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What Every Artist Can Learn From the Latest Scandal in Young Adult Literature
If the Sarah Dessen Twitter debacle has taught us anything, it’s that reviews are not for you
If you’re a writer, you probably went down the rabbit hole that was the Sarah Dessen Twitter debacle, just like I did this week. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, you can read about it in depth here or elsewhere. Here’s a quick recap: A grad student at Northern State University in South Dakota made a statement to a local news outlet about how she joined her school’s Common Read selection committee to make sure the chosen book was not one by Sarah Dessen. Dessen, an adult author who writes young adult fiction novels, responded to the statement by tweeting that she’s “having a really hard time right now and this is just mean and cruel.” Name-calling and nastiness ensued, with hugely popular authors on Twitter coming to Dessen’s side and blasting the grad student. It was a mess.
I want to share a lesson, courtesy of this brouhaha. It’s for fellow writers, artists, or really anyone who is emotionally attached to their work. That lesson is this: After you release your work — a book, a documentary, a Tweet, a presentation you post on LinkedIn — it no longer belongs to you. It belongs to the consumer.
