd like more of those really long seminars where we do plagiarism and referencing, please'. The 'please' kills me.]

I teach plagiarism as this: When you include something - could be a criticism, a description, anything - in an essay or a report and you do not provide a correctly referenced source for that something, then you are plagiarising. By omission, you imply that you are the creator of that something. You also obscure the work that you've done in the construction of the essay (range, depth and your understanding of certain papers).

Now, plagiarism is a sliding scale. "Freud was rather pants" might be a useful summary of much work into the worth of early psychoanalysis (a somewhat stubborn stain on the rep of psychology, that) and I'm not going to a mark a student too harshly if this statement isn't referenced; the student is quite capable of coming to this conclusion themselves, even if the conclusion peppers the literature. But if the student writes, "It might be argued that Freud considered dreams to be the royal road to the subconscious," and does not include a reference, my nostrils will twitch. If the whole essay stinks - i.e. it includes an HTML horizontal line that the student hasn't been able to delete since copying the text wholesale from Wikipedia - then I'll press the plagiarism alarm beneath my desk, which is linked to the Vice Chancellor's heavy mob.

Ostensibly, the issue of plagiarism in regard to literature is different, but I'm not so sure. Basically, the consensus seems to be: You can take things from other people's work because (a) they're probably dead (most people are, at this point in our evolutionary history); (b) it's too bothersome to attribute originality, so why go to all that effort?

Well, that may be true on occasion. I've no doubt that Norman Mailer's last book (The Castle in the Forest) contains a great deal of research into the early life of Adolf Hitler and I'm certain that, at its close, I'll have no idea what sources he used. As a reader, do I need to? Probably not. And yet, there are elements of the book that I've - either correctly or incorrectly - identified as original to Mailer. The idea, perhaps, of God as the Dumkopf, or that Fallen Angels fiddled with Hitler's childhood. If I were to look at Mailer's sources and see a book that introduced this idea, I would feel somewhat let down.

At the back of my mind is the notion that there is a compact between the reader and the writer. It has many levels. Verisimilitude is one. Meaning is another. A third, perhaps, is historical accuracy unless fictional demands cause the writer to swerve around it. I understand, I think, the reaction of those who felt a little cheated that important parts of McEwan's Atonement were not really authored by him. (Please excuse the fact that I haven't read the novel.) To author something is to provide it with a meaning in context. If the context and meaning already exist in the primary material, it is a natural reaction for the reader to think that the value of the book has diminished. It is a form of cheating outside the cheating permitted by the tacit compact. There is a sense in which the materials of a book must be digested and re-configured; not inserted wholesale. (Though having read some beautiful passages during the research for my current book, the idea is bloody tempting.)

I'm one of those writers who lists his sources and helpers at the end of the book. Not to take the moral high-ground in a plagiarism sense, but I still have the academic urge to cite my references. Not, either, in a PhD-like way (my thesis references ran to over fifty pages, I think) but just to indicate to the reader the provenance of the book, in research terms at least. Its themes and character are mine. I also want the people who helped me to know that their aid was appreciated. Two Boeing 747 pilots have read over the bit of my second novel where I describe an air crash from the point of view of a pilot (opined one: 'I don't think you've understood the basic principles of flight'); it would have been literally impossible to do it without them, and it would be odd not to cite them as a source.

Anyway, the dishes won't wash themselves. Take a look at Alexander's article. It raises some interesting issues.

Come with me now...

One paragraph down, about a billion to go

I made a start on my new novel today. I spent most of the afternoon scratching around my research pile, downloading demos of scene-plotting software (conclusion: there isn't much out there), until I decided that I could either research the book for the next two years or just sit down and write the bloody thing.

Inspired by Debra Hamel's TwitterLit service, here's the first sentence:

The time traveller was being followed.

That difficult first novel - tell me about it

Still somewhat dizzy from the night ferry twix'd Brittany and Devon - I'll bore you with snaps in a later post - I've been perusing the books section of the Observer Review. The old chestnut of 'the tricky first novel' has been placed on the open fire of journalistic regard, and the author of the article, Kate Kellaway, makes some interesting points.

Some of this, of course, we know already. We know that publishers will either pay a first author a sum that reflects the real-world takings of a first novel (rarely more than a few grand, a fraction of the minimum wage when counted) or a stonking sum that reflects outlandish hope and 'confidence' that the publisher has bagged an author of golden-egg-shitting proportions. We know that wheelie-bin loads of books are published each year, and publishers have the devil's own time spotting the one that will make them money.

We know that the emphasis is on 'placeable' - a marketing term. As such, it is on speaking terms with literary quality, but frequently makes the beast with two backs with celebrity endorsements (cf. Jordan's upcoming literary efforts). I once heard Mark Kermode shout at someone that the point of movie trailers is emphatically NOT to advertise the film per se, but to provide enough of the film to convince the sheep-brained viewer that he or she has ALREADY SEEN IT (Mark's emphasis, though I've wiped away the spittle). So, on choosing a film, we think, 'Ah, that Jarhead film looks almost exactly like Full Metal Jacket, which I saw when I was younger and adventurous, and I'd quite like to see it again, so - one adult please, and mind you liberally drizzle my nachos with that cheese-inspired chemical.' Placeability is key.

Somewhat typically, Kate Kellaway goes on to talk to several new authors, and rather than highlight (because remember, folks, this will work as a marketing piece) those who take the greatest and bravest risk on first-time authors - i.e. small publishers - she has chosen to highlight two from Faber, two from Doubleday, and one from Harvill Secker (a Random House imprint). No mention was made of, pff, The UKA Press, or The Friday Project, or Long Barn Books. It's her article, of course, not mine, but I thought this was a shame.

The article finishes with some interesting factoids, compiled by Anny Shaw:

• Around 70,000 titles are published a year in Britain, of which 6,000 are novels
• Any large UK publisher will receive 2,000 unsolicited novel manuscripts in a year
• The average sale of a hardback book by a first-time writer is 400 copies
• Many publishers use this rule of thumb to work out advances: they pay 50 per cent of the royalty earnings expected from the first print run
• According to the latest edition of Private Eye, first novel The Thirteenth Tale by ex-teacher Diane Setterfield (author's advance £800,000) has sold 13,487 copies to date. Only 516,129 to go and the book's paid for itself...

To which I can only add: Bloody good for you, Diane. If a publisher has judged her worth to be 800,000 green ones, then let us - gasp - see what she manages to produce over the course of a career, rather than pronouncing our smug judgement on her debut. I only hope she makes it that far.