is it plagiarism or is it something worse

There’s a fascinating article in the New Yorker this week about a lawsuit between Tracy Wolff, a successful romantasy writer, and Lynne Freeman, an unsuccessful novelist who claims that Wolff stole her ideas. Accusations of plagiarism are common enough in literary circles, and sometimes very funny, such as the lawsuit between two Omegaverse writers that the New York Times delicately referred to as “a feud in wolf-kink erotica.” Others are less stranger and sadder, such as Kate Losse’s claim that Dave Eggers’ novel The Circle (about a young woman working for a sinister Facebook-like company) had borrowed from her nonfiction book The Boy Kings (about Losse’s real experiences as a young woman working for actual Facebook). Losse never sued, and she’s since deleted her Medium post on the subject, but I distinctly remember one of her pieces of evidence. She claimed that her name—Kate Losse—and Eggers’ heroine’s name—Mae Holland—had the same vowel sounds and syllable count, and that this fact, coupled with other similarities, meant that Eggers had definitely ripped her off.

When is a thing too much like another thing: when are the preponderance of details proof of theft, and when are they just nothing at all, random patterns that only look similar if you squint? Eggers claimed he’d never read Losse’s book; she soon deleted her post. Probably nobody remembers the affair now except them, and me, because I have brain problems and will forget I’ve already poured myself a glass of water but will happily rant at you about something weird I read ten years ago. But Losse’s accusations stuck out to me for two reasons: one, because the name thing seemed like such a crazy reach; and two, because Eggers easily could have read The Boy Kings, borrowed from it without attribution, and lied about doing so. This kind of deliberate “soft plagiarism” happens all the time.¹

It also happens all the time unconsciously, to all writers. Arguably, it’s what writing is: the putting together of ideas and images synthesized from other writers, alchemized in your own brain into something new and potent. There isn’t anything new under the sun: we’ve known this since the writing of Ecclesiastes. In nonfiction, however, it’s vital to cite your sources, to show you were paying attention to your peers and did the work; less so in fiction, except that the act of writing in a genre or register is itself a demonstration of attention paid to peers and that you did the work. And then, even if you’re paying attention and you did do the work, it’s still extremely common to come up with the same ideas that somebody else came up with, simultaneously, with no theft or attribution required. Ideas are not, in fact like fingerprints or DNA but something made up of words, which everybody uses all the time.