Monday, May 29, 2006
Do you ever find yourself unintentionally copying the style or lifting phrases from authors whose work you admire? I have been reading a series of books by Laurie R. King about the adventures of a sixtyish Sherlock Holmes and his fifteen year old female apprentice. Oddly, I don't think these books are derivative of Conan-Doyle, but I almost feel as if the relationship, the moral and ethical issues they confront and habit they have of quoting from literature is lifted from whole cloth out of Dorthy L. Sayers Lord Peter Wimsey books. She uses some of the same quotes and phrases from the Wimsey books. The heroine is a scholar at Oxford like Harriet Vane. She has a character named Peter who has to be Lord Peter Wimsey even make a cameo in one of the books. I like these books very much. They are my favorite thing I've picked up to read in ages. Recent efforts by some of my favorite authors have been disappointing, so I was happy to find her work. But I'm still a bit bothered. I am a big fan of the Wimsey/Vane books and probably have them close to memorized. The estate allowed Jill Paton Walsh to flesh out and complete some of her unfinished work on Wimsey, and I had the books so well memorized that I kept finding mistakes in her works. But that being the case, I think I can be quite a derivative writer myself, so I struggle not to do that.
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I used to do that fairly often, but always when i was journaling or writing something for school, not recently. Maybe because I'm not reading anything but ASIMOV'S, ANALOG and APEX, usually not more than one piece at a time by the same author. While I was reading Frank McCourt I resisted several impulses to say or write "entirely" the way he did, as in "You'd better stop that before it destroys you entirely" which seems to be the sort of thing people in Limerick, Ireland used to say.
In a creative writing class I took my freshman year at the College of Creative Studies at UCSB, someone wrote a poem that went, "A fierce healing warmth from us; my knees tucked in yours," and everybody loved it. That summer, I read THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK by Doris Lessing for the first time, and realized where it had been lifted from: the famous passage where heroine/narrator/protagonist (I'm having trouble with this terminology, which doesn't make me feel very professional) Anna Wulf describes every moment of a day in her life, which begins when she wakes up in bed with her lover during a rainstorm.
It really bothered me that somebody just took a passage from novel like that and inserted it in their poem, and no one knew.
I wonder if the person that did it was even aware. You never know what soaks in. I have a pretty sharp memory and can usually remember where and when I heard/read something.
Yes, I've always wondered that.
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