Literary Homage vs. Plagiarism - What's the Difference?

[Link the Writer]

Let's say I wanted a character to quote Miss Havisham's line from Great Expectations by saying, 'I know nothing of the days of the weeks; nothing of the weeks of the year.' or bemoaning how a bride cake reminds them of their youth long since gone.

So long as I make it clear they're referencing Dickens, maybe have another character needle them with, 'Quoting him again, are we?' or 'Yeah, yeah, Miss Havingsham' even though it's clearly not their name, that's a literary homage, right? Plagiarism would be like if I lifted a quote from Dickens and tried passing it off as my own?

With that said, Dickens had been dead for over a century, so, status of limitations? And what's the difference between an homage and parody? Parody would be like making fun of Dickens/the Miss Havisham character?

Just a random thought I had, wanted to needle y'all's brains with it.

 

[Catrin Lewis]

Read Dorothy L. Sayers. She has her characters, Lord Peter Wimsey especially, constantly quoting the classics and more recent authors and poets. It's both an homage to those authors and a basket of Easter eggs for the reader (she assumes her audience will get it). She makes it known that Lord Peter has a habit of hiding behind "ironical quotations," so no one is under the impression that the character is coming up with these lines out of his own head.

There's nothing at all wrong, in my opinion, with having a character reference or even quote a classic line in the course of your story, if that's in the character's nature. Having another character supply the attribution breaks the flow of meaning and kind of says, "Hey, look at me!" (i.e., the author). The important thing is that the lines should be famous, so the educated reader knows where its from. In the case of your own writing, it might be safest to stick with paying homage to authors your audience might be familiar with.

As for parody, that's more sustained, and has to do with inverting the idea and intention of the piece being parodied. Any lines used would be in service of the inversion, and are usually twisted. In non-parody you can bring in bits from famous works as humorous one-liners, but that's not poking fun at the original.

We include a lot more under the umbrella of "plagiarism" than our predecessors did. Where it comes to the arts, I wouldn't mind a bit of virtuous push back. I used to sub for an English teacher, now retired, who had an evils-of-plagiarism poster on her classroom wall that included "copying ideas" as an example. To which I, in my head, constantly retorted, "Bull hockey!" If that were true, you wouldn't have West Side Story (Romeo and Juliet), The Lion King (Hamlet), or the plethora of fantasy novels that riff on Lord of the Rings. For that matter, you wouldn't have a lot of jazz and classical music, or Renaissance architecture, or the Arts and Crafts movement, or . . .

 

[Naomasa298]

I write homages and pastiches all the time. By that, I mean, I write stories in the style of, and including elements *similar* to those in the original author's work, but they are never the author's actual thing. I have set stories on "a" dying earth, but it is not Jack Vance's "Dying Earth". It resembles his, but does not have the same locations, just the same atmosphere. I've written a story about a robot with a quantum computing brain, but not a positronic one.

I might write characters with the same speaking style as the original author, but I never use the author's own characters. Sure, at least one of my characters is an expy of theirs, but it is not theirs. So if I want my character to act differently to theirs, I'm not constrained.

Is it homage? Is it pastiche? Is it a tribute? Is it fanfiction?

Who cares? The only criteria is, does it work as a story in its own right?

Some people might sneer at me for doing it. Screw 'em.

By the way, a parody is when you write something to specifically mock the original creation. Deadpool (Wade Wilson) is a parody of Deathstroke (Slade Wilson).

 

[Link the Writer]

So in my example above, it may just be referencing/alluding since the other character outright says the speaker is talking like Miss Havisham.

 

[Catrin Lewis]

So in my example above, it may just be referencing/alluding since the other character outright says the speaker is talking like Miss Havisham.

Perhaps . . . but I think it takes away from the force of the quotation to have the other character mention it. Better (imho) to have him/her pick up on the first character's meaning and sympathize or push back or get the joke and laugh or whatever.

 

[Homer Potvin]

You're fine. The literary catalogue is loaded with unattributed famous (or not famous) quotes and passages. There's no need to reference little ones for legal reasons. You may want to make a reference so the reader doesn't think you're ripping something off and trying to slip one past them, however. Up to you. I wouldn't make a big thing about it, though. That draws more attention to it. If anything, I would just have the character say, "Well, Dickens said, 'blah blah blah'."

 

[GrahamLewis]

Something that has always irked me about PG Wodehouse, one of my favorite authors, is how much he incorporates concepts and tropes from an earlier writer of similar style, that being HH Munro (a/k/a Saki), who died while fighting in the first World War. Not only things like tyrannical aunts, but one later Wodehouse work, Right You Are, Jeeves, has two brothers in it, one named Wilbert and one named Wilber (or something like that), one of whom is a kleptomaniac but the other folks get mixed up as to which is which. The exact same scenario is played out in a short story by Saki, The Seven Cream Jugs, with even the same first names, albeit a different last name. I am not aware of any time that Wodehouse acknowledged to "borrowing." Admittedly the scenario is much more played out in the book as opposed to the story, but still it's there. Perhaps Wodehouse did acknowledge it somewhere, but I haven't seen it.

 

[Also]

The exception is snippets of song lyrics. It's never the original artist who comes after you. The catalog owners pay bounty hunters to find unlicensed uses. They're not angry or offended — they actually hope you do it, because extracting payments from "infringers" is their bread and butter.

 

[Catrin Lewis]

The exception is snippets of song lyrics. It's never the original artist who comes after you. The catalog owners pay bounty hunters to find unlicensed uses. They're not angry or offended — they actually hope you do it, because extracting payments from "infringers" is their bread and butter.

We need a crying response emoji for this.

 

[Hammer]

Something that has always irked me about PG Wodehouse, one of my favorite authors, is how much he incorporates concepts and tropes from an earlier writer of similar style, that being HH Munro (a/k/a Saki), who died while fighting in the first World War. Not only things like tyrannical aunts, but one later Wodehouse work, Right You Are, Jeeves, has two brothers in it, one named Wilbert and one named Wilber (or something like that), one of whom is a kleptomaniac but the other folks get mixed up as to which is which. The exact same scenario is played out in a short story by Saki, The Seven Cream Jugs, with even the same first names, albeit a different last name. I am not aware of any time that Wodehouse acknowledged to "borrowing." Admittedly the scenario is much more played out in the book as opposed to the story, but still it's there. Perhaps Wodehouse did acknowledge it somewhere, but I haven't seen it.

I wasn't aware of this; I can see how it would annoy you. I know what I shall be Googling later on today...

As I was reading this thread I was thinking of PG Wodehouse; the Jeeves books are liberally peppered with quotations, and I think there was an expectation of the level of literacy by the author that the reader would know what was being quoted - something along the lines of "There is a tide in the affairs of men," said Jeeves, "which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune". Jeeves has a rather neat way of putting these things.

 

[JLT]

According to a famous director, plagiarism is when you borrow somebody else's work or theme.
You call it "homage " when they catch you at it.

 

[JLT]

The exception is snippets of song lyrics. It's never the original artist who comes after you. The catalog owners pay bounty hunters to find unlicensed uses. They're not angry or offended — they actually hope you do it, because extracting payments from "infringers" is their bread and butter.

In my book about VW buses, I wanted to quote a Bob Weir lyric "The bus came by and I got on, that's when it all began." But I couldn't get permission to use it. So instead, I wrote: "It all began, Bob Weir sang, when the bus came by and he got on." Anybody with a passing knowledge of the Grateful Dead would have caught the allusion but since it wasn't a direct quote, I got away with it.