Tag Archives: fiction

DaVinci Code Plagiarism?

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What?

Okay, so we all know that I sometimes retreat into a cave where I have no knowledge of current events. But this isn’t even current. It’s been going on since February. And even I can’t stay in a cave that long.

I’m talking about the plagiarism lawsuit over The DaVinci Code.

I heard about it today and spent some time catching up on the news with some good old Google searching. It appears that the authors of The Holy Blood, The Holy Grail (HBHG), which I thought was a work of non-fiction, are suing the author of The DaVinci Code (DC), clearly a work of fiction, for “appropriating” the central theme of their book for his. The situation is summed up quite nicely in this article from the The Times of London.

I read both books. Here’s my take.

I read DC first, primarily because it was getting so much press. This was about two years ago. I found the story very interesting — in fact, it was the primary reason I kept reading. It had a lot of fascinating “facts” and puzzles. I’m a sucker for fiction based on little-known fact and this had me hooked with its wild premise — that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, who escaped to France with their child — based on a string of facts that could just make the premise true. But as for writing style, characterization, etc., Dan Brown missed the boat, at least as far as I’m concerned.

I’m not the only one who feels this way. Frank Wilson of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, quoted in Opus Dei, said:

In my view, the book is unexceptionally written, with minimal character development and a third-rate guidebook sense of place. It is, however, a quick and easy read, largely because most of the chapters are only a few pages long, and just about all of them end as cliffhangers.

If you don’t pay too much attention, but sort of let the book go in one eye and out the other, you’ll get to the end before you know it. [Emphasis added.]

And Peter Millar of The Times of London (again quoted in Opus Dei — they must love this stuff) said,

This is without doubt, the silliest, most inaccurate, ill-informed, stereotype- driven, cloth-eared, cardboard-cutout-populated piece of pulp fiction that I have read. And that’s saying something. [Emphasis added.]

They said it better than I could. But there was enough page turning action to get people to read it — I breezed through the first half in a day, then finished it up a few days later — and I think the premise was more than enough to get people talking about it. The result: a bestseller from a rather average piece of writing. (It wasn’t the first and it won’t be the last.)

After reading it, I remember wondering why it was a bestseller. Maybe I missed something? I read fast and that tends to lessen the reading experience. So I did double duty and I read Brown’s Angels and Demons, too. More of the same poor characterization but with better puzzles and an even less believable plot. I don’t need to read any more Dan Brown.

Anyone who thinks Dan Brown is a great writer must read an awful lot of crap. (I’m sure that statement will get me in trouble somewhere.)

Intrigued by the whole Jesus-was-married-and-the-Catholic-Church-tried-to-hide-it thing, I sought out HBHG. I found it in my local library, of all places. It was a slow read, even for me. But I slogged through it. Lots of fascinating stuff, in painstaking detail. (Too much detail for light reading, if you ask me.) It seemed to provide all the background information for DC — the well-researched facts to back up the book’s central premise.

In fact, I always assumed that Dan Brown had read HBHG — he mentions it in DC — and had written a novel based on it. After all, how could he — a novelist — have come up with all that material by himself? It would take years to dig all that up. Or a reading list that included HBHG and a few other books that covered the same general topics.

Mind you, I don’t think it’s wrong to base a work of fiction on a work of non-fiction. And that’s where I’m having a problem with the lawsuit. Is it wrong? Am I wrong to think that it’s not?

My understanding of copyright law is that you cannot copyright an idea. Has someone changed that?

As a Guardian Unlimited article points out,

The case is also likely to clarify existing copyright laws over the extent to which an author can use other people’s research.

And that’s what scares me. Suppose I read a handful of books about Abraham Lincoln in preparation for writing a novel that takes place during his presidency. Suppose one of the books says something silly — like he was gay (hmmm, why does that sound so familiar?) — and that becomes one of the underlying themes of my book. Will the author that built the Lincoln-was-gay premise be able to turn around and sue me for plagiarism?

I guess if my book became a bestseller, anything is possible.

