Claudia Easton's Blog

Writing is the most fulfilling thing I do most days. Editing is perhaps the most debilitating. It’s not that I hate the process. In many ways, I find the act of taking something not quite right and making it better gratifying.

If that’s all it were, I think most writers would enjoy book editing almost as much as they enjoy the writing of the book. Of course, editing and proofreading are never just editing and proofreading. Writing is never objective, and many of us are our own worst critics.

Is this what makes the rewrite so painful?

Currently, I am a finished-manuscript editor, though in the past I have dabbled in writing a book and editing it simultaneously, starting each day by reading back through from the beginning and making changes along the way. I find advantages to both methods.

By writing a manuscript from start to finish before looking back, I get all the ideas out while they’re fresh, I stay fully entrenched in the forward motion of the story, and I finish the book sooner. The main disadvantage of this method is that the fun part, getting the story out, is over, and what remains is the work.

By writing and rewriting at the same time, I revisit the previous events regularly, keeping details and foreshadowing in the forefront of my mind, and the book has already been revisited several times, making later rewrites less tedious.

Whether I edit during or after the writing of a book manuscript, it’s always a difficult process. Books are never really complete, are they? Looking back months or years later, writers will always find things they would write differently given another crack at it. Of course, writing and rewriting the same book repeatedly is a good way to tell only one story for the rest of your life. Where would those other stories go if you did that?

I recently finished my next book, and am in the first stages of editing. It’s a lengthy book, so it’s going to be a lengthy process. So, to all the other writers out there who are in the midst of edits, I feel ya.

I don’t know that it’s my place to be concerned about what 50 Shades of Grey says about us as a society. Fantasizing about abusive scenarios, finding a physically and emotionally controlling partner the “knight in shining armor” of the piece, I don’t understand it. I find the notion of mistreatment, manipulation and total dependence on a person who takes advantage of that vulnerable position more turn-off than turn-on. I’m not interested in being controlled, and neither are my characters.

How much of an effect a novel has on its readers is hard to determine. Some, of course, will be swayed more than others. The written word can be manipulative in itself. There are experts speaking out on the book, though, such as Dr. Drew, who calls the relationship in the novel “pathological.”

Many of the arguments in support of the book have centered upon the fact that women should be able to harbor any fantasies that they desire, that people should stop making the female sex out to be morons who cannot differentiate a romance novel from reality.

Obviously, I don’t think that women are morons. I am a woman, after all. Nor do I think that the women indulging in 50 Shades of Grey cannot differentiate the relationship in the novel from a positive real-life relationship.

But the thing is, I don’t worry about the 35-year-old woman who plucks this novel from a store shelf for a little late-night reading. I worry about the 15-year-old girl who doesn’t fully understand an adult relationship and reads this book as a positive example of one.

As far as copyright law goes, 50 Shades of Grey probably doesn’t infringe on Twilight. The copyright holders are not taking action for infringement at any rate, and the opinions of the rest of the public don’t matter much.

Let’s be honest. As writers, we get inspiration from all sorts of places. Sometimes, we even find it within other authors’ works. It’s all part of the process. The line between inspiration and intellectual theft can be a hazy one. Most of us, I believe, know instinctively where that line lies and take great efforts to never cross it. It all goes back to the Golden Rule. We treat others as we would like to be treated. We would never lift someone’s work, because we don’t want anyone lifting ours.

Though I like to believe that all authors live by this rule, it’s hard to know how many of those authors cross the line. The world is full of books. I’m sure at least a few of them have a stolen character or line shoved in. 50 Shades of Grey is also not the only highly-successful novel that has been accused of borrowing major plot points from other works lately, so it’s difficult to know what is intentional and what is coincidence.

The thing that sets 50 Shades of Grey apart from these other accused books seems to be one thing and one thing only – people were already aware that the novel was inspired by Twilight. With that in mind, all that they could see were the similarities, which may in fact be many. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter much at this point.

Here’s what I do wonder, though -

Would 50 Shades of Grey have reached such peaks of success without its Twilight ties? Everyone talks about the sex, but were those initial buyers in it for the steaminess or in it for its affiliations? After all, fan sites are posting snippets of the books onto images of the actors from the Twilight movies and billing those images as “Christian” and “Anastasia,” the leading characters from 50 Shades. Clearly, some fans just wanted another, more adult, take on Edward and Bella.

That still doesn’t put E.L. James in the wrong. After all, we all puts faces to the characters in the novels that we read. The faces that fans are putting to 50 Shades of Grey‘s characters just happen to be the same famous faces of the Twilight‘s franchise.

It does make one wonder, though, if the Grey series could have ever stood on its own two feet. Did it have any shot at success on its own merits?

We’ll never know.

We all know that 50 Shades of Grey is a veritable book series sensation. Most people know that there is some controversy as to whether E.L. James crossed a line in publishing what began as Twilight fan fiction and, for many, bears striking similarities to the source material.

As I haven’t read 50 Shades of Grey, nor the Twilight series, beyond the first couple of pages, I can’t add to the argument of whether or not the publishing of the novel was intellectual property theft.

I also have no thoughts as to whether E.L. James best-seller is a work worth reading. Those readers who like it really seem to like it, and that’s all that writing can be. Though some series, like Harry Potter, may appeal to wider audiences than others, no series will ever be universally liked. If we pleased everyone, we probably wouldn’t be saying much. So, if people enjoy 50 Shades of Grey, we should let them enjoy it.

The question, of course, is whether they should be paying to do so. After all, the origins of the book – James’ Twilight fan fiction Master of the Universe – is widely known.

Personally, I am a proponent of fan fiction. I take no issue with writers playing in other writers’ worlds and works for fun, or with those writers sharing their derivative stories with other fans. Fan fiction explores a lot of areas of a work that the original author may not choose to explore, and offers alternative scenarios for readers who may prefer to see the author’s world in a different way. It also increases exposure of a book series, often introducing the books to an audience that may not have otherwise discovered them.

It’s a win-win for all parties, even if some famous authors refuse to see it.

It is when a writer attempts to profit off of someone else’s creations that fan fiction crosses the line from harmless fun into plagiarism. As I said, I haven’t read any of the involved works, but, from what I have ascertained about 50 Shades of Grey, it seems to me that E.L. James did use her own storyline and her own words. How much this storyline and these words overlap with those found in Twilight, I don’t know.

Does 50 Shades of Grey plagiarize Twilight? I don’t know.

Would 50 Shades of Grey be a bestseller without Twilight? It’s hard to imagine.

The reality, though, is that the books have been written, they are selling like crazy, and neither Stephenie Meyer nor publisher Little, Brown and Company have taken legal action against E.L. James. As far as the hazy line of legality goes, who better to make the determination of what does and doesn’t infringe than those who hold the copyright?