Kaavya Viswanathan has been forced to remove her books from bookstores and rewrite passages to eliminate the similarities that her book bears to another written by Megan McCafferty. An as yet unknown number of paragraphs in Miss Viswanathan's book were either lifted straight from the other books, or are considered similar enough to be copies and not original material.

"When I sat down to write my novel, my only intention was to tell the story of Opal."... "I was so surprised and horrified when I found these similarities." Kaavya Viswantathan

Well that's all any of us do when we sit down to write a story, tell the story of our characters, their circumstances and anything of interest that happens to them along the way. So that's easy enough to accept as her motivation for writing the book. In fact it sounds like there are striking similarities between the author's life and the life of her heroine.

They are both young woman from ethnic backgrounds who have pushed themselves to succeed no matter what the cost. In Miss Viswanathan's novel her character stumbles because she has forgotten to have a life outside of her academic ambitions, while Miss Viswanathan herself has stumbled for trying to take shortcuts on the road to success.

On the other hand, with regard to the second part of her statement, how possible is it that another author's work will turn up verbatim in one's own book unintentionally? Especially when the books are about circumstances that bear a striking thematic resemblance. It's one thing to write a book that covers the same territory as another, but an author is expected to write their own version, offer a new perspective on familiar circumstances.

I haven't been following the story too closely because, to be honest about it, sometimes this type of story strikes to close to the bone. Thoughts about originality and copying another's work have lurked in my brain since I started writing my novel. It's not that I've sat down and either copied out someone else's words, or even taken their ideas and retooled them, but the fact remains that other people have written stories set during the same time period and locale as me.

The very strange and great French writer Jean Cocteau once compared originality to a new suit, stiff and uncomfortable and difficult to wear. But this was more along the lines of an admonishment directed at young artists who were trying to invent brand new means of expression while completely discarding what came before them, and not about content.

Stylistically, he was saying everything must build on what has come before, even if it is just to reject what your forebears have done. Something that is new, only for the sake of being new, will not have the substance of something that has roots in the past.