Is everything copy?
I wrote this last year after “Bad Art Friend” went viral and seemingly endless conversations about the ethics of writing about other people/using someone else’s story in your writing were taking place on and offline. That conversation has kicked off once more thanks to this piece by Isabel Kaplan titled, “My boyfriend, a writer, broke up with me because I’m a writer”.
The boyfriend in question even quotes the same line from Heartburn that I open this essay with, the line her son drew from when naming his documentary about his mother: “People misunderstand her phrase everything is copy,” my boyfriend explained. “It’s really about making yourself the butt of a joke first so that other people can’t do it to you.”
While Ephron, myself, and many other writers – particularly those who are marginalised in some way and thus more likely to be made the butt of other people’s jokes – do do this, I do not believe this is what she meant by the phrase “everything is copy”. In this essay, I tried to explore the ethical conundrums that crop up if you live your life by this adage, with a focus on using strangers’ lives for content in particular. It’s largely the same essay it was in 2021, but I’ve updated it with some thoughts on the ethics of filming strangers for online content.
In the introduction to her semi-autobiographical novel Heartburn, Nora Ephron writes about one of the main lessons her mother taught her: that “everything is copy”. Ephron writes, “As a result, I knew the moment my marriage ended that someday it might make a book — if I could just stop crying.”
I was reminded of this precept while watching Sex Education, of all things; specifically, the storyline where the main character’s mum, a sex therapist played by the delightful Gillian Anderson, uses her son’s sexual dysfunction as the basis for her book. And this prompted the thought: is everything copy, though? Do writers really have carte blanche to mine the lives of those around them for copy?
The 21st century version of this adage would probably be “everything is content”, and we can see how that’s been embraced across all the major social media platforms. A decade ago, mining your personal life for cash was de rigueur thanks to sites aimed at women like xoJane and Jezebel. While the First Person Industrial Complex bubble has burst, ‘everything is copy’ lives on elsewhere. While oversharing wasn’t invented on Tumblr, it certainly became something of an artform on the platform — many people learned how to joke about their trauma in precisely the right way in order to go viral, and subsequently replicated that success on Twitter, Instagram, and now TikTok.
It’s often joked that people shouldn’t date or marry writers, because they will inevitably write about you once the relationship ends (people seem to say this about Taylor Swift more than almost any other person, as though having a Taylor Swift song written about you wouldn’t be an incredible honour). But I would argue that using your own relationship for inspiration, the way writers like Nora Ephron and Taylor Swift have, is wildly different to using the lives of relative strangers for content, and ethically murkier.
Videos on TikTok and YouTube featuring people in public who don’t know they’re being filmed are incredibly common, owing to the fact that in many jurisdictions, it’s completely legal. One woman, Maree, spoke to Australia’s ABC after a video of her being given flowers was viewed over 57 million times; she said, “He interrupted my quiet time, filmed and uploaded a video without my consent, turning it into something it wasn't, and I feel like he is making quite a lot of money through it. It's the patronising assumption that women, especially older women, will be thrilled by some random stranger giving them flowers.”
The video she appeared in is the result of a culture of what people involved view as “radical empathy”, but that is really weaponised pity. People will film themselves crying in restaurants at the sight of elderly people eating on their own and go on to film the elderly people as well, under the guise of “being an empath”. Much like the TikToker who assumed Maree would be thrilled to receive flowers because she’s older, these TikTokers assume that because these restaurant patrons are older, there must be a tragic backstory behind their decision to eat food by themselves. Instead of actually putting themselves in the other person’s shoes, they’re projecting their fears of aging and their feelings around eating alone onto a complete stranger. They construct narratives out of whole cloth in order to create content, and then benefit from the views and engagement they receive while the subjects of their videos often aren’t even aware they’re being seen by millions of people across the world.
I started really thinking about this question in 2021 after reading the essay ‘Cat Person and Me’ by Alexis Nowicki, in which the author revealed the similarities between a past relationship of hers and the relationship described in the short story that took the internet by storm in late 2017, ‘Cat Person’.
