My take on things, worth what you paid for it. 1) No policy is going to prevent conscious plagiarism.
2) Sometimes unconscious plagiarism occurs; policy won't prevent that. See: Patton Oswalt: http://www.pattonoswalt.com/index.cfm?page=spew&id=167 3) One author riffing off another in a non-plagiarizing way is the way the world turns. The exercise that convinced me it really typically wasn't a problem was one I had in grad school (Lawrence Connolly was the prof). We were given a myth broken into about a dozen plot points. Our goal was to figure out which element to start with (our eventual story would include all of them, but not necessarily starting at plot point #1). We went around the room and the 25-ish authors read what they'd worked on during our half hour of writing time. Every one was distinctly different and we'd all started with the same prompt. Some were science fiction, some were romance, a couple were mystery. Mine was comedic fantasy. I've read slush for four different venues and never been asked to sign anything. -- Deirdre Saoirse Moen deir...@deirdre.net On Mon, Jun 24, 2013, at 08:18 PM, The Fabulist Words & Art wrote: > Some things have been occurring to me regarding slush reading. Namely, > the fair treatment of the authors whose work is submitted to a fiction > outlet, and the prevention of abuses in the handling of their > manuscripts. > > In all the diverse complexity of this world we live in, I can imagine > that in some instances a slush-reading situation could go horribly awry. > Say one of the readers is an aspiring writer, is "inspired" by one of the > manuscripts he or she reviews, but the manuscript is ultimately rejected, > and after that the slush reader in question writes something that is > derivative of the original rejected submission … and next thing you know > we have a mess involving claims or plagiarism or what have you. > > This actually seems like a real-enough concern that I wonder if there is > such a thing as a set of "slush reader policies" out there that could be > attached to a work or volunteer agreement of some sort. This could > theoretically prevent such abuses. > > I welcome any thoughts or comments on the foregoing. > > Josh / The Fabulist > _______________________________________________ > Basfa mailing list > Basfa@lists.basfa.org > http://lists.basfa.org/listinfo.cgi/basfa-basfa.org _______________________________________________ Basfa mailing list Basfa@lists.basfa.org http://lists.basfa.org/listinfo.cgi/basfa-basfa.org
