I Blame Henry Ford...

[kethni]

As part of my Children's Literature course I just watched a very brief documentary on a kind of production-line writing of kid's books. A team of people brainstorm an idea for a series (no individual books here apparently) and eventually produce a summary of the plot, the characters, and the themes. The guidance they produce is generally around half the length of the book to be written. So for a 60,000 word book they're getting 30,000 words of guidelines.  Thirty thousand words! That must specify pretty much every character beat and description, every plot point, and probably most of the descriptors.They then have half a dozen writers on their list submit a couple of chapters based on the guidelines and pick one with an 'interesting voice' to write the book.

This is the point I started laughing because, really, now you want your book to have some kind of individual voice? They're written pretty much by committee and the poor writer has zero input into characters, names, plot, or anything other than the mechanics of which words to choose. The guy in charge even admitted that the 'author' of the books is the company, not the person actually writing the words.

Anyway, my course material asked if I was 'shocked' now I'd seen the film and if this would affect my purchasing decisions?

Well, I'm not shocked since children's serials are notoriously formulaic and I already knew of at least one serial where the so-called 'author' is actually a pen name for a dozen or more actual writers. I do find it a little depressing to think of those poor writers who are basically working on a kind of literary production line. Not that creative production lines aren't without precedent, I'm told that a lot of the Italian renaissance paintings had students and employees doing to the background while the master concentrated on the more important parts. But those paintings at least had a controlling mind, a genuinely gifted painter, guiding the work. These committee written books don't even have that.

Would it affect my purchasing decisions? I don't have any children but if I did I suspect I'd be much less likely to buy this kind of thing, purely because I'd snobbishly assume it wouldn't be as good as some book that a children's author has worked and slaved over to perfect.

But, honestly, I'd probably simply be happy to have my child reading SOMETHING. Not every book can be a classic and not every meal is cordon bleu. I'm sure I read masses and masses of trashy books when I was a kid. In fact I'm sure I did. I read all of the  Star Trek: Original Series and Star Trek: Next Generation novels (around 300 or so), as a kid and none of them is any kind of a work of genius I'm sure. Hell when I was a kid I practically inhaled books and particularly series; Discworld, Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, Sherlock Holmes, Chronicles of Narnia, The Chronicles of Prydain, Lloyd Alexander, and every TV novelisation I could find. I wasn't remotely choosy about the quality of books I read and maybe that's where kids score over adults. I read anything that looked a) science fiction, b) fantasy, c) detetective fiction, and when I was a bit older d) a little bit naughty (or even better, a LOT naughty).

Now I don't read nearly as much as I like and I um and ah ridiculously over what I do read. Why? I have no idea. I'm certainly missing out on all sorts of great stuff because I'm finicky. I have a pile of novels to read and what have I been looking at this weekend? Faulkes on Fiction. A non-fiction book about all kinds of interesting fiction books and characters.

So while production line writing isn't likely to produce any classics, and makes me feel bad for children's authors generally, maybe it's not such a bad thing for the children. It's feeding their desire to read and if what they read isn't good quality then it isn't likely to hang around in their imaginations. Junk books win over junk food because they only bloat your bookshelves, not your waist line.