R.L. Stine and Ghostwriters (2012) | Hacker News Reader

R.L. Stine and Ghostwriters (2012)

kathryns-inbox.com

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This is very lazily researched, a few minutes in google will give you pretty clear confirmation that he did in fact use several contracted ghostwriters. This was brought up by Scholastic publishing as evidence of breach of contract when they sued Parachute Press back in 1999. See this link for the court filings [0], note here that RL's representatives do not deny the claim that the ghostwriters were employed by RL but instead that the use of them did not suffice to constitute breach of contract.

So he has essentially via his legal representation confirmed that to varying degrees he did not in fact write many of the books past the first 20. Instead, this filing shows that he often wrote outlines which he then passed onto other contractors. Scholastic claims here that they lost substantial amounts of revenue because the ghostwriters did not write stories as well as RL.

[0] https://decisions.courts.state.ny.us/NYSComDiv/Oct02/600512-...

It’s a blog post from a decade ago. It’s not “researched” because it’s more like a journal entry (or a tweet, perhaps) than an “article” the way blog posts are often viewed now. It’s purpose isn’t to deliver readers a definitive answer but to spur discussion and get readers thinking. I might even go so far as to say the answer to the author’s question is entirely irrelevant.

> It’s purpose isn’t to deliver readers a definitive answer but to spur discussion and get readers thinking.

What is this supposed to get people thinking about beyond "Did R.L. Stine use ghostwriters for his Goosebumps and Fear Street series?" It's pretty much the only thing brought up in the post. How could the answer to that question be irrelevant?

I'll admit that this reads like a journal entry and it's pointless to try to hold a random blogger to the research expectations we might have for actual journalists, but if this post was intended to get people thinking or engaged in discussion there's really not much there to work with outside of the "Did R.L. Stine use ghostwriters for his Goosebumps and Fear Street series?" question which makes the answer pretty relevant.

If this post was intended to provoke discussion or thought it might have been better to address the concept of ghostwriting. The morality of ghostwriting, the impact it has on the quality of literature, the importance of branding, the economics of it etc. As it is, there's not much food for thought.

> What is this supposed to get people thinking about beyond "Did R.L. Stine use ghostwriters for his Goosebumps and Fear Street series?"

Perhaps the comments in this very thread might give you an idea of the sort of thoughts the blog post provokes...

Let's see... right now we have the actual answer to the question right up top (as expected) then near the bottom some discussion on the wisdom of Captain Picard and the sleeping and vacationing habits of Bill Gates, and in the middle some general commentary on the Goosebumps books (they don't hold up/helped someone learn English), and even on ghostwriting in general, but I'm pretty sure we're doing all the heavy lifting here.

With the exception of posts about the question in question, it's pretty much what I'd expect people to come up with from the title alone.

When my family arrived to Miami in 1999 one of the first things we did was make use of the public library. I checked out probably every goosebump book as I learned English. Thank you R.L. Stine, I learned English as a 10 year old by reading every single one of your spooky stories.

Goosebumps books are very short (23000 words each), it is very conceivable that he wrote them all himself.

Here's a chart of words written by prolific authors (Wildbow added in here is the author of a bunch of Web Serials like Worm, Pale, etc.): https://i.redd.it/cviz2vld5t461.png

Wildbow right now writes about 22,000 words a week, or ~one goosebumps book to completion.

That said, I suspect Stein did have them ghost written only because it would be so. tedious. to write the same story over and over.

>22,000 words a week

Which, to be clear, is a lot.

As someone who writes non-fiction (but less straightforward than technical docs) and is considered fast, I find about 2,000 words a day about my limit without doing any research etc. I know a few trade journalists who probably crank out a bit more. But even if you're literally writing every day of every week, an average of 22,000 words per week is a real stretch and I have to believe would be hard to sustain.

That said, a few people can do it. In the UK, Enid Blyton was a ridiculously prolific writer of young adult novels over the course of many years.

He has said that he spent one week on each Goosebumps book, two days of which were outlining. I do agree that the "boredom" argument is stronger than the "impossibility" argumemt.

