Writer's Block Daily

Amusing typo time.

edited 19th Apr '13 12:00:25 AM by Wheezy

You know, personally I find that "red shirt" characters are a good way of getting around Like You Would Really Do It.

That awkward moment after the Punch-Clock Villain has done a Heel–Face Turn and killed the big bad and he and the hero are now just sitting on the ground dead tired and trying to decide whether or not they should fight each other.

I helped contribute to this post. Is anyone a fan of any of the television shows or music artists mentioned?

They mentioned "Imagine Dragons" twice — or they mentioned "Imagine Dragons" and "Imagine Dragon," if they're actually two separate bands somehow.

A few. A very few.

To be honest this is a very clear rule why most of us regard YA as bad: Young Adults have no appreciation for actually good. Cater to them, and...

It's likely a minor typo. I'll tell her.

In any case, it probably happened because two or more analysts/spies like Imagine Dragons, and duplication happened through the copy-and-paste. From what see, Imagine Dragons are popular.

I like a lot of those musicians, and some of them are not "mainstream trash". Please don't generalize like that. You're basically saying that I have no taste.

Plus, most of those shows and music aren't "catering" to teens, but cover a wider age range, and a lot of us Tropers are within that demographic, even if we're not necessarily fans.

edited 19th Apr '13 2:08:28 PM by chihuahua0

I like Imagine Dragons's singles but the rest of their stuff is pretty bland. Marina and the Diamonds and Florence and the Machine are nice, and I like some of Lana Del Rey. However my music taste leaves much to be desired.

Er... no. I regard YA as bad because I think catering is bad, period. Big sweeping aesthetic judgments are horribly subjective and tend to cut both ways; I would never use them for anything but my own personal opinions. I would hope most other people on here feel the same way.

edited 19th Apr '13 2:15:25 PM by nrjxll

Admittedly a lot of the bands and whatnot on that list are very popular in general. That doesn't make them bad but a teenager's sense of taste is not going to be very well-developed simply because they haven't had time to develop it yet.

Still, I don't like the implications Night is making: that everything on the list cater to teens (even One Direction has a "young moms" demographic!), and that YA "caters" to teens (like every other type of book or media, quality varies).

Also, we (teens in general) might have less time to develop deep musical tastes, but that doesn't mean we can't appreciate more deep media.

edited 19th Apr '13 2:24:10 PM by chihuahua0

Thanks.

edited 19th Apr '13 2:25:40 PM by Masterofchaos

Well I think that the way YA is catering to teens by the publishers in particular is pretty harmful. As in I think YA publishers are doing a particularly poor job in filtering out the crap from the good stuff as compared to other genres because they can take advantage of the fact that young adults are likely to not have read a certain thing before.

edited 19th Apr '13 2:27:08 PM by ohsointocats

OK, I've been silent about this, but I figure that I should say this now.

Everytime we talk about YA, I get uncomfortable. NOT just because I just so happen to write a YA sci-fi story, but because sometimes the discussion leads to insulting other people for liking / writing it and other Unfortunate Implications.

edited 19th Apr '13 2:36:15 PM by Masterofchaos

I'm writing YA as well.

Good for you, but also irrelevant. Music is a far more subjective genre and I didn't factor it. (And I like some Imagine Dragons myself.)

I was mainly looking at the the movies and TV shows actually, as with those it's far more possible to judge and separate objective quality of work. Granted that a work being objectively badly made does not necessarily prevent it being entertaining. (Says the guy building a library of Italian exploitation films.) But typically not so entertaining as one that's well-crafted.

I've been on board with CSI since I watched the first episode premier with my family eons ago, and I think it's on an upswing currently (barring the bizarre DB gets a gun bit last season), and Miami's off the air (which could be endlessly entertaining but was oh my god holy shit bad), but I wouldn't cite as an example of incredible filmmaking in the hour dramatic format. The Good Wife, while I can't stand it, probably deserves that nod for incredible craftsmanship. Thing is, it's the only one listed that really does.

