Manual For Fiction Writers, Block, Lawrence [best books to read for beginners txt] 📗

My novelette, Like a Dog in the Street, concerned the capture of a daring international terrorist by Israeli security forces. His confederates counter by planting a bomb in the United Nations Building in New York and threatening to blow up half the eastern seaboard if the terrorist isn't released. The Israelis do release the man, but while processing him for release they give him an injection of rabies virus; the symptoms won't appear for about thirty days, and once they do appear death is inevitable.

That little gambit with the rabies virus was one that I'd been carrying around for years before I found the right story to support it, and I was not entirely happy with the idea of Brian's having stolen it. In due course his story appeared and I read it and relaxed. In his yarn, a U.S. intelligence service has to release an enemy agent in response to a terrorist demand. They don't want to lose him, so before the ransom demand is met he's given poison which begins acting after he's in East Berlin, or wherever. Once the symptoms show up he gets in touch and is told the antidote is available?all he has to do is surrender himself again, which he does, only to learn he's been tricked, as the poison was non-lethal all along.

Brian was absolutely right?what he'd practiced here was legitimate theft, or what I prefer to call creative plagiarism. His story derived directly from mine, but he had so adapted the idea as to create a completely different story.

And, thinking about the way his story had grown out of mine, I remembered how my story had developed in the first place. Back in 1961 I saw a Ben Casey TV show, one of the first episodes, in which Vince Edwards gets scratched by a rabies victim and for some medical reason can't risk taking the series of Pasteur shots. He has to wait thirty days to see if symptoms develop, knowing that the disease will be fatal if they do. The fragment of medical information, and the idea of making dramatic use of it, hung around in my mind for a long time before it took fictive form. When I got around to using it, I wasn't stealing it from the producers of Ben Casey, any more than Brian was stealing anything from me.

Most writers are readers, and I think it's natural enough that our reading should be the source of a substantial portion of our story ideas. There is a line to be drawn between legitimate and illegitimate theft, between simple and creative plagiarism. The acid test, it seems to me, is whether the plagiarist contributes something significant of his own devising to what he has borrowed.

Milton made essentially this distinction three centuries ago in Iconoclastes. For such a kind of borrowing as this, he wrote, if it be not bettered by the borrower, among good authors is accounted Plagiar�.

Writers, good or otherwise, are often quick to suspect they've been plagiarized, and not creatively, either. I've had this experience myself a couple of times. For example, I wrote a book called The Canceled Czech in which my hero goes behind the Iron Curtain to liberate an imprisoned Czech who had collaborated with the Nazis during the war. He accomplishes this by putting the Czech into a cataleptic trance, smuggling him across borders in a coffin, and then indulging his own sense of justice by conveying the man, comatose in the coffin, to a crematorium.

A couple years after the book came out, I ran across a novel called Mills, which opens with the hero smuggling a war criminal from East to West Berlin in a coffin, disguised as a corpse, and then indulging his own sense of justice by conveying the man, still in the coffin, to a crematorium.

This did not make me terribly happy. I can't be sure that the man who wrote Mills ever read The Canceled Czech; even if he did, I can't be certain the theft was deliberate. A good friend of mine discovered to his horror that he'd committed grievous plagiarism in a novel, having stolen the plot of a well-known short story in considerable detail. He knew he'd read the story many years previously, although he had no conscious memory of it. The author of the short story never sued him and no reviewers ever remarked on the coincidence, but he still winces at the memory of this unintentional larceny.

These things happen. More than a few times, an editor has recognized unintentional plagiarism in time to nip it in the bud, and quite a few authors have simply discarded stories and novels when they learned they'd duplicated someone else's plot. But the creative plagiarist, using someone else's work as a point of departure for his own, has no worries on this score.

Discontent will often serve to initiate an act of creative plagiarism. Much as the oyster copes with an irritating grain of sand by coating it so as to form a pearl, so may an author deal with an irritating film or story by refashioning it into a more satisfying story of his own. When I watch a character behave stupidly, I find myself calculating what he should do, and what the effects of this proper behavior will be. Occasionally my solution to his problem is sufficiently different from the author's, and seems to me to