You too can become a writer!

From The American Scene:

"The Borrower: How did Kaavya Viswanathan's first (and possibly last) novel end up being so heavily, um, influenced by another chick-lit writer? Sure, it seems like a cautionary tale about what can go wrong when you sign a seventeen-year-old to a huge book deal and then expect her to write the novel while studying for finals at Harvard. But I think the really interesting part of the story might be the role played by the mysterious "book-packaging" business. Here's an excerpt from the Globe's profile of Viswanathan, written two months back:

She had written poems and short stories since she was a child, even published a few in children's magazines. She showed her short stories to Katherine Cohen, her high-school college counselor, who was herself an author ("Rock Hard Apps: How to Write the Killer College Application") represented by New York agent Suzanne Gluck of the William Morris Agency. Cohen showed the samples to Gluck, who was impressed. Eventually the young writer was referred to Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, another Morris agent.

Walsh said she knew right away that Viswanathan had the talent. What she didn't have was a "commercially viable" work. Viswanathan's original idea for a novel was much darker than "Opal." The agency referred her to 17th Street Productions, a so-called book packager that specializes in developing projects in young-adult and middle-grade fiction. The editors there proposed that Viswanathan put her mind to something lighter, something closer to her own background.

"After lots of discussions about 'finding my voice,'" Viswanathan said, "I sat down and wrote them a fun, chatty e-mail about myself, which is where the voice and idea for Opal came from." She worked with 17th Street to flesh out the concept.

"They sent it to me, and I flipped over it," Walsh said. "We all recognized that Kaavya had the craftsmanship, she's beautiful and charming, she just needed to find the right novel that would speak to her generation and to people beyond her years as well. We worked on it some more and sold it for oodles and boodles of money."

Who exactly are these people? How many "young-adult and middle-grade" novels pass through their hands? Is it a coincidence that a book so deliberately "packaged" ended up containing lines cribbed from a novel in the same genre? Inquiring minds want to know . . ."

So we package and prep what might have matured into a real talent for our young readers. Just so long as it will sell. Are we producing literature or car ads? Does it matter to the reading public out there? And at a terrifyingly young age an author is now branded for life as a plagiarist to meet the demands of her handlers. She could have been a contender, perhaps.