Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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There are two issues which seem to be preoccupying cultural circles these days: plagiarism and ghost writers. Plagiarism has come up from time to time in the past, but this time the issue has taken a more serious than usual turn.

A teenage author, Kaarya Viswanathan, was accused of lifting whole passages from two writers, Megan McCafferty and Sophie Kinsella, and included them in her novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. As a result the publisher withdrew the book from market.

What drew my attention to the fuss was an article by Robert McCrum in the Observer Review, which one can give the title of "In Defence of Plagiarism". Plagiarism, claims McCrum, "has always lurked in the bloodstream of the book world like an unappeasable strain of some deadly virus, but recently our obsession with it has approached bird flu proportions". He then asks: "Is the threat not exaggerated and in danger of distorting our judgment?"

The writer believes that there is a bankruptcy in imagination which leads to the search on the internet for ideas to snatch. Once the would-be writer's catch-word was Ezra Pound's "Make it New", but now, in McCrum's words "it has become if you can't create why not copy and paste".

Plagiarism, McCrum believes, has always existed. To Shakespeare and the Jacobeans plagiarism was hardly a crime. Everyone borrowed from everyone else. Elizabethan literature, he continues, "is a cat's cradle of cross-reference, homage, allusion, misquotation, in-joke and world play." But today with the laws of intellectual property, and computer analysis, it has become easy to discover such acts.

The issue of ghost writing was brought up by news that a Manchester United 20-year-old player was offered five million pounds for five books. The books, however, will be written by a ghost writer, who had previously written a biography of William Wordsworth.

In an article in the Observer Review Tim Adams claims that "Ghost writing is no longer the sector of publishing that dare not speak its name; it looks like the future of the book trade." In many cases, the name on the front cover of any book on the bestseller list is "increasingly unlikely to be the name of its author".

It seems that the search for ghost writers has become quite common. There is a certain technique about this kind of literary cooperation. According to one ghost writer, he spends three hours a day with his man or woman, for six days, "preferably spread over six months."

Adams then goes on to give the history of ghost writing. The term was coined by a certain Christy Walsh who formed the Christy Walsh Syndicate in 1921 and for years controlled the literary output of American sportsmen. He selected a number of ghosts and, according to Adams, laid down a strict code of conduct for his operation. Number 1: "Don't insult the intelligence of the public by claiming these men write their own stuff". Number 2 "All ghosts must be in daily communication with their 'bodies'".

There are certain directives for ghost writers, according to Adams. A new ghost writer has to learn a lot about style. He usually makes the mistake of thinking that he ought to write the way his celebrity talks. That is an error. He ought to write the way the public thinks his celebrity talks.

The frustration of celebrities, and possibly the reason they go after ghost writers, is that "they are in a world we desire but are unable to articulate how we imagine it feels". The job of the ghost is to speak in a voice that is half way between his or her mundane world and that of the subject. A final remark by a ghost writer is worth mentioning "The key quality of any ghost is the absolute absence of ego, good ghosts are hard to come by."