Focus!

"Didn't anything good happen in Seattle?" my friend asked.

Yes, it was great! I told him.

He said he couldn't tell by my post. But then again, he said, no one ever wants to read happy stories.

Or as Tolstoy said at the beginning of a certain major epic:

All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Which leads me to my next and somewhat similar topic.

Recently I caught a segment on some news show about the tenth anniversary of Dora the Explorer. They talked about the process for creating the show. Each episode is put in front of a preschool focus group something like ten times. As a woman enacts the script for the kids with paper dolls, another sits to the side, marking down the kids' reactions. Any lulls, and that moment of the show is revised out until the entire episode is one smooth running, well-oiled machine.

And certainly a success. But one of the questions I've been struggling with the past few years is the novel as a genre of art. Why the novel and not a short story or a film? What does the particular form of the novel offer? What can we do with novels that aren't available in other forms?

I think I found my answer.

The novel is one of the last entertainment forms that doesn't rely on a focus group (for the most part!). I suppose one could argue a writing workshop is a kind of focus group, but otherwise, novels arise out of the writer's own love and passion more than her desire to please an audience. Of course, that sometimes is also one of the problems with the novel. But it's also lovely too to have this one little circle of artistic expression free from the groupthought of a particular collection of people chosen for the way they fall along the axiom of "average" (for whatever qualities the testers are looking for).

Viva la novela!