Posts by Rachaelking
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Am aiming to be a spectacular late-bloomer instead.
Kim Hill told me I was old to publishing my first novel. I was 35 (just).
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Why do authors like Ihimaera and McEwan have to write books that require research and the use of other people's writing? Had they stuck to writing contemporary fiction they would have done so in their own words and not become plagiarists.
McEwan's novel after Atonement was the contemporary novel Saturday, which was written from the point of view of a brain surgeon. Don't you think he might have needed to do a bit of research on that?
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Books don't generally sell based on who the editor was so it's always going to be easy for the accountants to say the editor is less important than the author and hence should be paid less
How I laughed! Often in the chain of things the author gets paid less than everybody else, editor included, especially when you break it down into hours spent, but even if you don't.
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Jolisa wrote:
And should excerpts always be marked in some manner in the text, or can they be spliced in as long as you note somewhere that you consulted the book?
But that is absurd, don't you think? Imagine reading a novel then coming upon a description that is suddenly in quote marks with a footnote or endnote! No, better that you write a novel using all your own words, even if you have consulted other works for information.
And i don't think novelists (providing they are not copying directly from others of course) should list all their resources, either. I think this reduces a novel to an assemblage of facts and diminishes the work of imagination that goes into it. A novel is not an academic paper, nor is it non-fiction.
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When I have said 'intertexuality', people have looked at me funny, but yes, that's what I'm going for.
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Crikey, I feel a blog post coming on too, Jolisa.
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Jolisa wrote:
In other words, there are ethical reasons not to borrow other people's words, but also artistic ones. (I could write at length about the other examples, but might save that for a follow-up blog post.)
This is the crux of the issue for me. All this talk about how quote marks should be used and attributions made is redundant in a novel... the art of writing fiction is to use research to help your character be in a scene, but you have to filter it through their eyes. This is what makes it engaging fiction.
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As a novelist myself, sometimes swaying towards the historical, I have found this a very interesting discussion.
Personally I can't stand it when novelists have pages and pages of acknowledgments - I have always felt that it screams 'see! I did my research! I didn't make it up!' , when fiction should be about being free to imagine. At the same time I can't imagine copying another writer's words in the course of my research and letting them get into my novel word for word. My approach to research is to read, to absorb, then to imagine myself there and write what I see. If we can't get into a time machine and go to another time, we have to rely on those that were there. Maybe, we might even - God forbid! - make stuff up. A fiction writer inventing? Call the police!
I also hate novels that read like text books. By all means do the research, but only put into the novel what is relevant to the story or the characters. I read one novel recently that had a character thinking about an unimportant fact about some piece of public transport ("why am I thinking this unimportant fact?" the character thought) and it really was unimportant! Sure enough, in the five pages of acknowledgments, there was listed the very book that this one unimportant fact came from. Yawn.
I am particularly interested in the wondering about novels borrowing from other novels, because I have done just that in my new book, without attribution, because I wanted to leave it up to the reader to spot and to feel smug about spotting, for example, a line of dialogue from Jane Eyre, a dream sequence from Wuthering Heights and various other scenes from these Victorian novels and more that have been worked into a modern-day context. I would hope that nobody would call that plagiarism, but I suspect from this conversation that they wouldn't.