Scribo Ergo Sum

"Franz Kafka was a legal secretary at the Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague (later: In the Czech Lands), where he wrote reports like 'Accident Prevention in Quarries,' and rose to a top office position, Obersekretär. Though his bureaucratic labors bore literary fruit—providing context and imagery for his fiction writing—Kafka came to feel bogged down by the daily grind. 'Writing and office cannot be reconciled, since writing has its center of gravity in depth, whereas the office is on the surface of life,' he wrote to his fiancée in 1913. 'So it goes up and down, and one is bound to be torn asunder in the process.'
     T.S. Eliot, on the other hand, was inclined to keep his day job even after it was financially necessary. When the Bloomsbury group offered to set up a fund that would allow him sufficient funding to become a full-time writer, the poet turned them down. 'This idea that Eliot should be freed from the drudgery of work misses the point that he was actually very interested in the minutiae of everyday life—he was a commentator on the quotidian,' British Library curator Rachel Foss told The Guardian. [...]
     Says Von Arbin Ahlander, 'We're kidding ourselves if we think we can make a living on writing.' As for the romantic ideal of the leisurely writer life, slowly crafting one's masterpiece in the calm solitude of a big, empty house: 'I mean, that's over,' she added, 'Unless you're a trust fund baby.'
     Though it's rare to make a living on writing, it's becoming increasingly easy to call yourself one. Without any money at all, anyone can publish digitally with the click of a button or, for a price, self-publish a print manuscript. The ecology of authorship has changed dramatically since, say March 1845, when Charlotte Brontë was working as a governess, miserable, and wrote in a letter, 'I shall soon be 30 and I have done nothing yet.' "— Betsy Morais, The Atlantic
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"How many ways can you say that Edgar Allan Poe was born in 1809?" — Jay Parini

"American author Lenore Hart has rejected accusations of plagiarism on Facebook, after allegations she used material from a 55-year-old book by Cothburn O'Neal in writing her fictionalised life of Edgar Allan Poe's cousin and wife, The Raven's Bride.
     Both Hart's novel, published this year, and O'Neal's The Very Young Mrs Poe, published in 1956, tell the story of Virginia Clemm, who married her cousin Poe when she was just 13 years old. Hart's is told in the first person, while O'Neal, who died in 2001, writes in the third person. A host of similarities between the two books have been alleged online, with the charge led by the spy novelist Jeremy Duns – who called this case 'absolutely shocking' – and by the blog The World of Edgar Allan Poe. [...]
     Asking if TS Eliot could have written The Waste Land 'if he worried about quoting without attribution,' [Jay] Parini said that 'the problem with historical fiction, of course, is that history is full of nuggets of knowledge. How many ways can you say that Edgar Allan Poe was born in 1809? If you're describing a certain river, the descriptions of that river will often sound like other descriptions of that river, and so forth. And it's important to remember that literature is a tissue of allusion. We all participate in the language, its writing and thinking; we do so unconsciously more than consciously. It's hard to find a sentence that hasn't been written by someone, somewhere: Isn't that a point made by Borges over and over?' [...]

     Bella Pagan, senior commissioning editor at Tor UK, Pan Macmillan, said that books receive 'a huge degree of scrutiny' before they are published. 'Commissioning editors will have read widely and deeply in their field, and are likely to spot it if something comes up which has been done before,' she said. 'But we can't possibly police everything, and we need to be very vigilant.' Although Pagan does not believe plagiarism has become more rife, she says it is more likely to be uncovered these days. 'Bloggers can police as much as anyone,' she said. 'I don't think there is more plagiarism than there has been historically, but it is probably easier to discover, and easier to publicise.'" — Alison Flood, Guardian
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