Kristen Roupenian’s actions raise a number of ethical concerns for writers: how far does ‘everything is copy’ stretch, exactly? It’s largely accepted that writing about your own life, or the actions of others towards you, is fair game. But is writing a thinly-fictionalised version of events that didn’t involve you the same?
Roupenian, in response to an email Nowicki had sent her following their shared acquaintance’s death, wrote, “I was wrong not to go back and remove those biographical details, especially the name of the town. Not doing so was careless.” Are identifying details all that stands between writers and the right to tell other people’s stories for them?
The issue was raised, yet again, thanks to the ‘Who Is The Bad Art Friend?’ essay by Robert Kolker in the NYT Magazine. Unlike the ‘Cat Person’ incident, there isn’t a clear and single wronged party — rather, both Dawn Dorland, who donated her kidney and wrote about it obnoxiously, and Sonya Larson, who used Dorland’s obnoxious writing in the short story it inspired, come off looking overly invested in something that should have been left behind in 2015.
But without going in to their subsequent actions (contacting anyone who has ever worked with Larson, filing lawsuits when you’re both writers living on writers’ incomes, pitching the story to the New York Times yourself), the now infamous viral essay does afford us with yet another opportunity to examine the ethics around writers viewing everything as potential story fodder.
Like with Roupenian, Larson took identifying details or words — in this case, copied and pasted Dorland’s letter from Facebook into her story without making many modifications — and used them in her story. Larson frames this as an issue of artistic freedom, and friendship, and trust, writing in an email to Dorland, “For me, honoring another’s artistic freedom is a gesture of friendship and of trust.”
Could it not also be argued that trust and friendship might mean hesitating before using a letter someone wrote about donating a kidney in a short story? Clearly Dorland felt as though her trust had been violated, and upset that this letter she shared in a closed Facebook group would be seen so widely because of someone else’s actions. Are writers entitled to insist that people trust them without offering much in the way of reciprocation?
Because, truly, what do the people whose lives are used for content gain from this? They get to see their own lives reflected back at them, but distorted by someone else’s own baggage. The writers themselves get paid (often not much at all) and sometimes, they get more — acknowledgement, adulation, virality. The Tiktokers and YouTubers make money from views and engagement, and the stranger they’ve filmed gets a bunch of flowers.
As someone who has engaged in many kinds of writing, I understand the feeling that grips you when you see, or hear, or read something that you think would make a fantastic story (although usually the most I will do is turn it into a tweet). As a person who has grown up online and endured the experience of having people you don’t know twist your life, your words, and your actions, into a narrative that suits their own purposes, I can still only imagine what it feels like to have someone use parts of your life in their published work with little regard for the impact it may have on you.
It feels akin to photographing a complete stranger in public — perfectly legal, but ethically dubious, particularly once intent and result are factored in. Are you photographing a fat person just to laugh at them? Are you filming yourself performing an act of kindness because you value kindness or because you know it does numbers on TikTok? Are you copying someone’s kidney donation letter word-for-word just to frame them as an antagonist? Are you telling someone else’s story just so you can twist it and draw a conclusion that aligns with your pre-existing views?
Ultimately, I think that part of the issue is that creators can be incredibly insular people. While creative communities do exist, and things like fellowships, residencies and workshops (not to mention ‘Hype Houses’) do try to encourage the development of deeper relationships, the nature of writing and creating under capitalism means that people often see each other as competitors, not comrades. In order to make ends meet, you’re forced to mine absolutely everything for content, and only able to think about the ethics and the consequences once the cheque has cleared. But even before factoring in capitalism, I think a lot of people are drawn to creating content because it is a largely solitary endeavour.
I’m inclined to conclude by arguing that fostering stronger feelings of community among creators would head off some of these ethical concerns before they’re even an issue — if you feel a responsibility to treat your peers with respect and kindness, you’re less likely to use elements of their life in your work. But I have no evidence for that; indeed, Larson was part of a writing community, and Dorland also considered herself a member of that same community (their differing opinions on this score are one of the things that made the Bad Art Friend essay feel particularly like a scene out of Mean Girls, in my opinion). All I have is a gut feeling that it is possible to create without harming others or using their experiences to further our own careers, and a hope that others feel the same.