It’s not clear why Random House threw 
It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact moment one achieves literary success, but when Stephen King picks up the phone to interrupt your Good Morning America appearance to personally thank you for writing your latest book, you know you are in the ballpark.
It might seem odd to describe a novel that involves barfing in cars, stalking boys and a drunk dad playing beer pong in his underpants as heartwarming, but Beach Week author Susan Coll is a master at finding wisdom in the unexpected.
Remaking society can take decades. But global rebellion is short work for sharpshooter Katniss Everdeen, who single-handedly foments a revolution in Suzanne Collins’ blockbuster young-adult Hunger Games trilogy. America likes its champions reluctant, and Collins specializes in that surly breed: her heroine trounces dystopic despots while chewing her cheek in self-doubt.
I live in Jersey City, about as far from a Betty Draper’s magnolia petal-overlaid redoubt as you can get. But every morning, I am mildly taken aback when I find myself marching among a troop that is entirely female, women of my age and station, ranging from the harried to the glamorous, all pushing one or two offspring toward the park in an assortment of urban-optimized carriages. Really? I think.
Jonathan Safran Foer has a son. He’s not the Son, I don’t think, although I might be forgiven for doing so. Because even though it is generally agreed that we are living in a child-centered moment, Eating Animals, the Everything Is Illuminated author’s somewhat reheated contribution to the recent spate of ruminations on flesh eating (verdict: don’t), is a singular entry in the annals of parenting literature—bypassing a now-commonplace obsession with one’s offspring to head straight to sanctification.
Welcome to ‘Fine Lines’, the Friday feature in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wrinkled look at the children’s and YA books we loved in our youth.
EARLIER this year, an icon of youthful abandon — bubbly, blond, a perpetual adolescent — left the grove of girlhood and gave birth to a baby boy. No, not Britney Spears. The puckish heroine Bridget Jones, whose fictional diary of the urban dating life was a best seller a decade ago, and whose recent journey to the delivery room has been serialized in The Independent in Britain. 
A story that rides on its own melting also runs the risk of dissolving entirely. In William Henry Lewis’s second collection of short fiction — his first, ”In the Arms of Our Elders,” was published by Carolina Wren Press a decade ago — the slow, lyric stories of love, loss and longing have a sensuous appeal, but they often threaten to disappear into the ether before they get off the ground.
Again, just for the record, we’re INCLUDING ourselves in that “mediocre” in there
Whew! Just to break in, because….uh…..whew! Hot damn.
Apparently we are neither for Kaavya Viswanathan or against her—but we are TOTALLY against teen writers.
Again, whoops. Because we thought we were being called in for one tertiary quote, there, not an ars teenetica. Still, it’s totally the reporter’s prerogative to slant us a little — and WELL done, young man, no offense taken. But to clarify:
1. We didn’t work for 17th street; we worked for GLC, jointly owned by the publisher of 17th Street and the publisher of another successful packager–they were college buddies. (We’re not going to list their names here because we’re sure they’re being bugged enough already; you can Google it and find out pretty easily, if you care.) We were in the offices of 17th Street and did pretty much the same thing they did with different series and projects, took part in editorial meetings, thought up this series title (which everyone HATED and the client LOVED), and unsuccessfully tried to get “Surface Tension” into an SVU title.
2. “A packager basically serves as both the writer and editor of a book,” Skurnick said in a phone interview. “The advantage for a publishing house is they don’t have to do anything — they don’t have to design the book, they don’t have to think about a concept…. They can just say, ‘Here’s $80,000 for twelve of these books.’ They don’t have to do any of the work.” We meant that in a win-win way, not a GODDAMN THOSE FUCKING PUBLISHERS ARE LAZY way.
3. “The picture Skurnick paints of 17th Street and similar packaging firms suggests a contemporary publishing world that has more in common with market-driven, assembly-line industrial production than any traditional notions of the tortured, solitary artist.” Again, not really packager’s fault–or something packagers have exactly, uh, captured the market on, so to speak. Also, tortured artists suck.
4. “How Sweet Valley High came into being,” Skurnick explained to the Indy, “was Francine Pascal came to them with a concept for probably six books, and what was 17th Street Productions at the time — they might have had a different name — sold all six to Random House, and the books took off. What happens to a tremendously popular series like that is that a publisher will renew it, and they’ll renew it for, let’s say, 12 books for that year. But they’ll say, ‘Oh, we want to change it’ — ‘Now they’re in high school,’ or ‘Now they’re going to be witches.’ All sorts of things; whatever keeps them selling.” This is, like, the most haphazard and rambling and semi-incomplete description of packaging, like, ever. Glosses and corrections welcome. And we blame ourselves. And we LIKE things, by the way, that keep selling. And witches.
