Part 2

I know who I am.

I am a thief. A cheater. A plagiarist.

I am the most notorious thief I know.

I steal words out of mouths, and I love it. It’s like a drug.

I believe the beauty of words is that they can be stolen. Every single story I write is a remix and assemblage of quotes and facts from other people. As a journalist, I steal words every day. In part I of this article, I stole 258 out of 546 words. Almost half of what I wrote is not my own. What makes my story different, or original? The angle of my story becomes an adaptation. The craft of the words is different. The way the words are blended and molded to make a story of experience about a specific event, person, conflict, idea, or controversy, is different. The recycled words have meaning and their stories have value. Their words make up the entirety of their experiences and I have the amazing task of telling those stories of reactions to the world around us.

I was challenged in my first semester Honors Writing and Rhetoric class. The professor asked us to explore the concept of originality. In our final projects, each student seemed to angle the idea of intertextuality into their respective fields. Many struggled with whether or not different forms of entertainment are original, the rules of plagiarism, and the origin of ideas. I was hung up on journalism. I questioned originality in my own field and decided to turn it into an example by writing part I.

People assume journalism is about the facts: who, what, when, where, why, and how. The reality is that stories are developed by how people interpret and react to those facts. I could interview 50 people, asking the same question over and over again about the same event, and each would likely have something different to say. My favorite explanation of journalism was in a Columbia University School of Journalism video in which a professor says “journalism explains the world to itself.” In that sense, we completely steal from this world around us, reporting on its people and changes. Before this project, I questioned the ownership of culture. I’m satisfied to learn that we, in fact, own culture because we create it. So who says we cannot interpret it and make it our own?

In Jonathan Lethem’s completely ‘plagiarized’ article “The Ecstasy of Influence” he quotes poet John Donne: “All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated.” I believe the crime would be to not steal from this amazing world. We have to steal, and we have to change the definition of originality. I am fascinated by the treehouse Alexa Rixon spoke of, the ordinary objects created time and time again, but different this time because of how it belongs. Everyone is striving to be original, to do what their elementary school teachers told them, and create something new and different, they forget to explain the beauty of recreating. Beauty, a completely subjective definition, is a combination of qualities that pleases the aesthetic senses. An artist understands they have to ‘steal’ from around them. There’s an excitement in finding inspiration and having the power to change what we see. We would not have the beauties of the world had no one stolen from those before us.

We live in a capitalist society that draws the line of plagiarism when an individual is making money from the work of someone else. I do not want to get into the copyright topic, because it’s tedious and annoying. For the sake of capitalism in the US, I will contend that people should not portray work as their own when it’s not, just as my interviewee Mia Smith said. In her field of fashion, people steal ideas all the time. In film, people steal plots. In journalism, I steal words. But, we should not have to live in some sort of fear that what we’re producing is derived, consciously or unconsciously, from something else. Every word I’m writing I learned from someone else, does that make me unoriginal?

There is so much I don’t understand about originality. I could tell you that originality comes from a visceral, gut feeling that we pursue, just as Alexa Rixon said. I could say that originality comes from inspiration, as Michael Matti said. I could confess that once something has my unique touch on it, it is original, as Mia Smith said. I do believe, more than anything, perhaps the beauty of originality is that it was never original.