Am I the Asshole For Accusing My Friend of Plagiarizing a TV Show?

Howdy friends! It’s my genuine pleasure to welcome you back to another installment of everyone’s favorite writing-flavored advice column, Am I The Literary Asshole? I’m your host, Kristen Arnett, and I just got back from Portland Book Festival. It’s actually colder at home in Florida than it was over on the West Coast, if you can believe it! I spent all of yesterday in various airports due to flight delays and boy are my arms are tired (from holding frosty glasses of airport beer). It’s nice to be back home. I missed you.

Let’s keep it breezy and just clink a couple of cold ones today, shall we? There’s a lot to get into and I don’t want to miss a moment of the fun:

1) Hi Kristen, a bookseller in response to your latest column here! I’m the events coordinator in my shop so I deal with event stock ordering pretty much every day. From my perspective it is certainly not gauche for an author to ask for their book to be stocked when they are doing an event and a month or more before is the right time frame. At the same time, I would like to politely put forward that I have noticed that there’s often a bit of a gap between what many authors think about how bookshops run and the reality of how bookshops run. Depending on an author’s publisher’s distributor and that distributor’s trading relationship with the particular shop it may or may not be feasible for the shop to just order a few copies and return them if they don’t sell. 

If your correspondent is being approached by the lead event author or agents and publicists then it is entirely possible that the booksellers truly don’t know about it! Some publicists are excellent and timely communicators and some, uh, aren’t always. 

Another thing about this gap in perception about how bookshops run is that authors (and agents and publicists) often don’t seem to realize how busy we always are and with very diverse matters. We don’t have time to guess whether the moderator/author would like their book to be stocked or not (some actively don’t—I even had one author who hid his own book one time). 

The positive side of this is that there is no point worrying about coming across as gauche because no one has time to care one way or another. If you don’t hassle us or yell at us, then you’re grand. (For clarity, an email saying oh, hey, would you get in a few copies of my book is not hassling; repeatedly coming into the shop during the busiest part of the day and haranguing someone for twenty minutes is). 

PS congratulations on your latest book—we had it face out in the front of shop in its publication month!

Thank you so much for this! What a kind thing to say!

And also thank you for writing in with the booksellers’ perspective on this matter. I think you’re absolutely right; there’s no way for people to have a complete understanding of how ordering materials and running a bookstore and managing events goes unless you’re actually doing that work. I really appreciate everything that you all are doing to keep us authors in your stores. I honestly don’t have anything to add to your incredibly helpful feedback here, so I’ll just say thank you (again) for providing this information!

Booksellers are the best!

Pretty nice way to start things off, huh? Genuinely terrific! I’m going to grab another beer while we look at our second question:

2) Hi Dad! So I had something kind of weird happen recently. A writer friend showed me a work-in-progress short story and they were really excited about it. I was excited, too, until I got halfway through (about 3,000 words into it) and realized I’d heard the plot somewhere before. I won’t reveal it here, but it’s from a well-known prestige television show. It wasn’t exactly the same, but close enough that I brought it up to my friend and texted them, and said “this is from XYZ episode of Famous TV Show.” Now this is where I wonder if I’m the asshole, because they immediately got super defensive and told me that I was dead wrong. They also said they’d never seen the show before. I don’t know if that’s true, but it doesn’t matter. It’s straight from the plot of the show, I know I’m not wrong about that, but I feel like maybe I could have handled the situation a little more tactfully. 

This is a tough one!

Let’s just get this right out upfront: it’s good that you brought this situation up to your friend. They needed to know this information. The sooner the better.

But sincerely, there was almost absolutely no way this was going to go well. They were excited about the work, they felt they’d made something creative and totally original, and to be told that it was something lifted from a TV show (prestige, no less) probably took the wind right out of their sails. Even if they hadn’t stolen the plot on purpose (hopefully they didn’t), it would still be a bitter pill to swallow. No one wants to think that they’re guilty of plagiarizing, even if it’s unintentional.

I’m going to ask you to give this one a little time, friend. It’s possible that after some space and a minute to digest the information, they’re going to realize that you saved them from some actual grief. Things would be a thousand time worse if they’d put this story out for submission and God forbid someone picked it up and printed it. Or possibly someone who’s not as kind as you might have posted about it somewhere and turned it into a whole stressful plagiarizer development (and that’s never a good time). This is the best-case scenario of a pretty bad situation. You warned them ahead of time, let them know about the similarities so they could amend their mistake before it turned into a real crisis.

It’s possible that this friend will be hesitant to show you future work, so be prepared for that. They might feel residual embarrassment over the interaction, or carry around the idea that you’re responsible for what happened. To be clear, you are NOT responsible, but sometimes our brains make connections that are tough to break. They might think writing + you = a bad time. And that sucks.

Yes, it’s possible you could have been more tactful with this, but sometimes no matter how nicely you giftwrap something, bad news is still bad news. If you feel so inclined, perhaps reach out to your friend and see if you could sit down in person and talk about this some more. It will help, I think. And if not? Well, at least you tried.

I’ve thrown on two different sweaters because my house is so cold! Lord! Lemme crack open my final beer and let’s see if the alcohol can warm me up while we read our final question of the day:

3) I have a friend who makes canceling our writing meet-ups part of her personality at this point. Nearly every time we’re supposed to meet she texts to say she has something going on or else she forgot and just doesn’t show. It’s gotten to the point that I’m just dreading these meet ups because when she inevitably bails it ruins my whole writing day. Is she an asshole for this or am I the problem?

Oh yikes. This is a bummer!

Nobody likes to be stood up. I’m sure that every time this happens you feel truly miserable. I hate that this is negatively affecting your writing practice! I’m sure that if your friend knew how badly you felt they’d be mortified.

That being said, have you mentioned this to them or have you only told it to me? People are all different and it’s possible that for this particular friend, tardiness and bailing wouldn’t bother them the way that it bothers you. If you haven’t done it yet, make it a point to gently bring up the fact that canceling on you last second or not showing up at all (the latter is rude and in my opinion inexcusable in the age of cell phones and texting) is really hurting your feelings. If they’re a good friend, they’ll want to correct this ASAP.

If not? Then perhaps it’s time to find a new friend to write with, or possibly treat yourself to some solo writing dates. Allowing yourself to miss out on writing opportunities because of someone else’s behavior is a terrible thing. Consider how to best move forward so you can still enjoy this friendship. Possibly they’re the kind of person you see at a party, not at the writer’s café.

And that’s all the time we have for today! Join me next time when I peel off all these sweaters and hopefully the weather in Florida will have gone back to normal. Send me your questions, please!

Sunnily,
Dad

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Are you worried you’re the literary asshole? Ask Kristen via email at AskKristen@lithub.com, or anonymously here.