Afterwords: Jack London
Hobos and plagiarism.
A MASSACRE
When I started Jack London, my plan was to tell the story of two characters: Clothesline Bill, a hobo, and his dog Shep.
Because my writing project has an eight-year span, I thought it would be fun to have one recurring story throughout the 100 Stories. Roughly once a year, these two characters would re-emerge. The “Adventures of Shep & Clothesline Bill.”
With a twist.
Each of these recurring stories would be told by other tramps and hobos in boxcars, one story for each decade from the 1930s to the 1990s.
With the decades I’d have a vehicle to look at the passing of the hobo life (Depression-Era, post war, beatniks and dreamers, all the way up to the last overcast, heroin vestiges of boxcar life in the 1990s.)
Romance, America, Boxcars, Collapse...
But always the shifting legend of Shep and Clothesline Bill.
The last story might have boiled down to the two of them as a fleeting mention, no more relevant to the story’s speaker than “Annie Oakley” or “Wild Bill Hickok” is to me. Jack London (Denver) might have returned in some fashion.
None of my “best laid plans” will see daylight. Right out of the station, the whole project “Mice and Menned” on me.
Immediately, the four boxcar characters took over and destroyed the entire series. The Episode 1 characters went from framing the first story of Shep and Clothesline Bill to becoming the story.
In fact…
Not only did my two main characters die off in Season 1, the image that started the entire effort died off (“a shoeless hobo who’s stolen a widow’s puppy hides in her billowing clothesline laundry”).
About an hour before I posted, I sliced that out in a brutal, pre-publish writing attack.
The whole effort was a massacre of darlings, but a thoughtful, noble massacre.
Now, suddenly, I’m wondering as I type this if maybe I could add a new chapter from time to time.
Writer rubs his chin like Mickey.
Are there more adventures of Shep and Clothesline Bill to be had? Can my darlings rise from the dead to ride the American rails once more?
TOBIAS WOLFF
ChatGPT, the Great Plagiarizer itself, informed me that my July story, Solomio, was in the same prep school, sub-genre as a short novel from Tobias Wolff called Old School.
Now I had not read Tobias Wolff.
I had not seen the movies made from his stories.
But I was curious.
In a Woodstock bookstore, I read the first page from Old School and was hooked. Then I wasn’t twenty pages into Old School when I hit a scene where a prep school headmaster forces a student to sing to humiliate him. Sound familiar, Solomio readers?
Reading this was like being a character in a Hitchcock movie, learning he’d murdered someone while sleepwalking and left a bloody knife in the refrigerator.1
A few thoughts popped up in close succession:
They’ll think I stole my story.2 By “they” I mean someone.
Even if I wrote something to defend it, like, say, this, I’ll only make it worse by drawing attention to it.3
Artistic disappointment that my “original” idea has already been mined.4 Truly, there is nothing new under the sun.
And, finally, relief to have a historical personal event as the inspiration so I know it wasn’t borrowed, even if inadvertently. Please see Peek for August.
The Universe wasn’t done messing with me. The mortification got worse...
It turned out, that Old School is literally about plagiarism! Who would plagiarize from a book about plagiarism?
God knows what the universe is carrying on about with me. I’m all ears, people.
If it turns out there is a Hitchcock movie where a character sleepwalks and leaves a bloody knife in the refrigerator, I’m not going to trust anything I write ever again, and you shouldn’t either.
The sky will fall. Thousands of readers will be crushed.
Please accept these notes as evidence, Your Honor.
Side note on a future story: I thought “A Conspiracy of Grace” was a great title for something I’m working on, only to find it’s been taken. Grrr. It’s all very deflating thinking of the same things as other people. (The story in question will now be called “Pigeons.” Prison story. Death Row. Nebraska. A drainpipe. A Bible read front to back. Maybe it’s next month’s story, maybe the one after. I’m afraid to check if “Pigeons” has been grabbed up. It probably has, and with my luck it will be a death row prison story.)
The refrigerator- that must be where Norman Bates stored his weapons in "Psycho"...
That’s it, I’m never reading you again. Plagiarizer! Credit to you for even bothering to ask the question. I have enough reasons to talk myself out of writing without looking for more.