Poor Kaavya

By now, the unveiling of the extent of plagiarism in Kaavya Vishnawanthan's debut book "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life" has become apparent. Whether we or not one believes Kaavya's assertion that she merely "internalized" text from Megan McCafferty's novels or actively copied from these and other works, one should step back and see the prop that Kaavya was in this sordid real-world plot. Take a young, ambitious Harvard student, with or without a modicum of intrinsic talent within her, throw lots of money at her, hook her up with a ghost-writing "book packaging" company and package a resulting chick-lit novel to thousands of pulp fiction devouring teens. Someone clearly saw a recipe to make a quick buck. Add to this, of course, movie rights, and you have a great recipe for wealthy returns all around. Except of course, for the missing key ingredients of honesty and originality.
Kaavya's Hindenburg like debut as a writer should be a lesson to the profit hungry publishers like Little, Brown & Company, in addition to ambitious young writers looking to strike gold. True writing, whether it be for chick-lit pulp books or Nobel prize winning fiction, requires hard work, real world experience, and hours of solitude and focus. No amount of money, packaging, or spin can circumvent that.
Perhaps Kaavya, whose name means poem, should eschew prose for her namesake poetry medium, or perhaps she should title her next novel, "Can't buy me into the NY Times Bestseller list"