When I don't post for a while, you get posts full of unrelated things

[sholio]

veleda_k is having a Neal/Sara Thing-a-thon (fic, art, squee, etc): here on LJ / here on Dreamwidth. Go leave prompts, answer prompts, or squee! (Season four spoilers are inevitable.)

trobadora is thinking about doing a Vorkosigan series reread & discussion. Interested? Tell her so!

On a (somewhat) different topic, I just read an interesting article by a woman who ghostwrote Sweet Valley High books. (My sister used to read those! Well, actually I think hers were Sweet Valley Twins, but the same series, basically ...) Her essay is interesting to me partly just for the process, because I don't think I ever knew how those kids' adventure serial books are done, and partly because some of her fears as a writer -- running out of words before she gets to what she really wants to write, or picking up bad habits by writing bad fiction -- are things I can relate to.

In the end, though, it's kind of odd to me how, after talking about how much fun she had writing these books and how much her audience of young teenagers loved them, she falls right back into the exact mentality that makes so much literary fiction unreadable for me. The Sweet Valley books, she decides, must be terrible because they're happy, fun wish fulfillment, and she eventually gives it up to write "real" books. To which I say, pfeh. I mean, yes, I can relate to the feeling of getting tired of writing fluff and wanting to give something heavier and more complicated a try, and in her case, specifically, she can't take credit and she's not writing her own stories -- I can certainly see moving on to something more creatively interesting. I just feel like she ended up with entirely the wrong "lesson" from her experiences. After she talks about how fun and effortless it was to write the Sweet Valley High books, it's a little jarring to discover that she ends up believing that this is how she knows they're "bad" -- because writing is supposed to be slow and painful and hard.

Now I'm not going to tell anyone they can't wallow in their Garret of Misery if they want to, but this is EXACTLY the reason (I believe) that so many teenagers give up reading, and so many people who have stories in them never manage to write them down: the belief that Art is Hard, and Art is Depressing, and anything that is fun and playful to read or to write must be trash. But I've climbed on this soapbox before, and I know I'm preaching to the choir around here anyway.

ETA: Oh, I forgot this awesome astronomically-themed sampler from Georgian England. Well, it's awesome and kind of sad too, especially since it's abandoned with only a few stitches, which really makes you wonder what the story was. Of course, everyone involved is long dead, so we'll never know ...

Comments

[meridian_rose]

Art should involve suffering is up there with art is only worthwhile if it's inherently valuable (in monetary terms) as ridiculous beliefs that hurt everyone's creativity and enjoyment thereof :(
You might be preaching to the choir but the choir likes to hear the same lessons now and again :)

[sholio]

Thank you! :) And yeah, even if it's preaching to the choir, it's still worth saying now and then. :D