5. “In my case, I was a former editor at the [17th Street] office where books are farmed out to. But there’s a whole network of writers who mostly do this kind of book,” Skurnick said, referring to scribes who churn out new installments long after a series’ original author has dropped out of the picture. As “work-for-hire” employees with usually no royalty or copyright claims on their output, many of these writers labor with the hopes of gaining the connections that might land them a project of their own. Skurnick explained, “They write books that already exist in series, they pitch series themselves, they pitch standalones, they sort of exist in this netherworld in which they have a relationship with the packager and then, maybe eventually, they’ll have a relationship with the publisher…” Again, we’re not sure this netherworld was a netherworld in a bad way. For some people (=us), writing various books in a series as a side job is HANDY. Working on many levels in the publishing industry simultaneously is handy. Series scribes and series pitchers aren’t pathetic, they’re scrappy. Also, it can be incredibly lucrative. (We have actually always wondered if Ziegesar pitched this series as an employee and, if so, how she managed to retain the damn rights. Anyone with that story, please step forward.)
6. “Because, as Skurnick continued, publishers seeking to maximize earnings on their properties (such as the book rights to television shows like Alias) know exactly where to turn. “The publisher [goes to the packager] and says, ‘You do this, because it’s faster…’ A place like 17th Street really knows what they’re doing with series.”” If we’re not mistaken, we were actually just trying to clarify who had gone to whom in this case, something we don’t know. Packagers sell to publishers, not the other way around. But an agent would certainly be psyched to place a teen book with 17th street, we imagine. There is no way the publisher went to 17th and said “fix this.” But a publisher would conceivably be happy to see a manuscript PITCHED by 17th, starmakers as they are.
Also, the Alias books didn’t have anything to do with 17th–but the editor who worked on other series with 17th got some writers’ names for the series from that connection.
7. “But what about a work like Opal Mehta — a first novel that cannot be openly farmed out to ghostwriters…” So nothing that would ever happen. If a publisher/packager thought the writing was so bad, they’d either work with the author or the book wouldn’t happen. We have rewritten books for series, but that’s ghostwriter writing over ghostwriter—akin to one editor writing over another at a mag in the editing process. Also, it’s completely done openly—as is “ghostwriting”, for that matter. Hence the good old “created by Francine Pascal.”
8. “For her part, Skurnick thinks that the realities of the market, not any malicious plagiarism by Viswanathan, may account for the similarities with Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings. “They seem like very brief and stupid phrases to copy,” Skurnick said after reading the passages in question. “I’m sure the same phrases are in like 20 teen novels…I think in the case of teen fiction, obviously there are stock characters, there’s a stock plot often, there’s sort of these stock areas — the boy, the body, the family, the friend.”” Again, we haven’t read these books. (Such a red flag! Damn! We never wanted to be this person!) But the phrases seem like unlikely ones to rip. Also, if you gave us these scenes, we would write them the same way, and, as an editor at a teen girls’ mag, we do see so much of the same phrasing all the time in the fiction submissions and in the books that come in over the transom–the equivalent of rhyming “rain” and “pain” in a rock song.
Our point: Has anyone read the 2,000 OTHER teen novels published that year? Any critic of the author should read at least 20, then get back to us.
9. “Skurnick continued, “The impulse at a place like the 17th Street is to have a house voice. There are just reams and reams of stuff that’s written… It’s unavoidable that certain phrases will be recycled or said in a certain way… Often what you’ll find is that, it’s not that anyone is copying, it’s just that [these phrases] are the first things a mediocre writer would reach for.”” Mediocre was harsh. In any case, we include ourselves. Let’s massage that to ‘any writer writing for the genre‘, which is more what we meant. And yes, though we don’t have Naomi’s issues with the genre, no one is writing any teenage lesbos like they used to.
10. “It sounds like the market is geared to a certain type of book, and [17th Street] just worked on that with her, and some stuff slipped though — God knows why… But I have to say, [as a] teen editor, you just see the same shit over and over again.” ….Mmmkay, yeah. Well, you do.
In any case, we’re sorry 17th Street is catching any shit for this. Packaging does not, apparent conventional wisdom aside, involve taking a budding author and having her sit down in a room and copy 40 awesome scenes from bestsellers of yore. Nor is it a mind-warp scheme that yields $500,000 checks from those poor dupes at Little, Brown and other major houses on a monthly basis. It’s all anyone there can do to stay drunk until 3. Seriously.
UPDATE: Apparently, boys work at 17th Street. When we were there, there was only one, and he was named “Leslie”. Way to scoop it, Slate.
DOUBLE UPDATE: We forgot. Our own reminiscences.
Posted by altehaggen in Lit-ish @ Wednesday, April 26, 2006 1:04 pm | | Comments (1)
All I’m sayin is, we need more teen plagiarism if only bring you out into the sunlight…
Comment by Jimmy Beck — 4/28/2006 @ 10:07 am