[defrost]

The similarities are intriging but not compelling.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pPE6tqReSAXEmzuJM52h219f...

Stories of "asian face" actresses with eyes taped back, prominent pieces of anti asian grafitti on walls and drawn in bathrooms are common tropes in asian communities, etc.

The examples of plagiarism are examples of common story arcs, with an educated asian female twist, and use of examples that multiple writers in a shared literary pool would have all been exposed to; eg: it could be argued that they all drew from a similar well rather thn some were original and others copied.

There's a shocked article: https://www.halfmystic.com/blog/you-are-believed that may indeed be looking at more evidence than was cited in the google docs link above which would explain the shock and the dismissal of R.W. as a plagiarist.

The evidence in the link amounts to what is common with many pools of proto writers though, lots of similar passages, some of which have been copied and morphed from others. It's literally how writers evolve and become better.

I'm on the fence here, to be honest, I looked at what is cited as evidence and I see similar stories from people with similar backgrounds sharing common social media feeds.

[sarchertech]

One of her publishers pulled her book from print, publicly accused her of plagiarism, and asked other publishers to denounce her for plagiarism.

That’s pretty damning evidence. If a publisher was on the fence they might pull her books quietly, but they wouldn’t make such a public attack without very good evidence that they thought would hold up in court. There was no equivocation at all.

[thereitgoes456]

Said publisher also claims Rona directly admitted plagiarism to them. That’s probably why they’re so confident.

[defrost]

That's a pretty damning response, sure.

The evidence, at least the evidence that I found cited as evidence, appears less damning.

Perhaps there is more damning evidence.

What I found was on the order of the degree of cross copying and similar themes, etc. found in many pools of young writers going back through literary history.

Rona Wang, whom I've never previously heard of, clearly used similar passages from her peers in a literary group and was called out for it after receiving awards.

I would raise two questions, A) was this a truly significant degree of actual plagarism, and 2) did any of her peers in this group use passages from any of Tona's work ?

On the third hand, Kate Bush was a remarkable singer / song writer / performer. Almost utterly unique and completely unlike any contempory.

That's ... highly unusual.

The majority of writers, performers, singers, et al. emerge from pools that differ from their prior generations, but pools none the less that are filled with similarity.

The arc of careers of those that rise from such origins is really the defining part of many creators.

[sarchertech]

It is evidence because a strong condemnation raises the likelihood that the accusation is true.

It doesn’t prove anything, but it supports the theory that they have seen additional evidence.

After researching this a bit, it looks like someone from publisher says she admitted it to them. That certainly explains why they weren’t afraid to publicly condemn her.

[occamsrazorwit]

> Perhaps there is more damning evidence.

Do you consider the announcement from her publisher that she admitted that she plagiarized passages as a damning response or damning evidence?

[drysine]

>On the third hand

On the gripping hand

[neilv]

Thanks, I looked at some of those examples. Several I saw were suspiciously similar, and I wonder how they got that way. Others didn't look suspicious to me.

I wonder whether the similar ones were the result of something innocent, like a shared writing prompt within the workshop both writers were in, or maybe from a group exercise of working on each others' drafts.

Or I suppose some could be the result of a questionable practice, of copying passages of someone else's work for "inspiration", and rewriting them. And maybe sometimes not rewriting a passage enough.

(Aside relevance to HN professions: In software development, we are starting to see many people do worse than copy&revise a passage plagiarism. Not even rewriting the text copy&pasted from an LLM, but simply putting our names on it internally, and company copyrights on it publicly. And the LLM is arguably just laundering open source code, albeit often with more obfuscation than a human copier would do.)

But for a lot of the examples of evidence of plagiarism in that document, I didn't immediately see why that passage was suspect. Fiction writing I've seen is heavily full of tropes and even idiomatic turns of phrase.

Also, many stories are formulaic, and readers know that and even seek it out. So the high-powered business woman goes back to her small town origins for the holidays, has second-chance romance with man in a henley shirt, and she decides to stay and open a bakery. Sprinkle with an assortment of standard subgenre trope details, and serve. You might do very original writing within that framework, but to someone who'd only ever seen two examples of that story, and didn't know the subgenre convention, it might look like one writer totally ripped off the other.