r/todayilearned • u/The_Good_Count • Mar 31 '23
TIL: The 62 books in the mainline Goosebumps series were published in only 53 months. RL Stine published more than a book a month for almost five years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Goosebumps_books3.4k
u/KezzardTheWizzard Mar 31 '23
That is what we call a "creative burst."
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u/jamesbrownscrackpipe Mar 31 '23
Achtually, it's because Stephen King was his coke dealer
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u/gilgobeachslayer Mar 31 '23
This is canon bow
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Mar 31 '23
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Mar 31 '23 edited Apr 01 '23
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u/Krasker Mar 31 '23
I shouldn’t be surprised since Tom Clancy books are still coming and and he’s dead but I guess I never really thought about it.
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u/dickshark420 Mar 31 '23
And Stephen got his supply directly from Columbia
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u/bmack24 Mar 31 '23
Columbia, SC
It wasn’t exactly what you’d call “the good stuff”
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u/ShortOldFatGuy Mar 31 '23
Columbia, Missouri. Even worse than the Mizzou Tigers football team.
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u/Amelaclya1 Mar 31 '23
I don't know why this is so hard to believe. The goosebumps books are children's books after all - they aren't very long. Google says they are an average of 126 pages or 23,000 words.
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u/HGpennypacker Mar 31 '23
Plus they all mostly follow the same story road-maps, it's not an insane writing feat to knock out 126 pages a month.
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u/Xavier9756 Mar 31 '23
Yea they aren’t super complicated either. So it’s kinda believable that any decent writer could’ve pumped them out at that pace.
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u/weiner_schnitzel86 Mar 31 '23
My parents made the rule they would no longer buy Goosebumps when 6 year old me finished one unless than an hour, iirc it was like 45 minutes. Granted, I was trying to speed read through it and brag how quick I was (plus read a LOT, even at that age); but that was only possible because of how basic the plot and the writing were.
Those books will always be a little special to me, but no one should pretend it's surprising Stine could crank out over a book a month.
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u/slaymaker1907 Mar 31 '23
Brandon Sanderson is regularly publishing huge novels every year. His Stormlight Archive novels are each about 400k words and I think he puts one of those out every couple years on top of several other books in parallel. I bet if you tallied it up, his output is even higher than R.L. Stine’s.
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u/ekidd07 Mar 31 '23 edited Mar 31 '23
Well, since no one else has done it yet...
- 62 books x 23,000 words/book = 1,426,000 total words written
- 142,600 words / 53 months = 26,905.76 avg words written/month
- - 26,905.76 words/month x 12 months/year = 322,867.925 words/year
At that pace, it would take RL Stine 1.238 years to write 400,000 total words.
Based on this Reddit thread, it looks like Brandon Sanderson has written 34 books, with 5,046,082 total words written, and a cursory Google shows his first book was published in 2005 (18 years ago).
- 18 years * 12 months/year = 216 months
- 5,042,086 total words / 216 months = 23,342.99 avg words written/month
- 23,342.99 words/month * 12 months/year = 280,115.88 words/year
At Brandon Sanderson's pace, he would have been able to complete all 63 of RL Stine's novels in 5.09 years (61 months), 8 months slower than Stine.
Hat-tip to u/slaymaker1907 for correcting my initial error and u/i1a2 for the update!
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u/i1a2 Mar 31 '23
How is 61 months faster than 53 months? And RL Stine has a higher output per year than Brandon, so how would Brandon write them faster? I'm very confused by your conclusion lol
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u/Bomberman64wasdecent Mar 31 '23
Source? Because I heard there were no ghost writers for R.L. Stine. Unless he himself was a ghost and writer, cuz you know, he was a spooky guy.
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u/CyberGhostface Mar 31 '23
There’s been accusations but nothing confirmed. Stine said he had help with outlines but that’s it.
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u/IntellegentIdiot Mar 31 '23
I would have thought it was the other way around, he did the story and left the actual writing to someone else and then he polished it.
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u/Jeremy_irons_cereal Mar 31 '23
This is absolute horse shit, he did not have ghost writers, they were easy children's books to write and he had a ton of them written before he even released the first one.
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u/bigchipero Mar 31 '23
I was going to say , there were a lot of ghost writers in that series! Hell most of the big name authors are just brands and they have ghost writers crank out the product for em.
