A lot of readers don't know that many, if not most, series have been written by a stable of hack writers who crank out the formulas handed to them. (Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and others). This hundred year old pattern raises a number of issues.
"Creative writing of any kind must come naturally from well-springs within the author and it is improbable that any deliberately created collection of stories, uniform in length and treatment, but by a variety of authors, will produce writing of the first class. It may, and often does, produce adequate writing, in a recognizable set of books on which parents and other present-givers can rely if they are incapable of selecting for themselves, or unwilling to make the effort. But it rarely produces the best..." Frank Eyre, British Children's Books in the Twentieth Century, p. 73.
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2 comments:
There certainly are exceptions. I think C.S. Lewis' series "The Chronicles of Narnia" would be one. How would you go about discerning which series books are good and which are written by the "hack" authors just cranking books out?
Thanks! (I did notice that this was Part 1, so if you were going to address this in Part 2, my apologies for jumping the gun ;)
(Actually these comments are from Dave's sister, Kay!)
Today I read a couple of chapters (at a teacher's request) of one of Ann Martin's Baby Sitter's Club books to a reading group of mostly third and fourth graders. It was painful. I found myself wanting to change the wording/vocabulary in order to even be able to get the job done.
In response to Mrs. Hankins I would say notice the word choice and sentence structure. Read a chapter or two aloud and see how the book hits you. The difference between Prince Caspian and the book I read today is obvious!
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