Literary Clusterfucks 2013

I don't even understand this impulse. Like, even if you wanted to convey the same idea as a passage from Gatsby ... you're a writer! Write it your own way. This approach seems weirdly like more work.

reminds me of writing book reports in 4th grade where I'd just copy the encyclopedia and then change every 2 or 3 words to a synonym

Makes me think of something Sebald said in a lecture:"I can only encourage you to steal as much as you can. No one will ever notice. You should keep a notebook of tidbits, but don’t write down the attributions, and then after a couple of years you can come back to the notebook and treat the stuff as your own without guilt.

Lots of things resolve themselves just by being in the drawer a while.

Except, well, not if it's from the fucking Gatsby you doofus.

Also that worked better pre-Google.

teachers can run work through online plagiarism detectors but apparently publishers haven't heard about those yet

I think the key word in that Sebald quote is “tidbits.” He doesn’t say to steal paragraphs.

yeah, I think a lot of literary inventions come from writers reading a phrase/sentence/image they think is amazing and trying to re-create its effect in their own words. Usually they fail. Sometimes they fail and something just as good or at least something interestingly perverse comes out. This dude sees a paragraph he likes and goes yoink.

reminds me of, apropos of the "typing class" tv quote above, people retyping or writing out a novel verbatim to help absorb the rhythm of prose

every source I've seen advocate this exercise recommends that you take some time afterward before doing your own writing so that your mind doesn't have exact passages in there

meanwhile, this guy's creating his novels by collage and then not keeping track of whether he's rewritten anything

(c) bcz menard is fictional!

rather a crucial point here

Here is a famous sentence, the opening line to One Hundred Years of Solitude: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” And here, from Juan Rulfo’s 1955 novel Pedro Paramo, a favourite of Marquez, this: “Years later Father Renteria would remember the night his hard bed had kept him awake, and driven him outside.” Plagiarism? A few words changed here and there. A few added, a few taken away. Influence? The distinction is not as clear-cut as the words suggest.

This example is hilarious! There must be dozens or hundreds or thousands of books in which someone "remember"s something "years later". Only three words in common, and common words! This was the best defense he could come up with?

Statement from the publisher:

https://upswellpublishing.com/category/news

This example is hilarious! There must be dozens or hundreds or thousands of books in which someone "remember"s something "years later". Only three words in common, and common words! This was the best defense he could come up with?

And the Rulfo line isn't even the opening of that book!

Right, good point!

I came to this thread because I had been told that my father Darth VaderJohn CandyHughes posted here.

Good longform piece about the Bello plagiarism case discussed above (may require free registration to read)

https://airmail.news/issues/2022-7-23/under-the-influence

I’m afraid I laughed out loud at this

But now I’m not so sure. I google it, and the first result is a link to Rebecca Solnit’s Recollections of My Nonexistence, a 2020 essay collection that contains this line: “To be a young woman is to face your own annihilation in innumerable ways or to flee it or the knowledge of it, or all these things at once.” When I read Bello her line, and then Solnit’s right after it, she sighs. “I have a flaw in my writing process.”

Sad story overall tho. Something about the way she responds to a question about the umpteenth example of her doing this by talking about how she reacts “every time I get caught” made me think that this serial plagiarism has something in common with compulsive lying, in any case there’s obv a lot going on there. Not sure really what the publisher was meant to do with a book that was one-third c&p except spot it sooner tbh

The whole article is mind-boggling. The woman is either a scam artist or completely insane; the one thing she's not is a writer. And yeah, fine, she's got legitimate medical issues, but staring into her bottomless well of self-pity is giving me vertigo.

The punchline is great, though:

Jumi Bello is now working on a memoir.

Love this piece on AI fiction.

I know you were all reading this five days ago or whatever, but for those of us doing a weekend reading catching up: SO GOOD.

By @joshdzieza https://t.co/OjeUgXOBP6

— Jay Owens (@hautepop) July 24, 2022

You can see a clusterfuck where an author could win a prize for a novel where a lot of the grunt work was done via AI.

that's mostly cos prizes are stupid tho

Yes that's part of it.

