Writing by the Numbers/Twin Stories

On October 19th, The New Yorker published a piece by Rebecca Mead called "The Gossip Mill." Subtitled, "Alloy, the teen-entertainment factory," the piece revealed the behind-the-scenes machinations of the company that packages approximately 30 teen-oriented books each year, while also scouring the what if? horizon for new TV and feature film projects. Alloy is indeed a factory. Its products are designed to sell, built to please, crafted with an insider's understanding of what teens really want, and want right now. The Gossip Girl series is the brainchild of Alloy. So is The Luxe and The Clique. With concepts brewed in team meetings, plots crafted by committee, and authors hired to see the big concepts through, teens, apparently, are getting their own very special brand of berries.

As one who struggles along here on her own, writing from her heart, I read the story with more than a modicum of interest, wondering how I would fare in a write-by-numbers scenario. Not well, most likely, since I've yet to use (as I've already stated here) so much as an outline, and since one sentence inevitably (if painfully) leads me to the next sentence, as opposed to, say, a hyper-imposed yellow sticky or rules sheet.

Mid-way through the article, however, I was stopped in my tracks by these words. "Shandler says, 'More serious, angsty literature is where girls are right now. Morbid, dead-girl lit.' Alloy's next offering in this genre is a book called 'Wish,' which is to be published by Scholastic in January. The heroine of 'Wish,' Olivia Larsen, is a withdrawn 17-year-old in San Francisco whose outgoing twin sister, Violet, has recently died...."

Um, I thought. Hmm. Dangerous Neighbors, my historical novel, is about twin sisters, one of whom has died. It's serious, too, it's literature, and there's a fair amount of angst, but I would like not to think of it as morbid. Still, could I, in my five years of non-committee isolation with this book, my fifteen drafts, my word-by-word finding my way, my nose-too-buried-to-parse-out-the-leading-indicators, have inadvertently hit on some pop trend? Was that trend already augured by Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry another book about twin sisters, one of whom also dies?

Could I, in other words, be onto something?

An entire year will pass before my book is out on shelves. I'll just have to wait to see what is what by then. I'll spend the time curled up with this adult novel I'm writing, immune to the trends in that genre, too, never knowing, day by day, just where I'm going.