Are You Plagiarizing Yourself? by Jason Black

We all do it.  Every writer has his or her unconscious verbal tics. They may be phrases that show up like bad pennies in our manuscripts, character mannerisms and reactions we can’t seem to stop writing, plot twists or even, Mr. Brown, whole story arcs.

No offense Dan. You write entertaining thrill-rides, and we only kid because we’re jealous of your status as the Croesus of Conspiracies.

But seriously, we all do it. You’re probably aware of some of your own verbal tics.  Mine include the adverb “really” (ugh!), over-use of modifying phrases, and characters who nod at everything.  I fight these tics all the time.  If you can name three of your own verbal tics without thinking too hard about it, good for you!  That means you can work on them.

What worries me are the tics I’m not aware of.  You should be worried about yours too, because I guarantee you’ve got them. Everyone does.  Here’s why: the tics themselves aren’t the problem.  The problem is that what's unconscious to you might be really (<= see, there’s one!) obvious to the reader.

Pet words

Most of us have ordinary words we over-use.  Modifiers--and especially intensifiers like “really,” “very,” et cetera--are common examples.  But there might also be some highfalutin, two dollar word that has unconsciously caught your fancy.  If you over-use it, it’ll jump right out at readers.

As an example, let’s take the word “palimpsest.”  Great word.  When it’s the right word for the situation, nothing beats it.  But let’s face it, the word draws attention to itself.  Here’s the question: How many times do you think a writer can get away with using that word in, let’s say, a quarter-million word whopper of a novel?

Before I answer that, let’s think about what it means to over-use a word.  Basically, you know you’ve got a pet word if you use it in your writing substantially more often than the word occurs “in the wild.”  That is, more often than it occurs in all the other reading material your readers are consuming.  There’s a surprisingly simple mathematical relationship that describes how frequently words occur, Zipf’s Law, and if you’re a word geek like me you can read all about it on Wikipedia.  In short, the less often a word occurs in the wild, the more attention it draws to itself when a reader encounters it.

So what of palimpsest? That’s a pretty rare word.  I pick this example because the last time I encountered it was just a few months ago in China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station.  He used it as a metaphor for the complexity of the sights/sounds/smells of his fictional city of New Crobuzon.  When I saw that word used in that way, I thought, “Oh, clever.  Good way to describe it.”  The word caught my attention, but in a good way.  There was a novelty to the usage which worked well in the story.  The second time he used it, it caught my attention in a bad way.  I thought “Oops.  You used that one already.  This book could have used a better editor.”  The third time, my reaction was to sigh and roll my eyes, wondering if anybody edited the book at all.  The fourth time--yes, fourth--I was all “Jeez, Dude! Get a new metaphor already!”

So how many times can you use palimpsest in a quarter-million word novel?  One.  Palimpsest is that rare.  Use it more often, and it will draw the reader’s attention away from the story and onto the writing.  And not in a good way.

The second reason I picked this example is because I learned the word palimpsest from another novel, when I was a younger man: Carl Sagan’s elegantly written Contact. Truthfully, I have no idea how many times palimpsest occurs in that novel.  I know it was more than one, but it didn’t bug me at all.  Why? Context.

Contact uses palimpsest literally, not metaphorically.  In its modern usage, a palimpsest is essentially a message that has layers of meaning, one hidden under another.  The characters in Contact spend a good portion of the book trying to peel back all the layers in an actual palimpsest.  That’s what they had: a real message with layers of meaning.  It was the exact right word to describe the object of their attentions, and as such Sagan could use it as much as he wanted without causing a problem. As a reader, it did not draw my attention in a bad way because there was a story-related reason for the word to occur.  It wasn’t just the author's pet word. It was a clearly intentional choice, fully appropriate to the events in the story.  That’s not self-plagiarism, that’s just serving the needs of the story.

Pet phrases

About a month ago I finished critiquing a pair of novels for a client.  In the first novel, I came across the phrase "a Gaussian hiss," describing the soft static crackle of a CRT computer monitor turning on. I loved that description. It was very evocative, in a techno-geeky way that was completely appropriate to the overall tone of the novel.

When I saw “a Gaussian hiss” again in the second novel, it brought me to an immediate halt.  “Wait.  Something about that is veeeery familiar...”  A quick search in the first novel found it for me.  Yup.  Same phrase. Exact same wording.  It was the
phrase that had caught my eye, but when I looked, the entire sentence was the same.  “The monitor came on with a
Gaussian hiss.”  Now that’s self-plagiarism.

