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First, NY Times writer Jayson Blair plagiarized. Then A Million Pieces writer James Frey who said the work was nonfiction when it was fiction. Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code is under suspicion. Now How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life by Kaavya Viswanathan has passages from two books by Megan McCafferty.

The last thing I want to do as a writer is plagiarize. As I read resource after resource, I fear that some resource’s words or phrases will stick in my head and I will have thought they’re my own rather than something that hid in a tiny forgotten memory box somewhere in the brain.

I don’t want to steal someone’s ideas and pass them as my own. It feels wrong and I’ll feel guilty for days, months, and possibly years. The cases of Blair and James Frey are obvious. But could Brown and Viswanathan have memorized facts they didn’t realize they had? Brown’s case is a tough one because he intermingles history with fiction.

I’m beginning to question ideas that pop in my head. Are they there because of something I experienced? Or are they there simply because my creative mind put some experiences together and created a new one?

I wrote a tutorial and posted it in an online resource. Shortly after, I received an email from someone who had an article on the topic somewhere else online. When I wrote the tutorial, I based it on my experience and then I researched many resources to tweak it further — one of which was the person contacting me. I felt horrible when I got her email.

I looked at my content and hers. There were some similarities, but some of it I came up with on my own or did I? Could I have read her tutorial months before? Stupidly, I should’ve referred to her tutorial and a couple of others when I published mine. Sometimes I get so wrapped up in my writing that I forget to add the important resources as I believe linking to others is vital.

Yesterday’s post provides a good reason not to plagiarize non-fiction — the story might have inaccurate facts.

Denny Hatch wrote a great article on plagiarism.

Here are plagiarism resources:

• http://www.famousplagiarists.com/

• http://www.plagiarism.org/

• http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/print/research/r_plagiar.html