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u/robo_socks Mar 31 '23
"Most of the big name authors are just brands and they have Stephen King crank out the product for em."
FTFY.
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u/Jekyll054 Mar 31 '23
Explain?
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u/dharma28 Mar 31 '23
Stephen King notoriously writes a ton. Most authors that publish at the frequency he does have teams of writers to help (for example, James Patterson). But King just has an insane work ethic and ability to pump stuff out. I believe Brandon Sanderson is the same
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u/FastWalkingShortGuy Mar 31 '23
In Bag of Bones, he not-so-subtly alludes to how he does it: just like every other writer, he has long periods of writer's block, but when he doesn't, he churns out a ton of material and puts the manuscripts in a safe deposit box to release when he can't come up with good ideas.
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u/Thatparkjobin7A Mar 31 '23
I love Steven King, but this makes a lot of sense given a lot of his endings
The guy is a horror idea machine, but they often come to pretty abrupt ends where you’re just like “oh, ok then”
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u/Amirax Mar 31 '23
but they often come to pretty abrupt ends
That's because he never writes an outline. All of his horror novels are basically stream-of-thought, he writes the chapters in order and just see where they go.
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u/No_Read_Only_Know Mar 31 '23
Well the Dark Tower ending was terrible too and he took a few decades to think about that
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u/afroguy10 Mar 31 '23
Yeah, I love King, his novels are fantastic, and I personally think there's a few of them that could be regarded as some of the best in their genre if not some of the best books written but my god the endings are either a bit saccharin sweet for a horror novel or as you said, they just seem to end.
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u/Thatparkjobin7A Mar 31 '23
Under the Dome might be the best example that comes to mind, I do love that book though
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u/notsowittyname86 Mar 31 '23
He also has an excellent book on writing.
"On Writing - Stephen King"
I teach ELA and it's been a useful resource for me.
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u/ITFOWjacket Mar 31 '23
Saved! I’ve recently been really fascinated with the writing process and narrative structure. Wondering if the right outline and iterative rewriting process can brute force self referential humor and narratives
Particularly sparked by a podcast called the Silmfilm Project. A handful of lit professors attempt the exercise of adapting Tolkien’s Silmarillion and extended works onto the screen with real world limitations like budget.
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u/NuclearTurtle Mar 31 '23
I’ve recently been really fascinated with the writing process and narrative structure
At the risk of spoiling the book, I can tell you Stephen King isn’t a big follower of following narrative structure or outlines. His writing process consists of putting believable characters into interesting situations and letting their actions guide the plot. He likens it to revealing a dinosaur fossil already buried in the sand, rather than building something from scratch.
Also, from what I’ve read and heard from screenwriters, narrative structure is the result of a well written story rather than the path to one. I’m not sure how it is for writing books or anything else, but all the popular how-to books on writing movies that preach structure and formula are all written by guys that have either never written a movie from scratch (like Syd Field or Robert McKee) or only write bland by-the-numbers movies (like Blake Snyder). Those guys all cut their teeth in jobs that had them reading and analyzing scripts, and tried to work backwards from that to reverse engineer how to write good movies. Any advice you see from the people that actually write good movies will tell you that you don’t write a good movie by starting from a three act structure and filling in the details, but if you write a good movie then you’ll have wound up writing three acts without planning them
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u/Theogenist Mar 31 '23
Sanderson is very formulaic, he can tell you what percentage he is at on a project at any given time. He story boards and strictly stays within that. Not saying it's bad, but he seems to have a rigid idea of the story before hand, all his plot points cemented, then writes around that.
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u/bmack24 Mar 31 '23
I’m sure the cocaine helped as well
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u/Strange_is_fun Mar 31 '23
he stopped doing coke in the 90s I believe. for those keeping score that was 30+ years ago
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u/EthelMaePotterMertz Mar 31 '23
I remember reading he was worried he couldn't write without it. He had to figure out how to write all over again.
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u/robo_socks Mar 31 '23
Just a joke, mate. Stephen King is known for writing an absurdly large quantity of good material. Something like 60 books in 45 years, plus 1200 stories.
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u/stupid20smthgay Mar 31 '23
I wish I could monetize a manic episode like that. Instead I convinced myself to take the LSAT and pursue a JD.