Pet mannerisms

Moving up slightly in scale are character mannerisms.  It’s fine, even good, for individual characters to have their own idiosyncratic mannerisms.  That helps differentiate them in readers’ minds, and makes the characters seem more real. Where you step into self-plagiarism territory is when all your characters share certain mannerisms.  In my current work in progress, my characters are all nodding at each other all the time.  I know this, and it’s on my list of stuff to clean up in the second draft. I had a client about a year ago whose otherwise very fine manuscript was full of characters who would bite the insides of their cheeks when they were nervous or pensive. Your beta readers can help you spot these in your own work.

Pet plot devices

Remember the Gaussian hiss? Well, it wasn’t just the sentence that was a clone.  In both novels, it turned out to be the whole scene.  In both, the monitor was coming on because one character was snooping on another, specifically sneaking into the other person’s office to poke through the person’s browser history to see phone numbers the person had been looking up. The author had self-plagiarized an entire plot device, rendered through situations which were virtually identical.  I encouraged that client to find another way for the snooper to discover the phone number in question.

Pet plots

And of course, self-plagiarism can happen at the largest scale of all, the entire novel.  How many times have you heard a successful author criticized because he or she seems to be writing essentially the same story over and over?  Dan Brown syndrome.  He’s writing to a formula.  Don’t do that.  For one thing, once the reader figures out the formula, they’ll be able to see all your surprises coming a mile away.  For another, come on.  You’re more creative than that, right?  Of course you are.

The Good News

The larger scale your self-plagiarism is, the easier it is to spot.  Dan Brown is obviously aware that he’s writing to a formula.  He knows he’s engaging in grand scale self-plagiarism, but he does it anyway.  (And can you really blame him?  He makes a frickin’ mint at it.)  Still, I hope he pushes himself to find a different formula someday.  He really does write entertaining thrill-ride stories; I’d just like to read one that's actually new sometime.

If you’re a plotter (as I’m sure many people on #amwriting are, having read Johanna’s descriptions of her sticky note boards and whatnot), this is pretty easy to spot.  You’ve got your whole plot distilled into some fairly terse form, which you can compare to the distilled plots of your other works. If you’re a pantser, well, that’s harder but you can still do it.  You can still make post-facto outlines of your works and look for similarities.  Either way, if you discover that both outlines contain “the scene where the guy and the girl get in a fight about their differing expectations for the relationship,” then you know you’ve got something to fix in at least one of those books.

The Bad News

It’s almost impossible to see your own small scale self-plagiarisms--the words, phrases, and mannerisms.  Of all the writing flaws we writers are blind to in our own work, small scale self-plagiarism is probably the hardest one to see. It’s almost by definition: we all know that plagiarism of any form is bad and that repetition gets old fast, thus, if we knew we were copying ourselves we’d stop, right?  Of course we would.

But almost impossible isn’t the same as impossible. Uncommonly hard, maybe, but there are things you can do to bring about your own awareness of what you’re stealing from yourself.

• If you suspect you’re self-plagiarizing something, search and replace is your best friend.  I pity writers from the
  typewriter era who couldn’t discover, in thirty seconds and a few mouse clicks, how many times they used “palimpsest” in their 600 page tome.  But you can, so do it.


• Take some time away from the novel.  That thing I said where all the people in my WIP nod at each other all the time?  I
  spotted it after taking a couple of months off from that project.  Let it sit. Plot out your next novel.  Come back with fresh eyes and an explicit intention to ferret out your own pet words and phrases.


• Run your novel through Wordle.  Wordle's whole job is to show you what’s common in a piece of text.  This will likely take some doing, but I think it’s worth the effort.  Make sure you turn on the option to ignore common words.  When you Wordle your novel the first time, what you’re going to discover are all the character, place names, important objects, et cetera, that are essential to the plot.  You’re not interested in those, because those are story-motivated.  Just like in Contact, you can use those as many times as you want. So, MAKE A COPY of your novel so you can safely delete all those story-motivated common items out of it, and Wordle it again. Now see what’s most common.  Any pet words jump out at you?  Look especially for those adjectives, adverbs, and intensifiers.  Repeat this process, deleting common stuff out of a copy of your novel and generating a new Wordle, to probe deeper and deeper into your own writing.


• Finally, use beta readers.  Computer-based tools are great as far as they go, but nothing beats human intelligence. However, if you want your beta readers to help you find your unconscious verbal tics, you have to give them specific instructions to do so.  You need to ask them to pay attention to the feeling of something being repetitive so they can flag it for you.  Most beta readers won’t do that without being asked, because it’s not something most people think to watch out for.  But if you can clearly articulate for them what you want them to help you find (hint: send them to this article!), chances are they’ll come through for you.