Who says it's boring? I find jigsaw puzzles - especially doing the same one over and over -- to be intolerably boring, personally. But some people absolutely love them. Same with puzzles of all kinds. Writing the same story over and over with slightly different characters/settings/twists is kind of like a puzzle. I can pretty easily imagine the kind of person who would enjoy that, as a sort of largely-mindless recreational process. Lucky to get paid for it, though!

Looks like he authored 62 Goosebumps books, published from 1992 to 1997.

So potentially only a little over a year's labor in total at a book a week.

The Wildbow comparison is sort of amazing. The Worm series wasn't some kind of earth-shattering literature but it was definitely well written content. I would be interested in what that workflow looks like given that the rate of content creation is an order of magnitude higher than anyone else in that list.

He's writing even faster now than when Worm was written and the content is much more complex, characterizations are richer, the world is even deeper, etc.

Where are you reading their stuff? I remember reading the Worm and liking it a lot, many years ago.

Parahumans is about Canadian Webnovelist Wildbow (aka John C McRae) various novels:

Worm - Superhero story focusing on a bullied teen’s first night out in costume. (WB’s first story: https://parahumans.wordpress.com/category/stories-arcs-1-10/...) (COMPLETE)

Ward - Sequel to Worm, focused on a retired superhero trying to deal with a changed society . (https://www.parahumans.net/) (COMPLETE)

Pact - Urban Horror focused on a man’s magically cursed inheritance and the hidden supernatural horror (https://pactwebserial.wordpress.com/) (COMPLETE)

Pale - (Same universe as Pact but not a sequel) focusing on a murder-mystery and the relationships between humans and monstrous creatures (ONGOING: Pale: https://palewebserial.wordpress.com/2020/05/05/blood-run-col...)

Twig - Biopunk set in 1920’s following a team of experimental children dealing with political and assassination plots (https://twigserial.wordpress.com/) (COMPLETE)

Thanks!

Asimov averaged about 36000 words/week over about 40 years.

Wildbow is being matched by pirateaba's Wandering Inn these days. https://wanderinginn.neocities.org/statistics.html

Daily dose of depression when I look at that graph, see Rothfuss's line and thinking about the 5 years I have been waiting for book 3.

Only five years?

I recently reread all of the Goosebumps books and I'll warn anyone inspired to do so by seeing this headline: they don't hold up as an adult.

And I say that as someone who really loved them as a kid.

With that said, the Animorphs books are all being rereleased as audio books and they've been a pleasure to listen to.

I was hoping someone would mention Animorphs :) The Andalite Chronicles definitely merits another read as well.

I can see and smell my half sun-faded copy of Andalite Chronicles as soon as you mentioned it. It was my first Animorph book and though I loved them only the Hork-Bajir Chronicles held up.

My next jump was to Mossflower and Redwall!

Oh man, all my childhood favorites :)

I've also reread all the Redwall books as an adult and it was amazing. Be aware that they didn't make audiobooks for all the books so if you're planning on listening, you'll have to read at least some of thing in book form.

Also they didn't make hardcovers for everything which is annoying if you're collecting them to sit on a bookshelf.

A great gateway series to Feist!

Eulalia!

Thanks for the reminder :) I was just thinking of Mariel not too long ago. I should see if the library has it.

I could see it going either way. Not to knock the series--I greatly enjoyed them as a child--but there was a solid cookie-cutter formula that they all followed by Vol. 30 or so. For every good one there were about 2-3 that were mediocre, and at least one that could have started its life as a Mad Lib.

I get the feeling that if R.L. Stine got to the point that he could pound one of these volumes out in a week, he could have easily trained someone else how to do it, as well.

Book series targeted at young readers benefit from this composition. My 8yo son follows a few series and he laughs about it when "the formula" reveals itself, but still enjoys the stories. You have to remember a novel – even a short one like a Goosebumps book – is a lot to keep in context as you're starting out reading. The predictable ebbs and flows of a series book help readers focus on the language and the things that are unique about each issue and mystery.