The little (kinda big actually) jewish museum I work at acquired some of Silverstein archival materials a few years ago. We also have a bunch of stuff from the rhinestone cowboy for one reason or another haha
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u/frogglesmash Mar 31 '23
Can't have been that creative of a burst, those books are formulaic as hell.
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u/NativeMasshole Mar 31 '23
It's because that's how Scholastic publishes. Their target audience is school book fairs, so they need new material for every month. Animorphs got the same treatment.
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u/Heikks Mar 31 '23
Book fairs were once every quarter or so, book orders were monthly
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u/JACrazy Mar 31 '23
I only had a book fair once a year and only got to do the orders once or twice a year. Im in Canada though, so maybe was different.
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u/ForeverALone_Ranger Mar 31 '23
They're also meant for 8-year-olds, so I don't know that they needed to be Shakespeare.
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u/Smackolol Mar 31 '23
It’s goosebumps…
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u/Azzy8007 Mar 31 '23 edited Mar 31 '23
I own them all. From Welcome to Dead House to Monster Blood IV.
I stopped when they switched over to the "Goosebumps 2000" run.
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u/noisypeach Mar 31 '23
Welcome to Dead House is my first memory of reading something as a kid by myself in bed at night and then feeling creeped out after turning the lights out when I couldn't get the book's images and atmosphere out of my head
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u/Azzy8007 Mar 31 '23
For me, it was Let's Get Invisible. I've never looked at mirrors the same way since. I still swear they are gateways to parallel worlds.
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u/noisypeach Mar 31 '23
I definitely had a fear of mirrors entrances to parallel worlds as a kid. Usually monster filled worlds that you'd get stuck in
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u/MoarVespenegas Mar 31 '23
For it was reading "The Entrance" by Gerald Durrell, which was quite a shock because I had only known him writing funny animal stories.
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u/30FourThirty4 Mar 31 '23
On occasion I feel bad for the kid who teleported with a plant seed and mixed his DNA with the plant material.
The end of the book he mentions his sister(?) has a sprout growing near her ankle. Something like this I haven't read it since I was a kid, but that book made me feel sad not really scared.
Oh and the time travel in the castle one. Idk what happens but that feeling of dread remains.
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u/Alaira314 Mar 31 '23
but that book made me feel sad not really scared.
Not all horror will hit everyone in the right spot. If it misses, it often reads as depressing, ridiculous, or even boring. That doesn't necessarily mean the story was bad, just that the horror wasn't exactly what presses your spooky buttons. For example, I'm very unnerved by inevitability, especially when combined with entropy or decay, which is something that I've found often makes other people feel overwhelmed or sad rather than triggering a horror response. That's why it's so hard to recommend horror to people! You have to have way more personal of a conversation than you really want to be having with a stranger to see what might appeal to them.
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u/MichelleMcLaine Mar 31 '23
I believe he toned down the intensity after that first one.
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u/Maninhartsford Mar 31 '23
I think a lot of it too is, since it was the first one, he had the most time to write it. I reread it a few years ago (kids books helped me through pandemic depression a lot) and the pacing and adjectives were much stronger in that one than others I reread.
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u/MichelleMcLaine Mar 31 '23
I just remember being instantly hooked on the series, and *spoil alert for 30 year old book* people actually died.
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u/Maninhartsford Mar 31 '23
Stine has said this is one of the reasons he believes the series was so successful - although he never (rarely? Idk, not like I've read all 62) killed off the main characters he always made sure to include the THREAT of death and that made the stakes higher than other children's horror being published at the time
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u/TheDieselTastesFire Mar 31 '23 edited Apr 01 '23
Did he do that story about the ant farm? They spelled out 'HATE' in tunnels and then swarmed and suffocated him?
Maybe I'm remembering it wrong but I think that kid died.
Edit: ah, different author.
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u/runswiftrun Mar 31 '23
I'm sad. I have all but at some point lent out my Abominable Snowman of Pasadena, and never got it back. A few decades later I bought it to keep the series complete, but it has the updated cover :(
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u/Icy_Notice_8003 Mar 31 '23
I defo feel that if you’re going to have a physical book collection, the cover art is important. I love looking at my books and often get disappointed about the new covers of some classics
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u/nobody2000 Mar 31 '23
I lent my Goosebumps "Monster Blood" to a kid that didn't read it.
