Do you think that in the future, crimes against information will be punishable? Writing a book that is sub-par but contagious(and very popular), killing a franchise, forcing a meme so it dies. Things like that.
I just feel that it's possible to write a novel crafted in such way that youth are instinctively drawn towards it. For example, using Johngreenian "spiked prose" to lure teenagers, except pushed to the absolute limit, so it's irresistable.
>>7660380
What the fuck is spiked prose
>>7660390
When you manufacture prose so it's instinctually gripping to some demographic. The certain flow and language that you enjoy not on conscious, but unconscious level. Pop music managed to do it, so why it can't be done within literature world?
It will just transform into a new medium or genre since people still enjoy classical music
>>7660395
John Green is not that crafty, there are simpler ways of explaining his popularity
>>7660419
John Green does this accidentaly and clumsy. But certain patterns emerge: the same with HP, Pratchett, Twilight saga and such and such. They didn't intend it but it happened. If you really devote your time to it you can fish out those patterns. It's like four chords of pop: it took a long time to notice that this works. Now you can manifacture an earworm, because the field was studied for half a century, and it's just a matter of time until it happens to literature.
>>7660433
I'm interested and I'd love to see some examples in Green's work
>>7660446
I'm about to devote muself to the task, but amongst literature generally, I noticed those patterns:
Using "you" and "your" to adress a character in the story, usually as a method to depict that character's reflection(but never adress the reader directly).
See-saw of importance and triviality. This is usually coupled with short-long sentence pattern, so it goes "Rare moments of clarity come to you unexpectedly; in recollection, those brief times haunt you, as you remember them, but not what you remeber in them. They visit always with weird smells, as you smoke the last cigarrete in a pack. Time slows, thought become rabid. Your face starts itching."
Cycle of tenses. It starts in past, switches to present, briefly glimpses into the future, then turns back to the present. Usually used for descriptions: "She was a child once, now she despises them: in future her love for kids will return, overpowering common sense, thinking back to the naive times - oh, how silly I was!"
And such and such
>>7660380
Spiked prose such as Lord of the Rings has done immeasurable damage to the genres it infects, but free speech is a valuable part of our society.
>>7660380
could it be done by an algorithm?
>>7660433
Yeah but it's not anything new with literature, penny dreadfuls have been around since the average person could read and I'm sure there were plenty of popular shitty plays and oral poems.y
>>7661502
It's not music. Considering there are less then hundred books each decade which are very popular but "bad"(pop music is much more formulaic than lit, even what one may consider good pop music), and there are no giant labels to speak of(so the prose is barely influenced), you may have too small of a sample.
>>7661519
Again, popularity is accidental, and there is no such thing as "pop prose" - terrible french romance novels mentioned in Onegin have little to do with Harry Potter, stylistically speaking, and even YA is very diverse. But something makes those popular, and it's not the plot* and rarely the characters**, so it must be prose.
* Plot in a structural sence, The flow and tempo of narrative arc can be one of those "earworm" factors.
** The development and motives, not the descriptions: it is very possible that the presentation of characters plays a major role.
>>7660395
>google "spiked prose"
>this thread is the first result
>It's the only place "spiked prose" had that meaning
Get outta here man. The only thing you could actually mean is just called targeting demographics or writing/catering to one.
>>7661525
maybe not purely algorithmic. more like cal, computer-aided literature, so that you let the computer do the dirty work and just edit it afterwards and smooth it out.
>>7661581
I don't claim that's an established thing - just a functioning comparison. When somebody spikes your drink, you feel attraction despite logic.
>>7660380
It will never be a crime. In fact, I would argue that due to the money that these books make, you will see new ways that writers will "spike" their prose. What you can do, however, is use these patterns, and mock them through satire, which I believe is making a comeback.
