I didn’t read Robert Kolker’s “Who Is the Bad Art Friend?” right away. I saw all the book people talking about it on Twitter, of course, and that was more than enough to satisfy my curiosity until the long weekend was nearly over. One of my favorite takes on the whole saga, before I’d dived into it for myself, came from romance novelist Courtney Milan:
Let’s say that hypothetically speaking, you’re copying a few lines from someone else’s Facebook page that you are using pretty much verbatim in a story.
Have you committed copyright infringement?
a) yes
b) no
c) it doesn’t matter if the person is litigious
It ultimately doesn’t matter whether Sonya Larson should or shouldn’t have taken Dawn Dorland’s Facebook post and incorporated it into her short story, although I have some thoughts about that, and we’ll get to those soon enough. What matters is that Dorland felt personally slighted because she felt Larson wasn’t commending her for having donated a kidney to a stranger, and then she found out Larson had written a story that paints a woman who donates her kidney to a stranger in an unflattering light, so when Larson wouldn’t give Dorland personal satisfaction, she decided to take it out of Larson’s hide by means of a lawsuit—and, however it ends, both of them will have spent, and continue to spend, a lot of time being miserable.
And that’s before you work out the financial cost to each of them.
My other favorite take, from the speculative fiction writer Jeff VanderMeer, wasn’t specifically about the dispute between Dorland and Larson, nor about the other members of Larson’s writing group—many of whom, the article revealed, were happy to support Larson by trash-talking Dorland in group chats. “I think kidney person was probably a lot,” VanderMeer admits, “but, no, it's not normal for writer groups to be immature high-school gossip hot zones unless [you’re] part of an unprofessional one.”
“I would leave such a group immediately, because that kind of discourse quickly becomes toxic in all kinds of ways and is, again, unprofessional. So, I'm a little aghast at the number of writers affirming that this is ‘normal.’ It shouldn't be.”
Whatever stage you’re at it in your writing practice, it’s important to surround yourself with people who will reinforce your commitment to that practice, whether that’s by, for example, directly encouraging you to keep writing on a specific schedule, or by helping you believe that what you’re doing matters and that something good—maybe publication, but then again maybe not—will come out of sticking with it.
Dawn Dorland may have been “a lot,” as VanderMeer guesses; she certainly sounds like it. But the other members of Sonya Larson’s writing group didn’t do her writing any favors by encouraging her to believe that, or by letting her believe that she held some kind of aesthetic moral high ground because she’d made “art” out of one of Dorland’s Facebook posts.
If you’re in a writing group, and you constantly find yourself talking about something other than what you and your colleagues have been writing—how it works and how it doesn’t work—what you’ve got isn’t so much a writing group as it is a circle of friends. Nothing wrong with having a circle of friends, of course; but if what you’re looking for is a spur to keep writing, and what you’ve got is a place where you escape all the frustrations of writing, it’s worth taking a second look at your setup.
It’s also very tempting, of course, to have your friends tell you how wonderful you are and how awful the person criticizing you is—tempting and difficult, in such a situation, to step back and ask yourself whether that’s entirely true.
I agree with Sonya Larson that writers can draw inspiration from everyone and everything around them—but I also think that taking somebody’s Facebook post, doing a bare minimum of revision to the text, and attributing it a character in your story isn’t “inspiration.” That’s just copying, and you may have gathered that I don’t think it’s particularly artistic.
Perhaps, as writers, we should all maintain a more skeptical attitude towards story elements that seem to just fall into our laps, perfectly formed as is.
“I think I’m DONE with the kidney story,” Larson wrote to her friends, “but I feel nervous about sending it out [because] it literally has sentences that I verbatim grabbed from Dawn’s letter on FB. I’ve tried to change it but I can’t seem to—that letter was just too damn good.”
Perhaps Larson should have listened more closely to that nervousness, that sense of being “morally compromised / like a good artist but a shitty person.” If Dorland’s words were “too damn good,” so good that Larson couldn’t see how to keep them out of her story, perhaps that was a sign that she hadn’t done enough to make her own work of art out of something she’d found on the internet… something that, whatever we might think of the person who put it online, still belongs to that person, still represents her experience in a distinctive way.
Dorland certainly has strong proprietary feelings towards her kidney donation, as I suppose someone in her situation might do. One of the saddest moments in Robert Kolker’s lengthy account, for me, was when she left a writers conference after emotionally unsatisfying encounters with Larson and other writers, and she finds herself wondering: “Do writers not care about my kidney donation?”
It’s an easy line to laugh at, and plenty of participants in the online discourse had their fun with it. I did, too, at first. It’s easy to laugh at stark emotional need, especially when we can recast it as vanity and self-absorption: Look at me! Love me!
But here’s the whole quote:
“I left that conference with this question: Do writers not care about my kidney donation? Which kind of confused me, because I thought I was in a community of service-oriented people.”
Now I can see more clearly why Dorland is in pain—she came to “the writing world” not just to find resources and make relationships that could make her a better writer, but to make relationships that would give her emotional validation, that would reinforce her belief in herself as a “service-oriented” person, and would confirm that this was a good thing to be.
Those are things friends can do for each other. They are not necessarily things that writers can do for each other as writers. And while it’s easy to confuse the effort to become a better writer with the effort to make new friends—both, at heart, are about wanting to be understood, seen, recognized by someone else—the saga of Dawn Dorland and Sonya Larson shows us how much pain and misery that confusion can bring, when we refuse to let go of it.
Again, it’s easy to say Dorland should have just cut her losses when she learned that Larson was willing to appropriate a key moment in her life for a story without telling her. If you’re thinking that’s not something a good friend does, you’re right—but Kolker’s account makes it clear that, while Dorland may have latched onto the idea of Larson as a friend, Larson didn’t return the sentiment. Easy to say that now, from the sidelines. Not so easy, perhaps, for someone still dealing with that disillusionment in real time—someone who, to circle back to Courtney Milan’s hypothetical scenario, seems prepared to turn personal disappointment into a protracted legal battle rather than let the hurt go.
I suppose the ultimate lesson here, whether you want to focus on the person who can’t let go of a perceived betrayal or the one who clings to “artistic freedom” as self-justification, is that if we want to become “better” writers, our time might be more profitably spent focused on writing.