My favourite American fiction is the pulp strand of stories churned out for money (SF, noir). Like how the piece maps out the update on this: one where Amazon inputs further pressures via their Algs, then an AI tool comes along to provide relief.

Meanwhile: https://restofworld.org/2022/china-romance-novels/

I never expected to sympathize with "writer who plagiarized a history of plagiarism in her public apology for plagiarizing" but that airmail piece was very humanizing. I sincerely hope that she comes out the other side of this as a stronger person, and has another chance* to pursue a writing career if that's still something she wants to do.

*: Assuming she first puts in place whatever medical and interpersonal supports she needs to free her from this pathological behavior.

Frankly I'd like to see a ripple effect that goes beyond her — the agents who represented her, and the editor who bought her book, should also be getting the professional stink-eye for at least a year or two.

Yeah I thought she came off well in that piece too, because she was neither "what I did is no problem" or over-the-top self-flagellating, I thought she had a very straightforward and I would say correct approach of "jeez, I keep doing this, I don't really understand why I'm compelled to do it but I see that it's not OK and that I have some work ahead of me if I want to fix it and write the books I have in me"

the rush to fast-track books by non-white people in the wake of george floyd was probably good not bad but it’s depressingly predictable that the “fast track” consisted of pressuring these authors to produce more quickly and with less oversight

As someone who published a book this year, there is no such thing as oversight in the publishing industry. The "editing" my book was subject to consisted of converting the quotation marks from US to UK style — there certainly was no fact-checking or any notes at all. They trusted what I gave them. It is like 99 percent on the author to have their shit together, and if the author doesn't have their shit together, it's extremely unlikely that anyone's gonna notice until it's too late. I mean, look at what happened with Naomi Wolf's last book, the one that hinged on a completely wrong reading of some statistical language. That book made it to print and into stores, and it wasn't until an interviewer said to her on live radio (or TV, I forget), "Hey, you know, your entire thesis is total bullshit, and here's why," that the publisher freaked out and yanked the thing.

my current basically freelance work is to be the underpaid oversight in the book-publishing industry -- so it does exist here and there, and some publishers do set side a small budget for it, especially when they're working with inexperienced authors -- tho it's a battle to get what i feel i deserve

(tbh my best customers are actually writers solidly earning in some other profession who sense that they need a beady eye over their work; from them i get a measure of professional solidarity -- i underquoted to one last year who insisted he pay me more when the project took longer than i expected)

i do usually give a manuscript the once-over with an inexpensive plagiarism app, and lightly fact-check stuff that strikes me as off

As someone who published a book this year, there is no such thing as oversight in the publishing industry.

this is an overgeneralization and is false with, at minimum, my copyeditors and editors at a major house. every last detail of my book gets gone over in copyedit multiple times ("on page 68 you say he drove from San Francisco to Milpitas but he left in the morning and when he gets there it's night; why did it take him all day to drive 49 minutes?") and the whole process is both fantastic and frustrating if you have a copy editor who's also doing this on details they don't actually know stuff about (restaurant work for example)

i'm reading the verge piece now, scattered thoughts:

who opens his novels with boring shit like the opening of this piece? jeffrey something? some shit british author.

"For example, ask GPT-3 to write Harry Potter in the style of Ernest Hemingway, as Branwen did, and it might produce profane reviews or a plot summary in Chinese or total nonsense."

sounds like gpt-3 understands rowling fairly well

"Branwen wrote that it’s a bit like trying to teach tricks to a superintelligent cat."

fairly insightful - who teaches tricks to cats?

the thing that strikes me about ai-generated writing is that it is quite literally meaningless - all style and no substance. there is a market for that. marketplaces like amazon privilege style over substance, and you know, this is not a new thing. i don't think it's that different from the penny-a-line pulps from the day. if we can get an ai to replace l. ron hubbard, i have a hard time seeing this as a bad thing.