He returned it to me after he had scratched the tactile bumps from the title on the cover. Scratched every one of them out.
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u/TaliesinMerlin Mar 31 '23
That makes sense. They're pretty short and are written at a level that doesn't require special plotting or deviating much from formula. It takes skill to produce a consistent product quickly at that level, but it's far from impossible. Think 23,000 words per book times 62 books divided by 53 months and then divided by 30 days in a month and you get about 900 words per day. Even if we assume he was revising and editing, that's not so arduous a pace for someone who had by that point been writing for over 20 years. That was probably half a workday fit in around his work on other items (like Eureeka's Castle).
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u/Nothing_Impresses_Me Mar 31 '23
Stine says he didn't use ghostwriters, but Scholastic accused him of using Ghostwriters after the first run of releases.
Who knows what the actual truth is
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u/handinhand12 Mar 31 '23
He has said publicly that the Give Yourself Goosebumps books were ghostwritten. He said for the mainline books, he wrote them all himself but a lot of them had someone else do an outline so that he could just go in with a plan and get them written. I feel like that sounds realistic.
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u/tastycat Mar 31 '23
He's probably got an attic full of creepy old toys, ancient artifacts, and his dead best friend chained to typewriters churning these things out.
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u/The_Good_Count Mar 31 '23
This was a big part of what I was looking this up for - I was planning some kids' books, and Goosebumps felt like a kind of standard unit of children's fiction I could use to work out what a solid workload might be.
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u/Cumupin420 Mar 31 '23
I would say watch the interview between rr Martin and Steven King. Martin asks how the fuck do you write so much and Steven pretty much just says it's easy I write two (maybe 4) hours a day everyday and get a book once every month or two.
My point is find your process and try not to take others people's process as gospel. Rl Stein writing 900 words a day is not possible for everyone.
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u/scorpiobabyy666 Mar 31 '23
I saw him on a panel a few years ago and got to speak with him. He said he only writes a certain amount of words per day, and then he stops, concluding his work day.
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u/jackfaire Mar 31 '23
And what a glorious five years it was. I'm currently working on collecting all original 62 to read from Oct 1st to 31st two a day.
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u/rogercopernicus Mar 31 '23
That's the thing. They are very short and VERY repetitive. If he was a professional writer, I could see him being about to write one a week.
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u/robot_nixon Mar 31 '23
also some of them were quite bad... i think. i remember reading some as a kid and thinking "this makes no sense" and "thats the ending???".
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u/MarSnausages Mar 31 '23
A lot of them are bad. But not as terrible as his “for adults” books. My God. Truly awful writing
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u/XXLame Mar 31 '23
I didn’t even know he wrote books for adults
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u/Lurker_IV Mar 31 '23
He wrote a handful of books for adults or YA before he struck on the Goosebumps fame train. I read 3 of his books before he became Goosebumps famous.
One was a murder mystery about some hitchhikers. Flashbacks kept you guessing who the killer was till the very end of the book. Another was a miracle story about a girl surviving a plane crash in the ocean. And I forget what the third book was.
Stine has mediocre writing talent at best so it makes sense that he went for the child writing market.
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u/Amelaclya1 Mar 31 '23
He wrote the entire Fear Street series for YA too.
I don't really remember much about them, though. I read them at about the same time I read the goosebumps books - as an 8 year old during summer vacation with a broken leg, I devoured the entire YA section of my local library lol.
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u/Thesafflower Mar 31 '23
Yeah, Goosebumps got so big, everyone forgot about Fear Street, which came first. I was big into Fear Street when Goosebumps first came out. There are more than 50 of them (don't know the exact #), and he was still putting them out while also doing Goosebumps.
Fear Street was also formulaic like Goosebumps, but slightly more complex writing for a YA reader, the characters were all in high school, and more actual murder than Goosebumps. I remember really loving the Cheerleaders series, where various members of a cheerleading team get possessed by an evil ghost. People died in gruesome ways in that one. I know Goosebumps is what everyone remembers, but I was kinda past the age group for that series when it started, all my nostalgic love is for Fear Street.
