Every field or profession has its monsters. These are people or practices that either hurt other people directly or damage the whole profession. Science has researchers who falsify data, Law has unethical lawyers, Writing has Nessie, and—

   “What? Repeat that last bit, Pen Person, because it sounded like you said ‘Nessie,’ as in the Loch Ness Monster, which you can’t have done, surely, since she doesn’t exist.”

   But it’s true—that Nessie is forever associated with copyright infringement, illegally copied books. I'll tell you exactly how in a minute, but first I'd like to point out that that’s just one of Writing’s multitude of great true stories, like Edgar Allan Poe being paid only $9 for his greatest poem, “The Raven,” and like only eleven copies of Moby-Dick (1851) being sold during Herman Melville’s lifetime, and like all 1,250 copies of Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species being sold two days before the first edition was even printed. (And it was an expensive book—15 shillings, at a time, 1859, when the average wage rate for unskilled workers in England was 4 shillings per day.)

   Other great Writing stories? The rejection letters that various writers have received from publishers are endlessly amusing (as well as a bit sad and, for struggling writers, inspiring). Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was rejected by (are you ready for this?) 121 different publishers. Then, in 1974, the 122nd publisher took a gamble and printed it. Almost overnight, millions of copies were being sold in 27 languages, and today the book, still in print, is called “the most widely read philosophy book—ever.”

   Claiming that Americans were uninterested in China, a publisher rejected The Good Earth, by Pearl Buck. After a publisher finally accepted it, the novel won Buck the 1931 Nobel Prize for Literature. George Orwell’s Animal Farm got a similar rejection from an American publisher who was clueless about American readers: it is “impossible to sell animal stories in the USA.” And the list goes on, and on and on, of great writers who initially had to endure the brutality of rejection letters, including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Sylvia Plath, and Stephen King. The Wind in the Willows, Watership Down, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, To Kill a Mockingbird, War and Peace, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Lord of the Flies, Catch-22, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold: these are but a few of the multitude of other classics that initially, and usually repeatedly, were rejected by publishers as being rubbish.

   The first rejection letter for another manuscript, by a deceased writer, called it “very dull . . . a dreary record of typical family bickering, petty annoyances and adolescent emotions.” That manuscript received 15 additional rejection letters before it was published in 1952, after which it immediately became one of the best-selling books in history: The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank.

   I’ve saved my favourite Writing story for last: the connection of Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster, to copyright law. Here are the facts.

   A very long time ago (in AD 561, actually), in Ireland, a Christian missionary named Columba copied an illuminated manuscript without first getting permission from the manuscript’s owner, another Christian missionary, whose name was Finnian.

   Both Finnian and Columba were what were called “warrior monks.” They walked around with a Bible in one hand and a sword in the other, and they were always ready to convert the Irish pagans with one hand or the other, so to speak. So on learning about Columba’s unauthorized copy, Finnian could have been expected to draw his sword. Instead, he sued.

   So Columba became the first man in history ever to be sued for making an illegal copy of a written work; and at the end of the trial he became the first man ever to be convicted of copyright infringement, illegally copying a written work. (And the work was definitely written, because this was nearly 500 years before Bi Sheng invented printing in China in 1045, and almost 1,000 years before Johannes Gutenberg, a goldsmith, built his printing press in Germany in 1463.)

   The judge in the Columba case was the High King of Ireland, and in deciding in favor of Finnian he used these words to establish the principle of copyright: “To every cow her calf and to every book its copy.”

   The entire vast body of copyright law today is based on that 11-word allusion to livestock.

   Having become the world’s first convicted copyright-infringer—and thus the Father of Literary Crime (copyright infringement, plagiarism, etc.), Columa reacted exactly like infringers, product pirates, knockoff producers and counterfeiters usually do today: loudly proclaiming his innocence, he rejected the ruling and fought back viciously. This time, the swords came out. The fight between Columba and his supporters and Finnian and his supporters is known as the Battle of Cúl Dreimhne, and there was said to be “great slaughter.” Columba lost again. He then fled from Ireland, wandered around Scotland for a few years, and in AD 565 became the first man ever to claim to have seen the Monster at Loch Ness.