 By Dan Brooks |
If you obsessively checked the New York Times twenty times the morning, as I do right after calisthenics, you probably noticed the advertisement for this shoppable children’s storybook by Ralph Lauren. |
“The RL Gang,” as it is titled, cleverly serves three functions: fun narrative for kids, handy shopping guide for parents, and terrifying portent of a coming consumer hellscape for the rest of us. As near as I can tell, this is RL’s pioneer effort in the field of shoppable children’s stories.
I remember my first SCS, an episodic narrative about a socially awkward but resourceful duck who goes shopping for a dirt bike while struggling with memories of the duck who inexplicably left him two years earlier. It was not successful, and very few dirt bikes were sold. Given the difficulty that the form can present to new writers, I’d like to offer some helpful suggestions for the next draft of “The RL Gang.”
The writers workshop: a tool as indispensable as the typewriter.
