How Opal Mehta Screwed Up

While I did think the premise behind Kaavya Viswanathan's book, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wile, and Got a Life", was a bit trite, I did have to give the current Harvard undergraduate props. Not many people can say that they had a $500,000 book deal at the tender age of 17. However, as I'm sure many of you have heard, it recently surfaced Viswanathan plagiarized many, many portions of it. I do question her editors for not catching this sooner. What a disappointment! I think she was clearly in the wrong, but I sort of buy her story. Viswanathan claimed that she read a particular novel so many times when she was little, she didn’t realize the passages she wrote, in some cases, were nearly verbatim from the book. Naturally, I think she'd lose her $500,000 book deal. I wonder if Harvard will take any action against her.

I remember back to my Composition classes at UCLA, when our professor asked us to write a short blurb about how we felt about "writing". I wrote, "It is a difficult and tedious process, which with I am at constant odds." For some reason, the prof didn't seem to think my work in class agreed with that statement, so I told her, "Prof, it really IS tedious and difficult, especially non-fiction or research writing. I first have to take notes, then outline, then write, then edit, then revise, then re-write, then revise, and so on and so forth." Her response, "But Cutie, what you are describing is the process of writing. And if that is your struggle, even the best writers out there can say there are at constant odds with their craft."

Development of a personal style in writing is difficult. Even with the most established writers out there, you can see a definite change between their early and later works. As MBA Cutie, I regularly draw upon the styles of various journalists, playwrights, screenwriters, and novelists whom I read and admire to get my thoughts across. I know there are some days that I do sound very "Carrie Bradshaw", and other times I probably sound a bit different. More recently, I've taken towards personal memoir writing for one main reason: it's an easy way to tell a story that is completely yours, in your own words, even if you are trying to mimic the style of someone else. When I write, I want my words to be mine, and that means no matter how much I love the words and characters constructed by Lucy Maud Montgomery, or the style, ideas, and story-telling of Cindy Chupak, I know better than to have any form of their manuscripts any where near me when I'm writing. Even if you don't mean too, it's all to easy to make someone else's words yours. And I wouldn't want someoene to do that to me, no matter how much they want to emmulate this Cutie.

Happy Writings to all my fellow bloggers, and to anyone else with the creative itch.