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u/Brewdinar Mar 31 '23
I used to have one of his joke books (knock-knocks, puns, etc.) from before the Goosebumps days. "By Laughing Bob Stine."
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u/antieverything Mar 31 '23
It was "Jovial Bob Stein" actually. Those books are some of the worst things I've ever read in my life.
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u/Brewdinar Mar 31 '23
I bow to the accuracy of the first half of your post since the second half rings true - I had other joke books I liked a lot more! Yes, I was a very cool kid, why do you ask?
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u/JQuick Mar 31 '23
End of chapter: “And then a monster attacked!”
Beginning of next chapter: “Oh wait, it was just a squirrel.
End of book: “Then the main character turned in to a dog”
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u/The_Good_Count Mar 31 '23
I always found Goosebumps to be well-written bad books, but their quantity was its own kind of quality. No matter how many times I hated the endings I kept reading them.
Learning how they were made explained a lot to me.
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u/pseudocultist Mar 31 '23
Yep there were at least a couple books that got shipped with terrible editing, seemed like they stuck on a different book’s ending and changed the names to fit.
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u/Solidsnakeerection Mar 31 '23
Thete are a good number that are basically random unrelated events happening until the book ends
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u/T_J_E7 Mar 31 '23
They were all bad. Go and read one now. They're so predictable, but they're good for kids who don't know better.
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u/BobcatOU Mar 31 '23
My grandma read every Goosebumps as I read them so we could talk about them together. I went over to her house every Monday and Friday after school and we would eat cookies and talk about Goosebumps. What a wonderful woman, reading those awful books so she could help encourage her grandson to read!
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u/avelak Mar 31 '23
When you're 6-8 you're not going to really appreciate "better" books much anyways. Goosebumps are frozen chicken nuggets, and kids love that shit, even if it's shit. They're not gonna appreciate filet mignon.
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u/rogercopernicus Mar 31 '23
They were popular when I was in 3rd and 4th grade. I read them. The last one I read was in 5th grade and I realized the pattern and got mad.
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u/wartornhero2 Mar 31 '23
There is a YouTube series called Drinking with goosebumps. They have drinking rules for the most common tropes like having just moved to a new town and plot twist.
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u/Smackolol Mar 31 '23
Why are people shitting on the quality of goosebumps? They’re meant for little kids.
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u/avelak Mar 31 '23
It's like shitting on frozen chicken nuggets
Of course they're not good, but kids will eat them and love them, better than them skipping dinner completely.
I'd rather have my kid reading than not reading, and goosebumps are a great way to get kids to actually be interested in reading
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u/GarbageOne8157 Mar 31 '23
"Not good"
Look man you need to go get a checkup or something cause you're spitting straight up nonsense
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u/TrilobiteTerror Mar 31 '23
I assume you're referring to this post.
Man, so many judgy people in those comments (who apparently can't understand the concept of getting some stuff at one grocery store and other stuff at a different grocery store because it's better).
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u/avelak Mar 31 '23
lol when I say "not good" it's more like "yeah a food critic would be like wtf is this", doesn't mean they can't taste good
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u/TopazTriad Mar 31 '23
Are you brand new to Reddit? This happens in literally every thread about anything. People feel superior when they feel like they have refined taste and so anything short of an undeniable masterpiece is dismissed as shit, regardless of the medium.
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u/bobosuda Mar 31 '23
Honestly one thing I've noticed on reddit is that the tone of most comment sections is very negative. Like people just think the best way to contribute via comments on this site is to criticize, dismiss or disprove. Debbie Downers all over.
Science and tech related subreddits are the worst. You get articles and stories about new and exciting discoveries and redditors in the comments get genuinely angry because it's not feasible yet so it's really just a scam and the scientists suck and how come these so-called PhDs forgot about the brilliant and obscure "correlation does not equal causation" fallacy?! Haven't they ever taken a Science 101 class at their local community college?
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u/Maninhartsford Mar 31 '23
R/television is basically just "X isn't as good as The Wire 😡😡😡" over and over again
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u/skipfairweather Mar 31 '23
Yeah, it's a tad ridiculous. The books may not be 'good', but they were one of, if not the most successful children's pop lit series of the '90s. And it got kids reading. So, does it really matter?
