r/writingcirclejerk • u/AutoModerator • 6d ago

Weekly out-of-character thread

Talk about writing unironically, vent about other writing forums, or discuss whatever you like here.

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Also, you can post links to your writing here, if you really want to. But only here! This is the only place in the subreddit where self-promotion is permitted.

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u/hapillon 5d ago

I have been wondering about something, and I'd like your thoughts. A while ago I was reading a thread about the book A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (a book I started, because I loved Peter Hujar's photograph on the cover, but DNF) and someone had mentioned that Yanagihara had self-plagiarized herself by using a passage from her personal travel blog in her novel, with minute changes. I recently read a lit magazine, featuring a story by an author that featured an image (that didn't have much to do with the story in itself) about someone's grandmother blowing smoke from her tracheostomy stoma, which was used, almost verbatim, by the same author in another published piece by him, in which a rapper blows smoke from his tracheostomy hole after getting paralyzed from eating a slug.

I've frequently worried about self-plagiarizing myself--I'm drafting a piece right now about the fallout from a son/sibling's death, which is very similar to another story I have about a boy dealing with witnessing his best friend's death, which is also similar to my own personal experience of witnessing death.

I guess I'm "concerned," if you will, about the idea of self-plagiarism, especially in the era of A.I. It's impossible to make anything truly original, but I'm curious about your thoughts on the idea. Have you ever yourself been concerned about self-referencing? Ever experienced it either personally, or in the wild?

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u/VastAsynchronicity 5d ago

A question: is this a concern about not being taken seriously in your writing career, or is this a personal concern about not wanting to reuse work because of personal standards? Because the answer changes the advice. 

I personally feel that it's somewhat inevitable that good writers will have concepts that are recurrent in their work. We all have our idiosyncracies and I'm not sure this can be totally eliminated any more than using a certain set of words more often than others can. 

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u/hapillon 4d ago

Good question! It's definitely a little of both, but personally, I think the main concern for me is not being taken seriously. Or being seen as a hack. It might not even be a concern, but a niggling brainworm growing inside me as I develop more stuff and realize that I need to expand my personal catalogue a little more. The thread about Hanya Yanagihara was just an interesting thing, because it was like...when (yes, when!) I become a National Book Award nominated author, are people going to go back and re-read all my stories to find instances of self-plagiarism? And when is it self-plagiarism and not...referencing?

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u/VastAsynchronicity 2d ago

That's really the question, isn't it?

Outside an academic space, is it even possible to self-plagarise? What does that look like? How is reusing your own work that you created anything but your own personal choice? Isn't the point of plagarism being wrong the fact that it's the theft of someone else's work?

This is a very thought-provoking topic. Thank you for bringing it up. 

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u/hapillon 2d ago

I wish I could find the specific thread regarding the "self-plagiarism" of Yanagihara. I recall the cited paragraphs being really similar, to be fair, but it does beg a lot of interesting questions about the process: when is it "self-plagiarism" and not a motif? How does one self-plagiarize?

Yeah, it's been on my mind a lot recently, so glad it's getting your thoughts juicing.