On accidental plagiarism: a memoir about memory

In 2020, I wrote an ill-advised short about BDSM-gone-wrong. It was accepted to the Short + Sweet festival. Then my friend Seán pointed out it had the same plot as Stephen King’s Gerald’s Game. I had to withdraw it. Karoline Rose at Short + Sweet was kind enough to invite me to talk about the experience and the phenomenon of Cryptomnesia at the online conference that was held in place of the festival that year.

Here’s the text of my talk.

How many stories are there in the world?

Is each story unique and individual? Are there are many stories as there are tellers of stories? Or do all stories adhere to particular themes and narrative conventions that mean they can better be described as variants of specific types? And if a story can be distilled down to its type — how many of these types are there? Some say thirty-six. Some say just three. A big AI project at the University of Vermont put all of the texts on Project Gutenberg through a natural language processor to analyse their shape — the highs and lows of their emotional arcs — and discovered there are only 6 — which may be as close as we will get to a definitive answer, for the time being at least.

Personally, I believe in the types. I believe there are universal themes, and established ways to explore them. Writers retell these same basic stories in their own ways, mining old archetypes and sprinkling them with fresh insights. But what if you find yourself telling exactly the same story as another writer? And what if you’re certain you’ve never even heard of their story — yet there they are, in black and white, and almost identical?

In July of this year I was having a conversation with a friend about her practice of BDSM. We’re being represented by Kate and Ana from the very malignantly-influential film Fifty Shades of Grey. She had described to me the process she goes through with her partners to establish limits — how they agree together which sexual practices are, and are not, acceptable. And she also shared a list of times when, despite those safeguards, things had gone wrong. A rope breaks, a restraint won’t unfasten, someone passes out. The safety protocols people put in place cannot protect them from the randomness and unpredictability of an accident, and, in some of these situations, the potential for bodily harm is severe. And the less experienced the participants are, the great the risk — the less likely they are going to be able to calmly, and safely, deal with an accident when it arises, without feel shame, panic, or guilt.

As she was talking about this, I immediately thought of what might frighten me about entering a situation like that. I do not like the idea of anyone having their hands restrained in a way that they cannot get out of. There is something quite primal about having use of your hands. They are what you use to care for yourself and to help other people. What if, for example, you were restrained, and something unexpected happened to your partner? A sudden heart attack, an incapacitating asthma attack, their first epileptic fit. How would you aid them, when you’re relying on them to release you? The idea — the fear not of being helpless, but of being unable to help — stayed with me.

In August, a friend suggested I submit to the Short and Sweet festival as an independent production company. And the idea came back to me. It was a fear I wanted to explore. I wanted to present a piece in which a couple are participating a BDSM scene, and one of them comes to harm. When we look in from the outside, the risk of harm seems to be entirely assumed by the person who is being incapacitated, being beaten, being controlled. But what if it’s the other person that something awful happens to? And their partner has to look on, and watch it unfold, unable to intervene. And let’s make the couple inexperienced in BDSM, so the element of risk is higher, and their ability to anticipate and control for the full range of potential negative outcomes is lower. And let’s not make them a solid couple, with good rapport — let’s make them a couple who are on the rocks, with weak trust, and diminished rapport.

This is how I came up with the story of Simon and Mona.

Mona is frustrated in her relationship with Simon. After several years together, they’ve settled into a steady, passionless routine. Between her busy job, steering the relationship and doing the majority of the domestic labour, she’s exhausted, and no longer has the energy to work on her relationship with Simon. Meanwhile Simon, feeling Mona’s lack of interest in him, is frustrated and withdrawn.

Tired of their impasse, and under the malign influence of the mainstreaming of BDSM in romantic media, Mona suggests she and Simon experiment with bondage. He’s unsure what that would mean for their relationship, and what it would say about him as a man if he agrees. Mona presents him with a fait accompli: she already has the restraints, and if he’s not willing to experiment with her, she will doubt his commitment to her and to their relationship.

And then it all goes wrong.

The outline was accepted. I told a friend that I would be presenting a piece at an upcoming festival. He wanted to know the vague outline of the story — so I told him. And he said, “oh, that sounds like Gerald’s Game. Have you seen it?”

“Have I seen what?”