When we together read longer books that can't be consumed as quickly – like a Harry Potter novel – he has to work with me to remind himself about the callbacks and references to follow along with the increased nuance.

I loved the Goosebumps books as a kid and they will always hold a special place in my heart. It's a shame the basic structure makes it hard to enjoy them as much on a reread as an adult, but that was never the point.

"Ghostwriters" is fun to use here....

I disagreed with this part though -> However, his downfall is his willingness to sell himself out. By the mid-1990s every month at least two titles (if not more) baring Stine's name on the front cover would be released in bookstores across the globe.

God forbid he try to cash in.... It doesn't mention what they mean by his downfall or even allude to poor reception or that the quality went down. I aged out of goosebumps when they were still new to the scene, so I have no idea what the author is talking about.

A lot of people are allergic to making money and feel others should be too.

more like there is a common trope in criticism that prolificity necessarily weakens the quality of output, like if creativity were sperm then writing more would mean you were shooting blanks.

This is probably true for some people, but it does fly against the idea that to improve as a writer you should write more.

Also relates to the idea that some people have a limited number of ideas or tropes and producing too much will mean going to that same source too many times, or that artists are better poor and struggling but once successful they become worn out and repetitive.

I inferred the blogger meant quality suffered when Stine was spread thin, which I'd agree with as an avid Goosebumps fan of that era.

Eons ago when I first learned what a ghostwriter was, Goosebumps was immediately what I thought of

Not exactly ghostwriting but the classic example is the Stratemeyer Syndicate which produced a huge number of YA books (Tom Swift, Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew) by pseudonymous authors.

Ironically not the contemporary Ghostwriter book series.

If we could only lock George R.R. Martin in a room with Brandon Sanderson, R.L. Stine, and a team of ghostwriters...

I've never understood the reasoning behind this. Creativity can't be forced. The books and world are a product of GRRM's thoughts and state of mind. If you have someone else write it, or push him to hurry against his desire, the end product just won't be the same. I'd rather get nothing than a book coaxed into existence or written by someone else.

Even if he did use them, there have been cases of authors being able to pump out books at very rapid rates, especially if they're all of a certain "type".

See: Brandon Sanderson. Insanely prolific and pretty creative author. He somehow wrote even more during the pandemic. It is absolutely conceivable someone could write the R.L Stine books at that pace. I bet Sanderson has written way more published words than Stine did at this point given that the Stine books are all relatively short.

Yeah, once you realize there are manga artist who write and draw entire story arcs each month, it becomes clear that if you dedicated yourself to it you could churn out novels pretty quickly.

Having assistants could speed it up even more while you'd still be the "writer".

For sure.

But also Manga artists who do that consistently seem to die young from the stress.

It's pretty taxing to produce at that pace, even if you love what you do

> I bet Sanderson has written way more published words than Stine did at this point given that the Stine books are all relatively short.

If you consider the notion that brevity is one of the more difficult parts of writing (and look at Sanderson's output), it's entirely possible that Sanderson's "more words" isn't evidence of "more work". Accounting for quality, it could be counter-evidence.

Brandon Sanderson should write a lot less though, or at least hire a decent editor. His story ideas are good but there's a lot of superfluous, boring junk that needs to be removed.

Still, Stine was not writing anything special. He had a formula and followed it. I think it is a question of productivity. I do think some of Sanderson’s series are tightly edited and others he lets things bloat a bit (Stormlight Archive, sigh).

Stormlight specifically suffers from massive bloating. I've been curious if it's a condition of his success - he's not editing / being edited as stringently because he knows his books will sell? Or maybe worse, the books are bloated to fit the "mega fantasy" niche. I've tried to like the books and they have some neat ideas in them, but the reading feels too abusive.

Especially books in genres where the norm is very short books—like intermediate-grades kids' books (Goosebumps, Boxcar Children, Animorphs, Nancy Drew, The Baby-Sitters Club) or romance novels. Bonus points if you can re-use the same two or three chapter-by-chapter beat-for-beat outlines over and over.

