Meryl's Notes Blog

Let’s be careful out there!(TM) takes a creative approach in encouraging readers to avoid plagiarizing — almost the whole article, or letter, uses content from resources and attributes every single one. How can people think of stealing another person’s work even before the Internet? I suppose they thought they’d never get caught, but it isn’t the fear of getting caught that prevents me from doing such a thing — but rather doing something immoral and dishonest.

I’ve written on this topic before and wonder if perhaps some writers truly thought their ideas were original — when it was an old memory stored in the back of their minds? If you can’t connect a memory to a previously read story or article, you naturally think it’s your own imagination.

Age of Embellishment writes that Helen Keller was accused of stealing Margaret T. Canby’s work from The Frost Fairies when she wrote The Frost King. The story says Keller based it on a childhood experience. Can’t it be possible that we experience or think of a story that exists?

American Inventor, a TV show that searched for the greatest inventor, showed an inventor who learned from the judges that his product already existed. It’s not hard to believe that two people came up with an idea. In 1999, I had an idea for a baby product and in trying to build it — I couldn’t make it work. The product showed up in a catalog last year. The inventor didn’t steal my idea. Simply, we saw a problem and worked to solve it — only that person found a better answer than I did.

All this stealing words and ideas talk can make a writer paranoid as it did for Helen Keller. We simply don’t have time to research every story and idea we write to see if it already exists. All we can do is “be careful out there.” So do I attribute the quote to Hill Street Blues though I dropped the “Hey” and “let’s” since it didn’t work in my sentence?