And then there’s Lewis Perdue, the author of Daughter of God, who claims that Dan Brown plagiarized his book. I guess he’ll be suing next. Until then, he’ll keep himself busy with his own blog, The Da Vinci Crock. I haven’t read his book, but if his claims are true, it would appear that he has a stronger case than the HBHG authors. Perhaps he just doesn’t have as much money for lawyers.

The lawsuit’s court case ended today, which is probably why I finally heard about it. You can read the Reuter’s coverage of the closing day here.

I’ll be waiting to hear how the judge rules.

On Cell Phones

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I think a lot of valid arguments can be made that cell phones are out of control. It’s gotten to the point that everyone seems to have one.

Or maybe I should say at least one. I had a real estate agent last year who carried two of them and a pager.

Is anyone really that important?

No matter where you go, you see someone with his cell phone pasted to the side of his head blabbing away, often oblivious to what’s going on around him. Or even funnier: apparently blabbing away to himself because he’s wearing some kind of fancy Bluetooth earpiece that looks suspiciously like communications head gear from the orginal Star Trek.

Do these people really need to be talking while they’re shopping for groceries, standing on line in the post office, crossing the street or — dare I say it — piloting their car through a crowded parking lot?

Does everyone need a cell phone? Even kids have them now. Heck, when I was a kid, it was a real treat to have an extension of the house phone in my bedroom. I didn’t have my own phone number, a number that would reach me any time of the day or night wherever I was.

Am I jealous of today’s kids and their cellphones? Hell, no! What’s so good about being reachable anywhere you are when you’re a teenager out goofing off with your friends?

I do, of course, have a cell phone. It’s for business — and I’m not just saying that. I set up my office phone number so I can forward it to my cell phone when I’m not at the office. People call that published number and reach me. I’ve booked more than a few helicopter flights on that phone.

And I do use the phone when I need information or need to tell someone something. Going to be late for an appointment? I call. Can’t find the street I’m supposed to turn on? I call. Need to know if we have any plans for next Tuesday night? I call. According to my phone bill, more than 80% of the calls I make last less than a minute.

The important word here is need. I use my cell phone when I need to. I don’t use it for idle chatter. There’s two reasons for that. First, I like to be comfortable when I’m chatting with a friend or family member. So I usually do it from home. Second, lengthy chats wear down the phone’s battery. A dead cell phone won’t meet my communication needs.

And no, I won’t buy the second battery pack. Or the colorful face plate or case. Or latest ring tone.

What’s with the ring tone thing anyway? I think that’s the most obnoxious part of cell phone usage.

We’ve all experienced this: You’re sitting in a restaurant with a friend/spouse/family, having a nice dinner, when the cell phone the idiot at the table behind you owns starts playing the cha-cha or the opening bars of a Def Leppard track or some digitized sound effect that sounds like a primal scream. He thinks its funny. Do you?

I don’t. I think it’s a selfish attempt to get attention at the expense of the people around him.

I read somewhere recently that people have no qualms about plunking down $10 for a ring tone but they hesitate when it comes to buying a new CD. (If anyone out there can find that piece online, please use the Comments link to share the URL; I can’t find it.)

My phone, a 1-1/2 year old Motorola flip phone, has a vibrate mode. Since I wear it on my belt, I feel it when it rings. If I don’t pick it up after a few moments, it plays a sound that’s kind of like a doorbell. A simple little chime. I’m not saying its not obnoxious — any sound a device makes in a public place is obnoxious — but it’s far less offensive than some. And frankly, every time I hear it in a public place and someone looks at me, I’m embarrassed. I don’t want to be seen as one of them. (And we all know who they are.)

Mike’s got one of those Razr phones. He says people are envious of him. The phone is extremely thin, has a built-in camera and e-mail features, and does more than my original computer did. (I’m sure it has more processing power, too.) But come on guys — it’s a phone. A phone.