The movies people are looking forward to are slightly puzzling, some of them have been out for a bit (Evil Dead, The Croods), but others...well the fact anyone is anticipating Mortal Instruments scares the hell out of me unless they plan to stage a Rifftraxs in the theater. The Twilight Ripoff Genre has bombed its way through box office, including even when the ripoff was originally authored by Stephanie Meyer, and for good reason.

edited 19th Apr '13 3:06:15 PM by Night

Okay, yeah, I read the first Mortal Instruments book and it was pretty damn terrible. However I can't really consider it a Twilight ripoff.

I don't even know what it is.

Neither do I.

x6 I'm writing also writing YA, and that combined with the amount of condescending to teenagers in conversations like this makes me want to face desk a fucking wall. It did when I was 16 and that hasn't changed since becoming an adult, in fact I'd say it annoys me far more now as an adult.

edited 20th Apr '13 1:05:59 AM by Vyctorian

I may not feel this way for the reasons Night says, but I will not make even the slightest pretense of an apology for my contempt towards the YA "genre". The quality of the individual works may be good or bad, but conceptually it's terrible and harmful and I don't consider that to just be my opinion. I'm genuinely sorry to anyone who finds that insulting, but it's deeply rooted in my views about fiction and art and it's not going to change.

If want the rest of us to respect that opinion, you might try explaining why you hold it.

Lets not confuse a marketing category with the demographic. Publishers labeling a work as belonging to a genre as a service to their customers may or may not be helpful, but in no sense can anyone be considered "wrong" simply because they understand their own preferences. Young adults dont need anyone permission to like something.

It has to do with the fact that 1) teenagers are a demographic that typically has a lot of disposable income (many of them work but rely on their parents to pay bills, which results in a rather lot of spending money) and 2) a teenager's lack of experience can allow for bandwagoning to be more profitable than in other genres (older readers will recognize unoriginal writing more easily and be jaded to it — for teenagers it may only be the first/second/third/fourth time they've seen an element and therefore accept it more easily). Yes, the goal of all publishers is to make money, but it seems like those who publish YA books do it in a more disingenuous way than most. There is almost planned obsolescence in a lot of the stuff published in YA, at least in part because they know that their core demographic has a very high turnover rate.

Again what Nrj said, this is not a judgement of all individual works marketed as YA and more a judgement of the publishers.

Then make that clear please. It started looking like a dogpile on Chihuahua (pun) just becuase he/she wrote an article describing what some teenagers like.

Anyway, all of what you just mentioned may be true, but that doesnt necessarily make the publishers wrong. Twelve to 18 year old readers do lack experience, have high turnover and are in a process of defining their tastes. They necessarily need to do a lot of experimenting, and it's not reasonable to expect them to have a lot of discernment. Nor do they need any to enjoy a work. So a YA category that caters to those traits may not necessarily be disengenous per se. I'm not familiar enough with specific publishers to comment on their record, so perhaps something is going on that I don't know about.

That said, authors deliberately altering their work in an attempt to be more attractive to YA (or any other category) are making a mistake.

I mean like say for example in Science Fiction or Fantasy, there's a lot of bandwagoning going on, but trends in those genres tend to last a lot longer than a few years like they seem to in YA. I think that maybe because of the speed a lot of stuff gets through the gate of publishing that doesn't really deserve to be. Like, there's a lot of advice to writers that says do not jump on the bandwagon, if you are already writing or have plans to write something like the bandwagon that's great, but hopping on the bandwagon is a bad idea — and it seem like in YA there is a lot more intentional hopping on the bandwagon and the quality suffers because that bandwagon is fast.

A lot of people are also saying that a big problem is that because of the market publishers are taking things that are less and less "risky," which ends up with a lot of crap that the publishers know will sell because it follows some magic formula of appealing to a large audience, and that a lot of this is being driven by a long and grueling recession. However I think this is pretty much true for all genres, not just YA.

Then again all of these opinions rely on seeing publishers as the gatekeeper. Gatekeepers are required because like prostitutes writers are competing with a lot of people who are pretty good at what they do and willing to do it for free, so publishers by putting out books are essentially putting out their endorsement that this book is good. However with very inexpensive and easy online publishing, publishing houses are probably not going to remain the big arbiter of what people should read. I'm not sure if this will improve YA as a genre or not.