Acknowledgment of Sources

In April 2004, Bryony Lavery's play Frozen debuted on Broadway. It received rave reviews, garnering Tony nominations for the entire play, its two stars and the director. Many critics considered Frozen to be Lavery's “most significant stage success to date.” That is, until psychiatrist Dorothy Lewis read the script, and hired a lawyer.

Lewis says that many scenes in the play were based on her memoir, Guilty by Reason of Insanity , about her life spent working with serial killers. Lewis also noted 12 verbatim quotes, around 675 words in all, taken from a New Yorker profile written about her by Malcolm Gladwell. She wanted to sue the playwright, who she thought had stolen details of both her life and her book—but ultimately, the only place Lavery was judged was in the court of public opinion.

Gladwell wasn't as offended because he thought the play was “breathtaking,” and said that “ instead of feeling that my words had been taken from me, I felt that they had become part of some grander cause.” Lavery made a fairly common creative nonfiction mistake, but one that shattered her reputation in the international media, who homed in on the plagiarism story and put Lavery's name next to that horrible word over and over again. So why did she do it, make a simple mistake that cost her everything? “I thought it was okay to use,” she told Gladwell. “I thought it was news.”

Certainly, many writers—creative nonfiction and otherwise—use newspaper or magazine clippings or traits of someone they know as the genesis of a longer work. Susan Orlean's New Yorker article and subsequent book, The Orchid Thief , gestated from the seed of some newspaper blurb. So why didn't the New York Times write stories that slander Orlean's influential work as one of plagiarism? The first, and most important, difference between Orlean and Lavery is one of language; Orlean didn't lift entire passages of someone else's writing—the words were her own. The second, equally important difference is one of facts—Orlean did her own research, spending innumerable hours interviewing, walking through orchid shows and Everglade swamps, finding facts with her own eyes and ears. Though the idea came from someone else's writing, the final product is a completely different work that relies on Orlean's creativity and research—her facts, her interviews, her insights.

Many writers' ideas start with a file of newspaper clippings, and it's perfectly fine to let world or local news generate ideas. But the care to avoid plagiarism comes in the following steps—ensuring all of the language in the writing is your own, and citing the sources of where quotes, facts, and thematic ideas originated, to give credit to those writers and thinkers the same way you'd want to be acknowledged for your own work.

Today, many people are distrustful of what they see and read in the media. Creative nonfiction has a complicated obligation to its readers—to entertain like fiction, but to educate like journalism. As a result, creative nonfiction writers have to balance the need for a good story with good facts—and if the facts aren't good if they're lifted, without giving credit, from someone else. Bringing in background information, statistics, and quotes are all integral in building credibility for the facts. In Eric Schlosser's indictment of the fast food industry, Fast Food Nation , he made his writing nearly bullet-proof. He protected his writing from fact-based criticism with 74 pages of notes on sources and bibliography. Whenever Schlosser's reporting wasn't first-hand, he acknowledged what wasn't his own and cited where he found the information, which builds the reader's trust and safeguards the writer's reputation—and this is a move all writers should steal, guilt-free.

[In the name of fairly acknowledging sources, the anecdote and quotes come from Malcolm Gladwell's wonderfully complex exploration of plagiarism, The Picture Problem: Should a charge of plagiarism ruin your life? , published in the New Yorker , Nov. 22, 2004.]

-Sarah Z. Wexler

From Creative Nonfiction, Issue 29: The ABC's of CNF , 2006