I’d still have my original Motorola flip phone if it would work as well as the newer one. I liked it better. It was simpler and started up quicker. It was plain black and it didn’t have a color screen. It didn’t have to make a sound when you turned it on or shut it off. And it didn’t have a built-in camera, Internet capabilities, Bluetooth, and dozens of ring tones to choose from. It was a simple, small, easy to use phone. Like the original Princess phones. Although it no longer is connected to any network, it’ll still work for 911 calls. So I keep it and its car power adapter in my car, just in case I need to make that emergency call and my other phone is dead.

That’s what cell phones were originally for, isn’t it? Emergencies?

Anyway, what started this whole rampage about cell phones was an article I read on Slate.com about fiction where the cell phone becomes the villain. It’s called “Can You Fear Me Now? – The cell phone goes from annoying to evil” and it’s by Bryan Curtis.

Some of the stories aren’t that farfetched, either.

Essential Truth

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More on the James Frey fray.

The Unger Report, a regular feature on NPR, talked about the “essential truth” in Jame’s Frey’s “memoir.” You can listen at NPR : ‘Pieces’ of Essential Truth. Or better yet: do what I do and subscribe to the Satire from the Unger Report podcast. It’s usually very funny.

I asked myself the other day why I’m so pissed off about this James Frey thing. I think it’s because, as a writer, I believe that writers owe the public the truth. If a book is a memoir, it’s supposed to be true, at least as you remember the truth. (If this is the way Frey remembers the truth, he really needs to get into therapy.) If a book’s content is so exaggerated that large parts of it are made up, then that book should be sold to readers as fiction.

From what I’ve read about the book, it wasn’t particularly well written and it was turned down by 17 publishers when the author attempted to sell it as fiction. So the only way he could sell it to a publisher — and to the unsuspecting and trustful public — was as a real life story.

And that’s what pisses me off. He abused the reader’s trust. No writer should ever do that.

Three Quick Book Reviews and a Rant about Amazon.com

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What I’ve been reading.

Late yesterday afternoon, while taking a relaxing, hot bath, I finished reading The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. Those of you who are movie-goers may remember the movie of the same name, which came out in 1986, starring Sean Connery and a very young Christian Slater.

I vaguely remembered the movie and was drawn to the book by its mention in a number of lists that appeared in Bookmarks magazine and Mystery Scene magazine. So I went to our excellent library here in Wickenburg and borrowed a copy of the book.

I’m fast reader, but this book was a slow read for me. The underlying mystery of the dying monks is what interested me, but the book was also full of insightful details about monastery life in 1300s Italy. And there was another plot line concerning a meeting of several orders of monks with delegates from the Pope. That was backed up by page after page of information about religious beliefs and differences of opinion and Middle Ages politics. Although I’m sure this is interesting to a student of those times, it was the part that slowed me down.

Since there was a movie made from the book and since I only vaguely remembered it, I picked up a copy at the video rental place on my way home yesterday. I couldn’t get it in DVD, so I was stuck with a less-than-perfect VHS copy. That’s okay; it was good enough for a Sunday evening’s entertainment. Mike watched it with me. The movie simplified the book’s details and made a bit of a plot twist that put protagonist William (Sean Connery) in greater jeopardy — something that always seems to work well in movies. It was more entertaining than the book, but I think it could have been done better. Still, the visuals of the abbey seemed quite realistic.

I also purchased the recently published The Elements of Style: Illustrated, which I heard about in an NPR interview with the illustrator, Maira Kalman. This book is a faithful reproduction of the grammar and usage classic with a twist: many of the example sentences are illustrated with full-color paintings. This little hardcover book will replace my old softcover edition on my reference book shelf. The illustrations are colorful and amusing. I bought four copies of the book and plan to give the other three to my favorite editors as Christmas gifts.

A few months ago, I heard another story on NPR, this one about a new computer DVD set called The Complete New Yorker. This eight DVD set includes scanned images of virtually every page of the New Yorker magazine going back to its first issue in 1925. Extremely flexible and well-designed reader software makes it easy to find, browse, view, or read each page of each issue. I’d read some feedback on Amazon.com (which I no longer use to buy my books; more on that in a moment) about this “book” and most of the complaints centered around not being able to read the articles without seeing the advertisements. But that’s precisely why I find this book so interesting. I can see magazine content with advertisements side-by-side. That might seem weird, but when you consider that the ads go back to 1925, you may realize the historic significance of it. Or at least my interest.

