Writing to be seen...

This is a follow up on my last entry. A friend pointed out that directors/screenwriters were not the only ones who deserved to be blamed for exploiting the economic opportunities offered by literature. Having thought about it, I had to admit he was right.

As a passionate reader, looking at the current trend of young adult literature I feel that the writers are cashing in on the success of the Harry Potter series. The interest generated by magic and fantasy have now morphed into a formulaic offering of a trilogy set in a dystopian world where young adults are the only ones who can salvage the situation. The general requirement seems to be a trilogy, followed by a prequel, or a retelling of parts of the original story from the point of view of the protagonist’s love interest. If this is not milking a tale for all it’s worth I don’t know what is.

HP is a fantasy, but it is also so much more. The spin offs of this series seem to provide nothing more than a fast-paced yarn, set in some dark, depressing future, where adults seem noticeably absent, ineffectual, or downright inimical. An outwardly obnoxious or socially inept individual is generally the protagonist, who gets forced into the hero’s role and who manages to steer the clan (read ragtag band of survivors) to a semblance of sanity. Given the pressures towards political correctness and the need to appear different from HP this protagonist is generally a girl who sees herself as thoroughly unremarkable. To show how mistaken she is about herself there’s usually an ardently admiring audience of friends who swear by her sterling worth, of which she herself remains obtusely unaware.

Series after series peddles the same essential plot and whole batches of children and young adult readers consume such writing, either in the printed form or in movie or serial adaptations. There’s very little original thought that goes into these offerings, yet, there’s a veritable rash of them. Why are they being dished out so consistently?

The most obvious factor here seems to be the money. Publishers seem to see a ready market for such fare and are therefore willing to publish these books. Writers seem to find buyers for such plots and so keep recycling them endlessly. Young adults are being bombarded with tales of fictional characters who seem to conform to them in age and circumstances and so seem to enjoy living vicariously. Freud did say that fiction was wish-fulfilment — the protagonists of these books supply the desire of readers for living an ordinary life extraordinarily, or of triumphing against all odds and assuming an important, even central, role in the life of the tribe/community.

After the book comes the movie, so these tales often feature high drama, action scenes, exotic or otherworldly settings — anything in short with a highly visual appeal. I sometimes think that this is what the writers write for — the movie rights and how much they’ll fetch. Accepted that everyone’s in it for the money and there is no need to expect writers to starve in the gutter, still some originality in the plots would be nice.

The OTT platform has, like the 24-hours news channels, created an insatiable demand that is being supplied by books of little literary or imaginative merit. To add to this, the global pandemic and the resultant enforced non-activity have increased the demand for visual entertainment. Like the Victorian penny dreadfuls that provided sensational reading material to entertain the bored population, today’s writers are churning out books that can easily be adapted to the screen. The economics is driving the production and it is all affecting literary value and readers’ imaginations adversely.

Another lamentable trend is the recent growth of a genre of writing that aspires to be detective fiction and falls lamentably short of the desired outcome. These books are mostly vanity publications, and one thing about these books that never fails to appal me is the falling linguistic standards of the recent publications. At least the books mentioned earlier have the merit of being published by big names in the publishing world which still employ editors who know enough to cull out errors of language (spelling, grammar and usage); besides, those books are driven by market demands. The vanity publications, however, are unleashed with no reference to either the correctness of the language or the banality of plots. The writers seem to think that detective fiction is easier to write than any other form of creative writing and recklessly take the plunge. Ironically, the plot essentials mentioned earlier — an unlikely (and usually a female) protagonist who is an amateur, supportive and admiring friends and family, helpless or unavailable authority figures or baffled professionals led to safety by the sagacity of the said protagonist — exist here, too. Strangers and suspected bad guys spill their guts upon the merest hint of a question. And, to make the plot appear dramatic, the accidental detective solves the mystery using her ‘little grey cells’ and saves herself and others in the nick of time from some silly denouement planned by the arch villain.

Neither the story nor the characters are interesting. Unlike Agatha Christie or Ngaio Marsh’s books that have a repeat value, this crop of detective fiction barely deserves even a single read. Their only attempt at originality is to place their women detectives in unlikely settings and give them anachronistic ideas about the world and women’s place in it. Don’t get me wrong — I do not criticise the attempts at self-expression. All I ask is that the writers put more thought into these offerings than is evident at present.

The plot elements mentioned in both cases seem to have become almost archetypal of late. I wonder what it is in modern life that causes writers to put the onus of saving the world on the young adults and amateurs. Is it because the adults and professionals seem to have made a hash of it?