A gentle plea for honesty.
Pseudonyms, plagiarism and catfishing. These three contentious words are all too common to any of you keeping an ear to the ground in our writing community. In recent days all three have shared the spotlight and been much discussed on Facebook and elsewhere. I tend to steer clear of these issues on social media since they almost always lose sight of principles. All too often, the rush to be seen to have an opinion just leads to deepening drama and personal vitriol.
I’ve decided to use my guest spot on this site to make a gentle plea for honesty in our community. It’s time we took a reality check or maybe I should say a realism check. So what are we talking about? Here is subterfuge 101:
Pseudonyms: there is a fine, time-honoured tradition of authors writing under a pen name. There are as many reasons for this as there are writers doing it and those reasons come in both good and bad varieties. Most of the bad reasons appear to be some kind of disguise and the elaborate excuses are just that, excuses. When I first started writing I chose to use a pseudonym because I had just retired from a long teaching career and was still doing supply work in primary schools. As I’ve grown older I’ve started to feel that I have a responsibility to be honest and transparent. At my age I really do feel that if anyone has a problem with me then it is their problem and not mine. It is more important that I stick to my own principles and lead by example in the hope that I may be able to help others who are still finding their way. I have chosen to keep my pseudonym, but most people also know the real me. I intend in the future to write in different genres and it will be useful to have more than one name to use.
This brings me to all the very good reasons for having a pseudonym. They mostly fall into the category of branding. As a writer you are a marketable commodity and as such you need a powerful, marketable brand. Your name is your brand and you should choose it carefully. There is no dishonesty in marketing a brand name to promote your work.
Plagiarism: the theft of another writer’s work is dishonesty with no excuses. The theft of stories, plots, or ideas from another writer is the lowest example of community behaviour and we should all be both vigilant and supportive of each other when it happens. This is a case where imitation is not flattery it is stealing and it is a crime.
Catfishing: this is an insidious nasty practice which I have seen defended but when the person defending it and making excuses for it is the same person who did it in the first place, why would we believe anything that they say.
Many people have seen or heard about catfishing in relation to online (or real time) romance. This is usually carried out for the purposes of extracting money from the victim. It is a con and usually involves fraud. Again there can be no excuse for an activity which is both illegal and immoral.
We m/m writers and readers are a close community and I hope that we will continue to grow as such. We are constantly defending our work against outside attack so the last thing we need are people within the community damaging us. We must be self-policing and self-supporting.
Everything that we do or say within the community should be about our stories. Whether we are posting as writers or readers let’s stick to our pseudonyms or our given names only. Let’s root out and expose any ‘imaginary friends’ that we come across. They have no place outside the imaginations of children and serve no honest purpose. Our best characters should be in our books not on our social media pages.
Deceit is hurtful and damaging. Just because you have not been hurt by any of these fantasy characters don’t assume that they are harmless.
Be gone all you fantasists and imaginary friends, for you are no friends of ours. If you are a writer then let your stories speak for you. If you are a reader then let your appreciation of our stories tell us the kind of person that you are.
For anyone who is unsure about the threesome that is me, you can find my component parts as follows:
www.tjmasters.com (pseudonym)
www.timorahilly.co.uk (real)
www.mastertim.co.uk (alter ego)
When I started writing, I chose a pen name so as to not embarrass my children by having their friends know I was writing gay novels. Since then, I’ve come to realize I don’t care if they are. I still use the pen name, but it is interwoven with my personal FB page and real name. At 72, I don’t care what people think any more.
Exactly my feelings. Good for you and thanks for the comment.
Plagiarism and catphishing are both contemptible, and there’s no excuse for either. Pseudonims are entirely different. I chose a pen name when I started writing m/m for similar reasons to Alix. My daughter-in-law has a very strange attitude to my writing, accusing me of fetishising gay men. Since my grandsons were under 18 at the time I thought it best to go with a pen name. Now they are legally adults, I don’t give a damn, and when people ask me what I write, I tell them – gay romance. I’m proud of my writing, and that my books have received awards and Honourable Mentions. And like Alix, I’m 72 [well, in January], way past the age of giving a toss about others’ opinions.
