Writers Must Wipe Their Brains Clean Before Beginning Novels
A Baltimore inventor has found a solution to the problem of novelists who unconsciously plagiarize other novelists’ earlier works.
Edwin Cotswald’s Brain Squeegee bombards the brain of an aspiring novelist and wipes out all memories of other novels that the writer might have read. This frees the novelist to pursue his or her muse without fear that a future reader will find plagiared passages that appear to have been lifted from other works.
“Novels reflect the soul of our culture, our very essence, and it harms us all if talented writers unconsciously fill their novels with passages that others before them have used,” said Cotswald at a news conference announcing his company’s latest invention.
“A novelist who uses our Brain Squeegee service will get a signed and notarized certificate attesting that their brain was purged of all memory of other novels before they began their own novel,” Cotswald said.
Cotswald said that in discussions he had with publishing industry executives, he was assured that his Brain Squeegee would likely silence any critics of a new novel who raised questions of plagiarism.
“A writer will be able to prove that he couldn’t possibly have unconsciously lifted a passage in his book from someone else, because the Brain Squeegee Certificate will attest that the writer’s brain was essentially empty when the novel was written,” Cotswald said.
Cotswald said his Brain Squeegee was inspired by highly publicized plagiarism scandals involving book publishers.
The most recent was that of a Harvard University sophomore’s “chick lit” genre novel that was published earlier this spring to high acclaim and won her a reputed two-novel, $500,000 publishing contract from a mainstream publishing house.
When readers pointed out that at least two passages in the new novel were almost identical to passages in earlier chick lit novels by other writers, the Harvard student said she had read the other novels, but didn’t realize how much she had “internalized” them.
As is frequently the case, Cotswald declined to reveal the details of how the Brain Squeegee works, other than to say that the aspiring novelist reclines in a closed cabinet for about 15 minutes and is “bombarded with electromagnetic waves.”
He said Brain Squeegee fees would range from $1,000 per novel and upwards, or a percentage of a novelist’s gross revenues “similar to the fees that a good agent earns.”