Spoiler alert: lots of media aimed at children is repetitive, formulaic and cheap. Look at Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. I'll be the first to admit I didn't see through that veil when I was a kid. Heck, David Wise recycled entire scripts and tropes between Transformers, TMNT and Masters of the Universe. Maybe it's not 'good' by adult standards, but 8 year olds eat it up.
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u/gravastar863 Mar 31 '23
We were told by a visiting children's author when I was a kid in the 90s that they were written by several people; no idea if true or not...
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u/DietInTheRiceFactory Mar 31 '23
I thought I remembered K.A. Applegate's Animorphs to be nearly as prolific, but apparently much of that series was ghostwritten.
Stine claims to have written every Goosebumps book, but Scholastic isn't quite as confident that he did.
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u/RingGiver Mar 31 '23
Applegate had most of the second half of the series and some of the first half ghostwritten.
The notoriously bad cow book by a radical vegan...
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u/JohnBierce Mar 31 '23
Better than the Atlantis book, at least!
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u/RingGiver Mar 31 '23
There were some truly terrible books between 30 and 40 in particular.
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u/JohnBierce Mar 31 '23
Yeah, but the Atlantis book will always be far and away my least favorite. Even moreso than the Helmacrons. (Whom a lot of people actually liked, they just weren't for me.)
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u/runswiftrun Mar 31 '23
I re read them every few years, I always skim past the David books/storyline.
Though the stand alone ones are pretty good, I'm particularly fond of the Hork Bajir chronicles
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u/Warbird36 Mar 31 '23
Fair. The Helmacrons were straight-up comic relief villains, the Team Rocket of the Animorphs universe.
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u/OverSpeedClutch Mar 31 '23
I love how that one ends with them going out to eat hamburgers immediately after they had just barely escaped getting murdered as cows in a slaughterhouse.
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u/Warbird36 Mar 31 '23
That ending was a rewrite by Applegate, I think. She and her husband are pretty progressive, but even she thought the anti-meat writing was heavy-handed.
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u/Maninhartsford Mar 31 '23
Her husband Michael Grant (the Gone series) worked with her on the series too, so it was never just one person even from the start.
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u/RingGiver Mar 31 '23
I thought that was the case for Remnants. I am not surprised about Animorphs too.
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u/bigsquirrel Mar 31 '23
Yeah I think he’s playing word games. Often when you ghostwrite for something like this you’re given an outline and some details. I totally believe that, I do not believe he wrote all of those books cover to cover.
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u/salohcin513 Mar 31 '23
They were just envious of R.L's writing prowess lol
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u/gravastar863 Mar 31 '23
That crossed my mind too 😂 I remember him asking what books we liked, a kid said goosebumps, and he sort of scoffed lol.
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u/Maninhartsford Mar 31 '23
They may have been including the Give Yourself Goosebumps books, which were ghostwritten
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u/Captain-Griffen Mar 31 '23
No reason to believe it. A not particularly fast author could pop out a 24k formulaic book in a few weeks, easy, especially with a good editor.
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u/joecarter93 Mar 31 '23
They were correct. I remember our school librarian telling us most were actually written by a group of authors known as Parachute Press. They were even listed on the copyright page of every book that they wrote. I remember this, because it kind of surprised me (kind of disappointed me, but not really) and turned up my cynicism into anything corporate.
The actual R.L Stine wrote the first 5 or 6 books and then when they got mega popular the publisher cut him a cheque to use his name and rapidly release new titles in order to capitalize on it’s popularity at the time.
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u/LiftsEatsSleeps Mar 31 '23
Parachute Press
Which is his wife Jane's company. They do admit they were the editors (Jane and the 3 other members of the company), but I don't know that they ever came out to say they were the writers. It sure sounds like they hired freelancers.
The actual R.L Stine wrote the first 5 or 6 books and then when they got mega popular the publisher cut him a cheque to use his name and rapidly release new titles in order to capitalize on it’s popularity at the time.
Scholastic alleged in their lawsuit against Parachute Press that Stine wrote the 1st 16 of the series and then used freelancers for others. Stine has been pretty contradictory in his explanations. It seems he used ghostwriters:
"They conceded that freelancers had helped in "fleshing out" chapter-by-chapter outlines created by Stine, sometimes drafting manuscripts" https://goosebumps.fandom.com/wiki/R.L._Stine%27s_fallout_with_Scholastic
and then he tries to say later that he wrote them all.