Also, I can’t spell pseudonyms…
Thanks for taking the time to reply Chris. Sound words as always! Tx
All of this is leaving me exhausted. It’s safe to say that name I use in my day to day life is as ‘fake’ as my author name although that was caused by my parents decision when I was baptised and subsequently getting married. If I’m ever asked to prove either name using documentation I’m in real trouble because such documentation doesn’t exist 🙂 As uncomfortable as the catfishing and the plagiarism have made me over the past few days, I don’t feel a whole lot better about all the ‘this is me’ posts I’m seeing now either. To me it feels like feeding the paranoia and I refuse to play. If anybody is really curious about what name I go by in the day job it’s is ridiculously easy to get from one account to the other.
Great reply Helena Thank you! I totally agree about all the ‘This is me posts’ on facebook. They are unnecessary and at the end of the day are no more proof of anything than a politician’s promise!
…but when the person defending it and making excuses for it is the same person who did it in the first place, why would we believe anything they say…
Thank you for that! How refreshing when someone gets it after a few days of victims having to justify that they are the victims, not the catfisher. Seeing people saying ‘this is me’ saddens me. It’s not necessary and a constant reminder of what happened. A writing pseudonym is perfectly understandable and it’s pretty easy.
Sell books – okay
Sell people – NOT
This quote has given me strength.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Edmund Burke
Seems obvious doesn’t it but I think some people are being defensive because that is easier than admitting that they were conned! Many thanks for reading and responding.
Great post. I do want to clarify one thing. I think your definition of plagiarism goes too far. The recent examples of plagiarism are line-by-line or retyping-with-changes thefts – clearly plagiarism. You cannot, however, copyright an idea or a plot. If you could then there would be no such thing as a trope and there would only be one book with a sexy millionaire. There wouldn’t even be such a thing as genre because some writer some where would claim they own the elements that we all repeat.
To use the writer who converted m/f to m/m as an example, she retyped an m/f book with changed names and made very minor adjustments. Had she read an m/f blurb that she liked and then actually written an m/m book herself with the same or very similar plot she would have had ended up with a unique and defensible product. An example of this that might be more accessible is the movie Aliens. It’s plot is Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians. But there’s no plagiarism there. They’re two unique products built on the same plot.
It’s okay to take ideas and plots and make them your own. It’s not okay to take lines, paragraphs, chapters or even entire books and call them your own.
Many thanks for taking the time to reply. It is much appreciated. I agree with you entirely on all points and it has been said many times that there are very few real plots and we all write variations of them. We all recognise that fact and work with it.
I still stick to my comments however since I have been in the position of discussing a plot for a story that I was intending to write only to have the listener go away and pre-empt my work with an identical work.I have since heard from others who have had the same experience and to my mind that is plagiarism of a more insidious kind.
I agree that once you’ve discussed a project with someone (or pitched it) it is unethical to take that idea from them without clearing it. You can even sue over this – it’s been done successfully in Hollywood. That’s why everyone in Hollywood makes you sign a document that says they can develop similar ideas.
Great post. I have repeatedly said that almost everyone knows my real name. My bosses even know I’m a published author and the name I publish under. I basically created my pen name so as not to embarrass my parents. And I work for a huge corporation, that at the time, I had plans of moving up in. (Those plans have changed.)
Now, nearly everyone at work knows that I write on the side, from my bosses boss down to my crew members. I post book information on my real name Facebook. At RWA, I’m known by my real name writing as Caraway Carter.
I’m in my 50’s, I don’t care what people think about my writing, I have to defend writing romance enough as it is. Someday, I might start writing under my real name, but as I’ve stated before, I think it’d be a difficult change.
If I linked my legal name to my pseudonym, I would be fired from my job, disowned by the remains of my family that still talk to me, could have lost my previous flat, and given what my day job is, could easily have been tracked down by some of the less wonderful individuals I deal with on a day-to-day basis and attacked or killed.
Please, please remember that some of us really do need pseudonyms. It’s not excuses, it’s not disguising ourselves because we’re embarrassed, there’s no option of ‘oh I don’t care what others think.’ It’s necessary. And if it’s not necessary for you, then you’re *lucky*, but please remember not all of us are.
I haven’t seen anyone say don’t use a pseudonym. The issue is, don’t use a pseudonym to claim authority you don’t have. You can protect yourself with a pseudonym without claiming to be things you’re not.