I installed the reader software on my PowerBook — it works great on Mac OS x 10.3 or later, as well as Windows (as you might expect) — and was soon browsing the very first issue of the magazine. Then I tried out the search feature, which enables you to search by year, issue, author, department, or topic. Although the search feature could be a little quicker, I suspect it’s my G4 PowerBook that’s holding it back. (The computer is just starting to show its age.) I look forward to loading everything up on my dual G5 in the office — including disk images of the 8 DVDs (if that’s possible) for something to browse through when I’m on hold, waiting for some kind of customer service or technical support. (I seem to spend an awful lot of time on hold these days.)

If you’re wondering why I’ve called it quits with Amazon, here’s the deal. I became an Amazon associate back when the company was first started and sold quite a few books for them, pocketing a generous 15% commission. Somewhere along the line, they changed the commission structure and my revenue stream suffered for it. But that’s not why I’m cutting them out of my life.

I first started getting annoyed by Amazon’s reader review program. Reviews seemed to fall into three categories: normal people writing reviews (okay with me), people who were very full of themselves and thought they were great reviewers writing reviews (get a life, guys), and people who obviously wrote a review to bash the author or the book for some personally-motivated reason. This came to a head when I read a review of one of my Quicken books and realized that the reviewer hadn’t even read the book before soundly bashing it. Most of what he said was simply not true and anyone paging through the book could see it for themselves. But one of the problems with buying online is that you can’t page through the book. People rely on the reviews and when they bash the author, people don’t buy. Of course, it goes the other way, too. I once bought a book on Amazon.com because of several rave reviews. I truly believe the author had his friends write those reviews because the book was just awful. But Amazon rewards people for their “opinions,” no matter why they were contributed or how realistic they are.

Amazon also constantly “suggests” titles based on previous purchases and searches. I once bought two books about eBay for my sister, who was trying to put my godfather’s antiques on eBay for sale and needed help. For months afterward, Amazon kept pushing eBay books at me. And I’m really tired of seeing lists of suggestions by people I don’t even know. Yet there’s no way to turn off this feature — I’ve written to them and asked.

The final straw happened last month when I ordered three books and a calendar, all of which were supposedly in stock and ready for shipment. I chose the “Super Saver” shipping option, which gives you free shipping when all items can be shipped together. Suddenly my order was shifted to the back burner. I received an e-mail message saying that the items would be shipped out on December 26 — more than two months after my order! I wrote to them asking why I had to wait. I got a response with some nonsense about multiple warehouses and how the items would have to be collected in one place for shipment. But they made a “one time” exception for me. I had the books in 3 days. I’m still waiting for the calendar.

I started browsing Barnes & Noble’s Web site, www.bn.com, and found the same prices as Amazon with fewer annoying “reviews” and targeted marketing. BN also has free shipping for orders over $25 and when you choose it, your books go out within 3 days using 3-day UPS shipping. So now I use BN.com and highly recommend it to anyone who buys books online.

What’s next on my reading list? I think I need to finish up a few books I started and set aside. More on those in another entry.

NaNoWriMo Expanded

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I talk more about beginning novelists.

The other day I wrote an opinion piece about NaNoWriMo ’05, which I turned into a podcast for Maria Speaks. Here are some related thoughts and experiences.

One of the things that has always bothered me was way organizations prey upon people who want to be writers — particularly novelists. They have writers’ workshops and writers’ magazines and and writers’ Web sites with forums and writers’ mail-away courses. They sell products to writers to motivate and inspire them and make them better writers. I’ve seen these products and although I admit to have bought my share of writing books, I’ve also seen enough to know that only a small percentage of what’s sold will really help a writer. And the thing that bothers me most is the fact that the vast majority of writing publications focus on topics of interest to beginning writers — people just starting out. I’m talking about people who haven’t had anything published yet. It’s as if they never expect their readers to get beyond that point.

