Just a quick note about this piece, which elicited a lot of … strong responses from my followers on Twitter.
For the record, I don’t think he explains away his actions. In fact, what I found interesting about the piece was just how little of an explanation he had. Take this bit, where he describes the inception of his “habit”:
I was 20 years old, and trying to write a short story for the first or second time when I came upon a paragraph I liked from a short story by B.S. Johnson called What did you say the Name of the Place was? It was so easy to do, as easy as picking up a drink, if you think about it. The lifted paragraph perfectly fit my narrative. And it temporarily assuaged the awful feeling I had in my head that I was no good as a writer.
The thing about mea culpas like this that normally make them effective is that they walk you back to a first, seemingly innocuous step — something that everyone can relate to — after which they inevitably spin off into disaster. But, speaking solely for myself, I can’t even understand the inception of his crime. That leap from copying someone’s paragraph and pasting it into my own work is one that I could never knowingly make.
I’m not willing to call plagiarism an “addiction” (though I’d argue overuse has long since robbed the word of most of its clinical connotations). But is it not possible that there’s some flipped switch in Quentin Rowan’s mind that isn’t flipped in mine or yours? Why is it so much easier to think he’s an evil, evil son-of-a-bitch with no conscience?
It’s great to beat up on people who plagiarize, because it’s one of the absolute wrongs. There’s no gray area, it’s simply not done. I believe most of us are guided away from absolute wrongs by an internal moral compass. It’s one that steers us away from these big sins and maybe allows for a few smaller ones that may be harder to judge, harder to detect.
I may be naive, but I prefer to think that some people have areas where their compasses don’t function correctly, rather than thinking those people are missing theirs entirely. Whether you want to define that as addiction is up to you, but I’d be loathe to kick around someone else’s great big sins just because mine are harder to find.
The Justin McElroy Institute 
Are you saying we should call it GRAYGIARISM?
Agreed. He talks about having a girlfriend in the piece … usually pretty hard to get girls if you’re kicking puppies all the time. He just didn’t understand something that was wrong, was. It makes him a man who made a mistake and is now paying for it.
That’s something I definitely understand. (Even if yeah, I don’t really think he’s the greatest guy.)
Come on, easy moral outrage is what the Internet is all about
Justin, I totally agree! I know that at my worst I could be a pretty despicable individual. I could be a thief or a drunk or a 500-pound shut-in. Plagiarism isn’t my “thing” but any of the things I struggle with could overtake me given enough time and enough opportunity. I guess I know myself well enough to know that I shouldn’t go around the internet throwing stones at people.
This situation to me sounds like a rich banker who got caught embezzling, but with words instead of money. It’s a common story, but just in an uncommon avenue.
Also, in this age of the internet, the LAST thing you want to do is make a bunch of writers mad. Those comments are SCATHING!
Reading his piece, it sounds like this guy lead an obsessive life.
First off, this reads like an earnest but of writing. I’ll always think to William Shatner’s version of Theme from Cyrano, which states “Never write a line that does not ring with sincerity”. Weather Rowan wrote the essay or not, it does have a certain sincerity about it. I enjoyed it about as much as one can enjoy that sort of thing.
I get the impression he started out by writing to avoid drinking. When he felt he was short on words, he borrowed someone else’s. It was a crutch. Probably not an awful writing exercise, especially if your just trying to get through the night without throwing up all over yourself. You’re the man now, dog.
The great disconnect here is that he actually went through the motions to get the thing (and severak other things) published. The whole point of a crutch is to cast it aside when you don’t need it – something this writer never seemed to be able to accomplish.
It’s strange – in journo school they teach you plagiarism is akin to heresy. To do so on this scale, for this long, seems almost fantastic. If someone charged me with the task of piecing together a narrative using mostly borrowed passages from other books, I’d probably think it easier to “cheat” and write the damned thing myself.
It’s this alone which makes me thing that – yeah – maybe this guy really is quite sick. Maybe he’s not evil; just broken. Is that even uncommon anymore?