reasonable creature

Isn't the Kaavya Viswanathan story a bit puzzling? These cases tend to be bizarre anyway--Slate has a good rundown on why plagiarists do it. But I really want to know the nuts and bolts of this one. Try to imagine what actually happened: You're 17, writing a 310-page book, and you're stuck for material. So you crack open a couple of successful chick-lit books and start pulling things directly from them. And you do this more than 40 different times, barely bothering to change the wording at all. I dunno, to me that seems so much harder than just writing something with a similar plot line to another book. If you pull out someone else's sentences, then you have to figure out how to make them work within the story you already have, and you still have to write the rest of the stuff.

The alternate theory is that her book packager did the copying, but that's almost weirder. Do these people so believe in formulas that they are afraid to stray a few inches away from what has sold in the past? Oh, whoops. Asked and answered.