the interest i have in this is in the theological implications. i'm aware, for instance, of the Urantia Book, which is said to be a "channeled text". why not skip the prophet and have ai write a holy book entirely?

every last detail of my book gets gone over in copyedit multiple times ("on page 68 you say he drove from San Francisco to Milpitas but he left in the morning and when he gets there it's night; why did it take him all day to drive 49 minutes?") and the whole process is both fantastic and frustrating if you have a copy editor who's also doing this on details they don't actually know stuff about (restaurant work for example)

I would have LOVED to go through a process like this. Turning in a manuscript and having it published basically as-is terrifies me, because there are ALWAYS fuckups in, for example, my Stereogum column; I credit an album to the wrong record label pretty much every month, or something similar. But as you said, you're going through a big house and I worked with a small UK indie. And it's entirely likely that there are internal deliberations as to how much work will go into a given title based on its prospects. Your stuff has a track record of good reviews in prestige publications, so you get A-level assistance up and down the chain. I'm (relatively speaking) nobody, so I don't.

my current basically freelance work is to be the underpaid oversight in the book-publishing industry -- so it does exist here and there, and some publishers do set side a small budget for it, especially when they're working with inexperienced authors -- tho it's a battle to get what i feel i deserve

I do something like this too, though earlier in the process — critiquing and/or editing manuscripts in order to help get them potentially salable. Which only kinda reinforces my belief that the publisher wants a ready-to-go project more often than not.

fairly insightful - who teaches tricks to cats?

Samantha Martin

The plagiarism piece is definitely humanising but there’s no way this person should be encouraged to keep writing. At every stage she ripped other writers off, and was allowed to fail upwards afterwards. And that shit about how she didn’t steal the plagiarism historians FEELINGS or HISTORY or whatever, is such bullshit. If you’re a writer who doesn’t understand the primacy of words, you shouldn’t be writing.

i don't think it's that different from the penny-a-line pulps from the day. if we can get an ai to replace l. ron hubbard, i have a hard time seeing this as a bad thing.

it's a bad thing because we'd also be replacing everyone else on the pulp circuit, some of whom turned out to be great writers, surely?

not that I know shit about what the 2022 equivalent of the pulps would be tbf

see rob’s link from yesterday at 15:05

or even the AI story in general. wattpad, those self-published amazon writers.. even slashfic

I don't see this as replacement. It seems like a place where substance and style sorta collapse onto one another. The authors can generate pages (physical substance), and AI is an assistant that can help.

The old pulp writers would have imaginative quirks of their own, if you like, that replaced a lack of writing style. The trade-off was more than enough. And maybe the AI assistants iron those out, maybe not.

Where we end up in a bad place is where the apps are acting as blockers for certain kinds of stories from being told, e.g. the Nigerian author in Rob's link. There is a "customer is king" bias at play here.

But they are platforms that can give someone a start.

mark twain lifted entire pages from published travel guides when he was trying to hit a deadline for life on the mississippi. it was all taken out by his editor… or was it? i seem to remember zola also lifting descriptions of consumer goods in toto from catalogs of the day when he was writing the ladies’ paradise. i can kind of get it.

mind you i’m somebody who presented an entire shel silverstein poem as his own when i was seven years old!

sites like this make millions in revenue

https://www.dreame.com

I started reading one of the stories on that site, may as well have been written by a fucking robot tbh

the more ai-written schlock the sooner the singularity, and i am eager to see what a skynet born of werewolf erotica can do for our species

it is incredible how that dreame site is literally 80% werewolf erotica. they've developed an entire vocabulary and schema for werewolf love that spans across authors and which at first glance makes me think i'm having a stroke when i'm reading the descriptions

I don’t think an AI is going to generate authentic werewolf sex scenes. What does a computer know about fucking werewolves?

“what is this thing you humans call… yiff?”

What does a computer know about fucking werewolves?

More than any actual human does, because real human beings know there's no such thing as a werewolf, but computers, trained on bodies of text, know no such thing

One can only fuck what one sincerely believes to exist