The New Yorker posted a long read on the Quentin Rowan / QR Markham plagarism scandal, which some of you may remember back from November.  Basically, this guy wrote a spy novel the way kidnappers in Dick Tracy comics wrote ransom notes: by cutting words, phrases, images out of other books and pasting them together, with a little bit of added connective tissue.

The funny thing about this is (as Rob Beschizza  noted at the time, and as the New Yorker piece observes) that if Rowan had been honest about what he was doing, he might have been hailed for his formal invention.  I can imagine devotees of spy fiction devouring such a book-of-books, trying to hunt down the source for every passage.  It would have been a legal nightmare to produce (maybe), but imagine the possibilities–a contest, say, for whoever caught the most allusions.  The book could have been a salute to spy novels everywhere.

I feel there’s a deeper level of oddity to the whole case, though: I don’t know a single writer who isn’t also an avid reader.  Most people write stories based off the ones they read.  Sure, SFF people write mysteries or spy novels, and vice versa, but in general, if you read a lot of fantasy or science fiction, your will be more likely to think of interesting combinations of language, imagery, and story in an SFF context.  Same with any genre, including literary fiction.  We’re all internalizing language and ideas, recombining them, and using them to build.

There’s a difference, to be sure, between a storyteller who glues together pre-existing bits and pieces, like building a popsicle stick man in grade school, and one who cuts up and recombines existing work, as with papier mache.  Even at that stage, influences (and even sources) are recognizable.  I used to make papier mache monster masks, and one of the coolest thing about them (outside of their realism) was the fact that you could still read the newspaper clippings on the inside of the mask.

We tend to want our writers to go a step beyond popsicle sticks or masks: to build wasps’ nests, in which the original materials have been so broken down and remade that we can’t identify them any more.  Of course uproar ensues when someone attempts to pass off a stick man as a wasp’s nest, but I wonder if there’s a place for stick men, or papier mache masks, in the world of fiction, the same way we’ve come to embrace sampling in music.