Of course, that quality also makes those sort of books the easiest to have ghost-written.

I think this is a tradeoff all writers must face - while some are certainly capable of writing more prose of a given quality than others, there certainly exists a tradeoff between length and quality. One can certainly write endless meandering paragraphs that seem to go nowhere, repeating the same points over and over - one just needs to look at modern 'journalism' filled with page-long articles which could be reduced to 2 sentences without any loss of information.

Such a tradeoff exists in literature as well - some of the most celebrated writers of the SF/fantasy genre took forever to write a book - Tolkien, Gibson, GRRM, to name a few.

While other writers, who I assume are similarly talented - King, Crichton, Sanderson, Fleming, produced a much greater volume of books over a given time, many of them admitting that they aim to publish at a consistent pace, rather than trying to write books worthy of literature's hall of fame. Reading their books I often felt that while they contained great ideas, and incredibly memorable scenes, at other times they felt workmanlike, unwilling to expand on the interesting premises they introduced, in order just to get to the finish line.

Stine is just a more extreme example of that.

At least with Tolkien it's interesting to see because we can get access to early drafts of much of the LotR work, and his son had pretty accurate timelines for them, also. Some of the earliest writing is quite good, being polished for the final publication, but Tolkien could have written very much faster and still been "good enough" - but he spent way more time trying to figure out what the story would be than he did editing/revising it.

Nora Roberts is a romance author, and she has penned over 225 novels. Her books average 100k words, so a pretty good feat for only 40 years (roughly 1 book every 2 months). She has claimed that she has no ghosts, and I feel inclined to believe her.

Pulp writer Walter B. Gibson (known for The Shadow, among other works) famously kept a typewriter in every room of his house, with a story in progress on each one.

At his peak, according to Wikipedia, he was cranking out about 1.7 million words per year.

About 5k words a day, or about 15-20 pages a day (for normal novel-size pages) - call it a chapter. Pretty impressive.

(Intentionally does NOT calculate the number of words posted to various Internet forums over the years)

Seems like something ML should be able to answer.

Write an M.L. Stine book is probably a good gpt-3 prompt

If any machine learning algorithm could write a convincing R.L. Stine book I think I'd call it pretty close to a general intelligence!

When it comes to kids, one of the worst things you can do is create the misleading illusion of "hard work and dedication."

This applies to Bill Gates, Lance Armstrong (and many other professional athletes), Donald Trump, Jennifer Lawrence, RL Stine, KA Applegate, etc.

I don't mean to take anything from these folks. Success, even if you have a leg up or game the system, does require a lot of effort and sacrifice, but I think if we had more integrity around the other pieces of the puzzle, it would drastically change how we view success in this country.

One of the things I like about Twitch is that you can see the full spectrum of talent and success. In the Music category, the difference in musical talent between someone with 5000 viewers and someone with 100 viewers is almost nonexistent, but the production value, allure, niche, etc all plays a huge factor.

Lance Armstrong might have used performance enhancing drugs, but so did all his competition. The unfortunate lesson to kids isn't that he cheated, it's that despite hard work and being one of the best in the world, he still had to cheat to be competitive.

But did they all use PEDs because they knew Lance was?

They've talked about PEDs being endemic to cycling since forever.

For many kids, the difference between a 'C' and an 'A' is very much "hard work and dedication." Sometimes they may not try hard, and still get an A+. Sometimes they'll work hard and still get a 'C', but hard work and grades usually correlate, wouldn't you agree?

I'm sure you're not saying that we should teach or kids that cheating on their test every now and then is a good way to be successful.

Bill gates was known for sleeping under desks at the office and didn’t really take a vacation till he was 30. I’m not sure why you’d use him as an example that hard work doesn’t pay off.

Even with those stories it's more of an example of survivorship bias than him earning his immense wealth. There is no actual link between "sleeping under your desk" and "becoming a billionaire".

