Sloppy firsts

BOTH the title of Kaavya Vishwanathan8217;s now notorious novel, How Opal Mehta Hot Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, and the huge money riding on it, testifies to the formulaic nature of modern novel production today. The search for instant best-sellers by gargantuan publishing houses has reduced the old-fashioned activity of sitting down and laboriously writing a book into a 100-metre dash on anabolic steroids.

Kaavya Viswanathan cannot escape her fate. It must be hard to metamorphose into the bad girl of the chick-lit coop after being the toast of the town with a record-setting deal. A bright girl like her should have known about the dangers of producing a sloppy first book by borrowing so freely from Megan McCaferty8217;s Sloppy First. Not to speak about McCaferty8217;s Second Helpings! A Havard sophomore should have realised that plagiarism 8212; defined as using someone else8217;s ideas/words without clear acknowledgement 8212; is a serious no-no. But let us also not forget that behind Kaavya Vishwanathan are some very eager beavers. The fact that the copyright for Opal Mehta was held, not by the writer but an entity that went by the name of Alloy Entertainment which is in the business of packaging books by helping authors develop their storylines, tells its own story. Apart from Alloy Entertainment, there was also a heavyweight agency dealing with 8220;literary talent8221;. Finally there was the well-known publisher, Little, Brown, which thought nothing of handing over a 500,000 deal to a 17-year-old on the presumed assessment that it had a clear winner 8212; exotically Asian to boot 8212; on their hands, or at least one it could make a winner with some well-directed hype.

There are morality lessons of course in the unfortunate Opal Mehta story. For writers, it doesn8217;t pay to steal words, even if it looks as if it does pay and how! at first glance. For publishers, don8217;t sully the waters of literary creativity. The whole of humanity drinks at this pool.