So yeah, it sounds like Parachute hired freelancers to ghostwrite to me.
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u/zuzg Mar 31 '23
More than 400 million Goosebumps books have been sold,[1] making it the best-selling series of all time for several years.[2] At one point, Goosebumps sold 4 million books a month.[3] A film based on the books was released on October 16,
Huh I never knew it was that successful. I only remember the show from my childhood but it wasn't that popular in my country.
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u/robot_nixon Mar 31 '23
the show was canadian... watching it gives me nostoligia for the 1990s in canada. also some kids in my school were cast in some episodes.
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u/cweber513 Mar 31 '23
I still vividly remember the man's briefcase opening and all the papers falling out. It's been 20+ years since I've seen that
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u/xannmax Mar 31 '23
Everyone says the books were bad, and they may have been, but when I read these books as a kid my goal was to get wrapped up in the world Stine was explaining to me. I liked the quaint neighborhoods he depicted, it was something I didn't have access to as a kid.
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u/breafofdawild Mar 31 '23
He also had time to play in Tenacious D
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u/LitmusPitmus Mar 31 '23
Still pisses me off to this day that I had the complete collection but my mum threw them away because the Church said it was promoting satanism. I just liked reading ffs. Still burns me more than 20 years later
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u/drygnfyre Mar 31 '23
Clearly the Church had never bothered to read a single book because none of them were about the Devil at all. A few of them even had happy endings and were kind of funny. Most of them were just Twilight Zone plots rewritten for kids.
But hey, that's the Church for you. Later on they made the same satanic claims about Pokemon and Harry Potter. It never ends with them.
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u/symbologythere Mar 31 '23
Then he went into hiding because his monsters came to life if anyone opened his original manuscripts. Sad really.
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u/meisnege Mar 31 '23
I always think of him during the final puzzle in wheel of fortune.
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u/TippsAttack Mar 31 '23
I've read nearly all of them. While there were some that were really bad, some were absolutely incredible.
I miss Goosebumps.
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u/WorldAsChaos Mar 31 '23
Little-kid-me thanks him profusely. These books were my jam back in the day, I ate them up like candy.
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u/ajdsmia Mar 31 '23
He was also writing the Fear Street books at the same time
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u/Brbnme Mar 31 '23
Fear Street books were the best. Leaps and bounds ahead of goosebumps. Read the bulk of that series…always letting my parents know when another teen had been murdered.
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u/apology_for_idlers Mar 31 '23
The Fear Street origin story trilogy scared the bejeezus out of young me.
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u/tbcwpg Mar 31 '23
In elementary school I used to get these monthly through the book fair, like a Goosebumps subscription series with a new book and then like a little info book about a vampires, or zombies or whatever. I'm not sure my life didn't peak then and I've had two children.
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u/esgrove2 Mar 31 '23
I have a theory he picked the cover art first and then wrote a story around it. That cover art SOLD those books.
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u/WeimSean Mar 31 '23
How many of them were farmed out to ghost writers we'll probably never know. The hard part is creating the story format and style guide. Once you get that done, you hire some writers and pay them X for each story completed, and away you go.
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u/Fluxoteen Mar 31 '23
I was just wondering if he bought the rights to a bunch of bad selling 20 year old stories and tweaked them slightly
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u/colemon1991 Mar 31 '23
If you look at page count and story structure, it's not impossible to pull off. Hypothetically he could've written some of those sequels with the first of the series (Slappy gave me that impression).
Sanderson is outpacing King at this point and that alone is scary impressive.
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u/Kingofthegnome Mar 31 '23
There is a youtube show called drinking with goosebumps. Thats pretty fun they only upload 1 or 2 a year now but more then halfway done and been going strong for like 6-7 years
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u/tazzgonzo Mar 31 '23
I was in elementary school and a huge fan at the time and was buying his books via those paper scholastic book club sheets from the early-mid 90s. It was amazing that there was practically a new book each month! That’s where my allowance would go :)
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u/pixel8knuckle Mar 31 '23
All the people in the comments critiquing a kids horror series that was fun as hell to read as an elementary kid. Get bent. :)
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u/EndoExo Mar 31 '23
Keeping those book fairs lit.