It’s definitely not sufficient for success but it is often a necessary precondition. People get caught up on the randomness, but hard work increases the number of dice rolls you can get in life. I’ve seen it pay off many times (and I’ve also seen it fail completely)

That's true, but for his level of success that's arguing you should buy two lottery tickets instead of one because it greatly increases your odds of winning.

If his level of wealth is your definition of success, it’ll do everyone a disservice.

Working hard will dramatically increase the odds of an acceptable or good outcome where you are upper-middle class or have a couple of mil and are retired comfortably. An outcome where you have 100B+ is such an outlier, there can be no general advice on how to do it.

The original poster I'm commenting about says:

"Success, even if you have a leg up or game the system, does require a lot of effort and sacrifice, but I think if we had more integrity around the other pieces of the puzzle, it would drastically change how we view success in this country."

and this is huge. As a software dev I don't work nearly as hard as I did when I was a cook, but I know which one I'm far more successful at, and I know that there was no way my work as a cook would have put me into upper-middle class territory, even though I spent 6 days a week sweating.

It sure isn’t the only requirement!

KA Applegate has always been unusually forthcoming about using ghostwriters, especially for back when no one talked about them.

> production value, allure, niche, etc all plays a huge factor

Production value = hard work. Finding your niche requires marketing skills and work. Etc... So really the key is that even if you have talent, you need to put in work.

Agreed, but in the start-up space I so often see this "If you build it, they will come" mentality, when a huge piece of the puzzle is sales/marketing. 80% of what goes into success is the boring stuff.

I think this is more about teaching kids the universality and importance of marketing. If you want to develop a creative skill to the point where strangers will seek out and consume your work (let alone pay for the privilege of doing so) you'll need to work your ass off for years regardless of how well you end up marketing the results.

So you want to teach your children that success is purely based on luck and not hard work? This is a surefire way to raise nihilistic underachievers.

"Success" is not based on luck.

"Wild, runaway, moonshot style success that turns you into a billionaire" is based on luck. No matter how hard you work, that kind of success will always always always require a lot of right time, right place, right audience style luck.

So yes. I would teach my children that.

I would also teach them the old Captain Picard lesson: It is possible to do everything right and still not succeed. That is life.

> "Wild, runaway, moonshot style success that turns you into a billionaire" is based on luck. No matter how hard you work, that kind of success will always always always require a lot of right time, right place, right audience style luck.

And what would be the purpose of this lesson?

> I would also teach them the old Captain Picard lesson: It is possible to do everything right and still not succeed. That is life.

This is a dumb lesson. There are many things in life where if you make all the right decisions you will succeed. In chess if you make every perfect move you will succeed at winning. Let's take poker as an example, a game with an extreme amount of variance (or what the average person would call luck), if you make every right decision you will succeed over the long term, your profit will be a line with ups and downs that points up and to the right. Don't set dumb goals and success is easy.

> if you make every right decision you will succeed over the long term

You don't always get to make the right decisions for long enough to get to the long term though.

The point of teaching the lessom that doing everything right does not guarantee success is to help people move on from failure. You don't need to dwell on what you did wrong forever if you know that doing everything right isn't sufficient for success. That doesn't mean you shouldn't look back and examine if there was more you could have done, but it's ok to say I there was nothing more I could have (or should have) done, so whatevs, I'm moving on.

Poker players illustrate the value of the lesson perfectly.

Poker players fully understand that they can make the exact right play and still lose the hand. They expect it, and they plan for it.

It's funny that you called the lesson dumb, then proceeded to give me an example of people who absolutely live by it.

Poker players play poker and expect to win over the long run. If they didn't expect to succeed at poker they wouldn't play. A good poker player would not consider losing a single hand or even tournament a failure. They would consider making a mistake a failure. Because they know if they do everything correctly they will win over the long run.

Really good players will even consider hands they win but made mistakes in failures.

There surely must be something between nhilistic underachievers and narcissistic psychopaths. Especially if you ever want to see change in the system.

Only in the minds of the mal-educated would teaching children that hard work pays off equate with teaching them to be a narcissistic psycopath.

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