“Gerald’s Game. It’s a Stephen King story. I think it was made into a film for Netflix or something.”

I can feel that the blood has drained out of my face.

“What happens in Gerald’s Game?”

“Well, it’s almost the same as your story. A couple are trying BDSM for the first time, she’s tied to the bed, he has a heart attack, she can’t help him, he dies.”

“Yep, that’s the same as my story.”

“Are you sure you haven’t seen it?”

I’m sure I haven’t. I’m sure the genesis of this story came to me during that night in the bar with my friend, and I’m sure the story came to my mind fully-formed when I sat down to write out my Short and Sweet submission.

Or did it? Could I have read this, and forgotten about it? Could I have idly clicked it on Netflix one sleepless night, and could it have sunk into my barely lucid memory? Did someone every tell me about the book, or the film? Was it really my own idea? Could I trust my memory? Has the lockdown got to me, have I finally gone quite mad?

But this is a known phenomena, cryptomnesia — and everyone it happens to is adamant they know nothing of the work that is identical to theirs.

We could say, that what is happening in cases of cryptomnesia, is that the person suffering from it is remembering the shape of the story — remembering its basic type — but forgetting the specific details that would have allowed their memory to identify it as another author’s work.

Here’s an example from the canon that I really like.

Byron’s tragedy Manfred was to me a wonderful phenomenon, and one that closely touched me. This singular intellectual poet has taken my Faustus to himself, and extracted from it the strangest nourishment for his hypochondriac humour.

Byron was grateful for the compliment, but, despite the similarities Goethe traced, Byron was certain he’d never read Goethe’s Faust.

And it’s quite possible he hadn’t — Faust is an archetype. His story has been around since at least the seventeenth century, and the idea of bartering with gods and demons is clearly much older and universal. Here’s a randomly selected list of artists the Faust legend has been retold by: Marlowe, Beethoven, Oscar Wilde, Marilyn Manson — and even Stephen King.

So what’s happening in my case? Am I mining the same archetypes as Stephen King? Or did I know his story and misremember it as my own? Am I losing my mind?

I have never read Gerald’s Game. I’ve never seen the film. There is only one book by Stephen King that I have read — and that’s On Writing, one of the most accessible and encouraging handbooks for an aspiring writer.

I checked the index. There are two references to Gerald’s Game in On Writing. Neither describes the plot. The most detailed description is that it is a story about ‘one woman in a bedroom’. And my play was set in a living room.

Cryptomnesia can have a huge and detrimental impact on a writer. It not only makes you doubt your own capacity for originality — it makes you doubt your ability to keep track of your own memories, to be sure about which of your ideas are received, and which are yours alone. If we are our memories, any proof of the fallibility of memory is destablising.

Helen Keller accidentally plagiarized a set of stories called The Frost Fairies in her story, The Frost King. The reputational impact on her was enough to prevent her from ever writing fiction again.

The list of esteemed writers this has happened to is long. It happens to the best of us. In my case — I withdrew from the Short + Sweet festival, and this play — this story about Simon and Mona — will never be told.

But there is one interesting soundbite in Stephen King’s On Writing that jumped out at me when I re-visited it for this talk: ‘Writing is telepathy.’ He illustrates what he means with an example.

“Look- here’s a table covered with red cloth. On it is a cage the size of a small fish aquarium. In the cage is a white rabbit with a pink nose and pink-rimmed eyes. On its back, clearly marked in blue ink, is the numeral 8. This is what we’re looking at, and we all see it. We’re having a meeting of the minds. We’ve engaged in an act of telepathy. No mythy-mountain shit; real telepathy.”

All writing depends on the psychic transmission of images from one mind to another. It only works because we all have the same shared set of referential concepts — we all know what a rabbit is. We all understand the figure eight. We all have a concept of a table, and of the colour red, and you craft this image in your mind when these concepts are referred to by language. But the rabbit with the number eight on its back doesn’t exist. The table never existed. Simon and Mona don’t exist. Gerald and Jessie don’t exist. They are types that speak to our deepest fears of intimacy, of physical harm, of disappointing our partners. We all understand that story — we understand the basic shape of it.

And independently arriving at the same idea as Stephen King — well, that’s not a bad position for a new writer to be in. I’ll take it.