The people they prey upon — the beginning writers — have a story (or or two or three or dozens) inside their hearts that they’re trying to get out. They’re convinced their work is better than bestselling author, fill-in-the-blank. They believe that the editors who have rejected their work are stupid, selfish, and evil. But rather than spend their time writing, getting those stories out and fine-tuning them for submission and possible publication, they waste a lot of time whining about editors and publishers and the industry in general in online writers’ forums. Or providing all-knowing (or sarcastic) answers to serious questions posted by other want-to-be novelists.

This is where something as silly as NaNoWriMo can help. If these people would stop wasting time and get down to it, they might actually get some work done. A novel in 30 days sounds impossible, but if they’ve been thinking about it as much as they’ve been wasting time in online forums, they should have all the hard part done: the planning, plotting, and character development. Getting the words down should be easy. Just stop procrastinating.

And if there’s one thing that’s always helped me produce, it’s deadlines. Ask Cliff, Nancy, and Megg, three of my editors. (More on that in another blog entry.)

Here’s a real life story about someone I knew years ago. There’s a slight chance she might read this and, if she does, I hope she’s not offended by me telling her story from my outsider’s point of view.

Mary (not her real name) always wanted to be a novelist. I think she was partial to fantasy and science fiction, but she may have had other things in mind. I don’t know because I only had an opportunity to read one thing she’d written. She spent most of her non-working hours online, frequenting bulletin board systems’ (BBSs’) message boards (precursors to the Internet’s forums). She had a BBS and so did I. In fact, that’s how we met.

Her BBS posts were consistently negative toward publishers and editors. She spent a lot of her writing time writing short stories and entering them into contests. She never won. (More about writing contests and other gimmicks in another entry.)

Sometime around then, she sent me one of her short stories to read. I don’t remember what it was about. I don’t recall it being bad, though. But it did have one big flaw. At the end of the story, which takes place in Washington, DC, the main character looks out the window and sees the Pentagon. It was an important part of the story’s irony — seeing that building. I remember that clearly. But it was also a serious flaw because the Pentagon is not in Washington, DC. It’s in Arlington, VA. And it simply cannot be seen from the location her character was standing. When I pointed this out to her, she got extremely offended, as if I’d gone out of my way to find something wrong to pick on her story. I hadn’t gone out of my way. The glaring error was there, right in my face. I would have done her a disservice if I hadn’t pointed it out.

Anyway, she didn’t send me any more stories.

Then one day she decided that the biggest thing holding her back from being a published author was her job. I’m talking about her “day job” — the one where she spent time to earn money to pay rent and buy food. That job. So she quit and retreated into her apartment to write her novel.

A year later, Mary was completely out of money and borrowing from family members to survive. She hadn’t finished her novel and she hadn’t had anything published. I think someone pulled the money plug and she was forced to go back to work.

That’s about the same time I left my day job and started teaching computers and writing how-to books. She claimed I “sold out.” I think she meant that I was writing non-fiction instead of fiction because I was in it for the money. Maybe I did, but my current lifestyle sure beats the 9 to 5, suit-wearing grind I’d be stuck in if I’d kept that corporate job. And who the hell wants to be a starving writer, anyway?

I moved to Arizona and we pretty much lost touch. I heard she had a short story published in a small literary magazine. She was paid in copies. (See my blog entry about Freebies.) But she had her first clip.

The point of this story: this is one person I know who falls into the same category as many of the beginning writers attracted to things like NaNoWriMo, writers’ magazines, and writers’ Web sites with their forums. I’ve just reported her progress in about five years of her life. Five years is a long time. Too long to waste if you’re serious about becoming a writer.

Every day you don’t write, though, is a day you waste if becoming a novelist is your goal. And don’t fool yourself into thinking that participating in those writers’ forums is good practice for writing your novel. I’ll agree that it’s good practice for typing your novel. But it isn’t going to get you any closer to finishing your work in progress.

So why are you reading this? Get back to work!