The issue of authorship is central to the book Yellowface. A struggling writer takes a (deceased) successful writer’s first draft and, after editing it to polished completion, passes it off as her own.
She rationalizes: The draft is so good, it deserves to be completed and released to the world. It honors her dead “friend” to do so. A first draft is just a draft; the real work is the editing. She put as much time and effort in as her friend did. Her edits made a real difference in the manuscript.
But underneath it all, she feels guilty, and this guilt haunts her for the entirety of the book, until it is eventually her undoing.
Why does she feel such guilt? And why do we likely agree she should?
Because we are accustomed to thinking that creative products like books spring entirely from the author’s imagination, as they toil away in isolation in a hidden world of their own making. Despite some authors' protests to the contrary (e.g., TS Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent), we continue to believe that writers are capable of producing something entirely original. Indeed, that is the goal, we think.
It is a convenient fiction, most significantly because it allows us to make claims of intellectual property for our writing.
But Yellowface exposes the falsehood of this. June has stolen Athena’s manuscript, but Athena before her stole June’s real-life story, and those of others, in her early writing.
Who owns the story? The person whose experience it is, or the writer who has written it down? The person whose idea the story is, or the person who executes on it and gets their manuscript published first?
Historically we’ve answered that question on the side of the author, and the one who hits publish first. But that’s been changing recently.