I meant to post this a week ago, but between revising, pie-baking, family reunion-ing, and Christmas play and concert rehearsing, there has been no time left for blogging. So here it is, pathetically late…

I am a Simpsons fanatic. I can quote seasons 1 – 8 practically verbatim, and countless Simpsons references have become part of my personal vocabulary. (“Unpossible”; “Boo-urns”; “[Person X] cares not for beans!”  “Cranberry sauce a la Bart”… The list goes on.  And on.  And on.  I also once named a pet snail “Bort.”)  However, I haven’t watched the show for the last twelve seasons.  However, however, I did watch Episode #492 (Good lord, can there really be that many?), “The Book Job,” because if The Simpsons is going to base an episode around trends in young adult writing and have Neil Gaiman as a guest star, I am going to watch it.

There are plenty of quirks in YA/kids lit that the show could have targeted.  As it turned out, they focused on a fairly esoteric one: group ghostwriting, or book packaging, in which a team uses market research to write and sell a trendy book, with a semi-imaginary “author” to be the face or figurehead of the whole business — a sort of book world Betty Crocker.   Frankly, other than those long-running series like Nancy Drew and Sweet Valley Technical School or whatever it’s called now, and the novels “written” by teenaged TV/pop music stars, and whatever it is exactly that James Patterson does, this formula doesn’t seem to be all that prevalent (at least, not yet).  And it wasn’t the idea of book packaging as presented by “The Book Job” that interested me, anyway.  It was the idea of the author as Betty Crocker figurehead/mascot/advertising character, and the differences between writers as authors and writers as human beings.

When I visit schools, I talk about why I didn’t believe I could be a writer when I grew up.  I was an imaginative, book-obsessed child, and yet I never planned to be an author myself.  I believed in stories so entirely, I never really bought the idea that ordinary human beings could have simply made them up and written them down.  Those names on the covers of the books I loved were just names, without real people behind them — or, if they were people, they were magical, otherworldly, romantic versions of people, hardly human at all.  (Even now, I expect writers to have a spellbinding, larger-than-life presence… Ridiculous, I know, especially when I spend so much of my own time in too-large socks and slightly smudged glasses, microwaving a third cup of coffee and feeling so much smaller than life.  But it’s true.)

And perhaps an author should disappear into his or her work that way.

The episode’s idea that a hot “tween” book needs a giant author photo on the back cover, complete with an intriguing biography for marketing purposes, doesn’t quite hold water.  Everybody has heard J.K. Rowling’s amazing tale — the penniless single mother suddenly struck with inspiration, scribbling away in Edinburgh coffee shops — but her books would be just as popular without that background.  And there aren’t many other author biographies that have become common knowledge in that way.   Perhaps that’s because the backstory of many–if not most–authors is so much duller.   It seems to go something like this: “I sat down at a desk.  I wrote.  Then I wrote some more.”

It’s work, not romance, that creates a book.  The story you write is the story.

As a child, I didn’t care who A. A. Milne was; if he was a man or a woman, old or young.  Ditto Roald Dahl.  (In my mind, he was sort of a living, ever-changing Quentin Blake sketch.)  I still remember my surprise when I saw a photograph of L.M. Montgomery for the first time and realized that she didn’t look exactly like Anne Shirley.  I vaguely assumed that Stan and Jan Berenstain were bears.  I was shocked to learn that John Bellairs had died before my sixth grade class could send him our fan letters, because in my mind, he wasn’t mortal in the first place.  And maybe that’s the highest sort of praise a reader can give: To believe in a writer’s work so completely that they forget the writer exists at all.

BTW, the whole “Book Job” episode can now be found here.

Oh, and Lisa’s writing routine?  –That part rang 100% true.