Editors' Soapbox

Copycat

If you submit work to Brain, Child, you might be bemused to know how we refer to it. When we have our quarterly meeting to decide what will go in the next issue, we'll say things like: Oh, you mean The Breastfeeding One? Or: It's great, but we just did Bullying a few issues ago.

Anyone who's taken a writing class knows that there are a finite number of stories. In the world of publishing, though, the pressure to be original is both ubiquitous and daunting. The desire to write something new and fresh is the force that keeps writers going (news stories about a certain passage-lifting Harvard student notwithstanding). It's tough to be original.

Magazines are not immune to The Originality Problem. If anything, when you're publishing a niche magazine—one, say, devoted to good writing about motherhood—you're bound to run into it. Your scope is limited, your audience is coming to you for a particular kind of writing—and there's only so much talent in the world. I'll bet everyone who publishes has had his or her words lifted sometime.

We have. A few years ago, a woman sent us an e-mail saying how much she admired Brain, Child. She was hoping to start a similar magazine—only it would be geared to mothers of a particular ethnicity, and it would be available online only. Would we give her some advice? Happy to help, we surfed on over to her site—only to find the words of our own mission statement reprinted there, nearly verbatim.

Writers don't just copy each other; they also copy themselves. Whether spurred by laziness, desperation, or forgetfulness, the urge to recycle one's words can be powerful. Not long ago, I was sitting at my desk, looking over the essays we'd just accepted for the next issue. Taking a break, I logged on to one of my favorite online magazines—where, lo and behold, staring right back at me was one of the essays we were about to publish. It wasn't an exact clone, but the author, topic, and entire chunks of writing were identical to the one we had accepted. And within a week, another writer submitted a short book review that we discovered (by chance) she had already posted on the book's Amazon page.

But lest you think we're always at the receiving end of The Originality Problem, here's one more story. While it's true that we're the first (and only) print magazine of our sort, we were undeniably inspired by Salon's "Mothers Who Think" column, the first media forum devoted to narratives by mothers. Brain, Child probably wouldn't exist without it.

Writers should do what they can not to copy each other's words. But I also agree with the writer Malcolm Gladwell when he says that we should think twice before we hyperventilate over every instance of imitation. A couple of years ago, he found out that parts of an article he'd written for the New Yorker had been incorporated into a play. At first he was incensed. He wrote a strongly worded letter to the playwright. Then he reconsidered. "The truth was that, although I said I'd been robbed, I didn't feel that way. Nor did I feel particularly angry," he said. "On some level, I considered Lavery's borrowing to be a compliment."

Sometimes it really matters that someone uses your words. Sometimes it doesn't. (We cared far more about the recycled essay and review, for instance, than the flattery-by-imitation of the mission statement.) Gladwell's point is that ideas, once released into the world, are free; they're owned by everyone who encounters them (within the legal limits of copyright law, of course). But to solve The Originality Problem, writers have an obligation to improve on these free-range ideas. And that, my friends, is how an essay gets elevated above being, say, The Breastfeeding One. After that, we start calling you by your last name. —S.W.

Art by Elizabeth Hannon