Writing is not a Dreadful Mayan Curse

From today’s NPR Book News:

Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert is taking on Philip Roth over some advice he gave to a young writer named Julian Tepper. In a Paris Review essay, Tepper says Roth told him he should quit writing: “Really, it’s an awful field. Just torture. Awful. You write and write, and you have to throw almost all of it away because it’s not any good. I would say just stop now. You don’t want to do this to yourself.” Gilbert counters with an essay in which she says being able to write for a living is “a profoundly luxurious act,” and not “some sort of dreadful Mayan curse, or dark martyrdom that only a chosen few can withstand for the betterment of humanity.” Amen. Roth, for his part, hasn’t said anything.

This little blurb particularly struck me today, because I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about writing lately. I love writing. It makes me happy. I love revising. That makes me happy too. (I don’t tend to care for reading the comments that lead to revising. That’s just painful. But what’s a little pleasure without pain, right…?) In fact, I’m going to have a short story published in anthology by the end of the month. Woo!

But I wrote that story last spring, and I haven’t really written anything since. I made a really half-hearted attempt at NaNoWriMo last November, but the timing was bad and the idea I was working on didn’t even start to gel until about the 20th of November.

Novels are intimidating.

On vacation, over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been reading a lot of short stories. Jeffery Archer is possibly my favorite short-story author of all time. If you haven’t read any of his work, go check him out now. I also gave some time to Steven King (though I vastly prefer his short stories to his novels, this particular collection was a little dull) and an anthology of Best-Of Sci-Fi and Fantasy. In the anthology, each story is preceded by an author bio which lists the humongous number of awards and awesome publication credits these authors have.

Which lists make me jealous.

“Laura,” I say to myself (because in moments of self-loathing I always talk to myself), “you’re not allowed to be jealous. You’ve never even tried to publish in any of these fancy magazines, so it isn’t like you’re failing where these people are succeeding. You’re failing on a completely different level!”

Ouch.

But I’m right, you know. I socialize in circles of writers. I have two friends who have been published in such impressive journals as noted above. They do it because they write, they edit, and then they try to get published. If they can do it, why can’t I?

Because I’m not very focused. Nothing new there. Look at this poor blog. I was posting 4-5 times a week when I started. Now I’m down to what, 4-5 times a year?

I read a blog around the end of the December that described the author’s mission to read 366 books during 2012. Ridiculous, right? But he did it. He did it because he didn’t do anything else for fun that year. He kept up with his job and continued to be a good husband and father, but he gave up video games, he gave up newspapers, he gave up everything except reading books.

That thought, combined with the Cracked article about harsh truths that will make you a better person,  has really been rattling around in my brain for the last couple of months. “Do the math: How much of your time is spent consuming things other people made (TV, music, video games, websites) versus making your own? Only one of those adds to your value as a human being.”

I don’t DO much. I consume a lot, but I don’t DO much.

Perhaps it’s time to see about switching that up. If a dude can read a book every day of the year by giving up all of his other hobbies, surely I could write a few stories in a year by just slimming down on a few of mine?

My life is full of interesting places, interesting events, and most importantly, interesting people. I certainly do not lack for material about which to write. (Ooh, and look at that good grammar!) So let’s do this thing. Let’s get some stories written, or some blog posts, or even some letters to people I haven’t seen in awhile. Then maybe one day I really will be the person my 5-year-old self was sure I would be, after writing my first story, called “Majic Dors”. (Upon reflection, that story idea was awesome. Doors that take you to magic places? Maybe I should revisit that.)

(Shhh, yes I know it’s been done before.)

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Losing and Winning at NaNoWriMo

Derp derp! I am looking forward to my first non-win since I started NaNo in 2008.

(I originally typed “my first failure” but that isn’t right, because as I’ve been preaching to my Wrimos all month: writing less than 50k words does NOT equal failure!)

I’m actually kind of pleased about it. As an ML (regional coordinator, for you uninitiated folks), I feel like I ought to know what it feels like to be one of the people who doesn’t make it, but who keep writing every day anyway. That includes a fair majority of people who participate. Now I know some of the trials and real excuses, and I know a little better how to support that crowd. Yay me!

On the other hand, my story really started taking shape around the 20th of the month. I went from writing rambling pages about my characters taking a walk through town, describing every single thing they see in excruciating detail because I had no idea what the plot was supposed to look like, to suddenly having two or three major insights in a row that gave my story substance and direction.

It was very exciting. If only my organizational abilities could keep up with the thoughts zinging around in my head.

And I’ve had an interesting revelation about how I handle brainstorming. Apparently I deal with brainstorming the same way people with addictions handle interventions. This might have something to do with the fact that most of my brainstorming happens as a conversation with my husband. Here’s an example:

Me: My characters have no motivation! Why would anyone go to such huge risk and expense just to drag a couple of dragon hearts home from the mountains?

Him: To save someone’s life?

Me: Mm, that could be good. But the people mounting the expedition are bad guys. Whose life could be worth saving to them?

Him: Maybe they want to start a war.

Me, internally: Psh. War is stupid. I don’t write about war. What a dumb idea.

Me: Interesting. I’ll write that down.

Him: But their obvious motivation should be something noble. War could be a secret motive!

Me, internally: War is stupid.

Me: Secret motives are interesting! But saving someone’s life is too hard to work in, since this expedition will take, like… eight months. Should be something a little less dire.

Him: What if they’re trying to do something stop-gap to fix the problem they need the dragon-batteries for? Maybe there’s a coal shortage.

Me: There can’t be a coal shortage. My world runs on coal.

Him: …

Me: Oh, that would certainly create a need, wouldn’t it?

Me, internally: Noooo! I already wrote thirty excruciating pages about the wonders of the steam-driven technology in my world!

Him: There you have it then, coal shortage and war.

Me, internally: War is stupid. 

Me: I’ll write it down.

… Later, in the throes of ecstasy over having taken away most of the technology in my world …

Me: What could possibly be so important that you would pay for the coal to make an 800-mile train trip to the edge of nowhere every month?

Him: Oil.

Me, internally: I should have known better than to ask that after I saw him watching that History Channel special on the Vanderbilts. 

Me: Oil is boring.

Him: Yes, but it’s valuable.

Me: I’ll write it down.

Me, internally: This is not going to be a book about freaking energy crises. 

… Two days later, I’d done some outlining and much additional pondering and realized that an energy crises presents a perfect backdrop for a more atmospheric setting, the opportunity for royal conspiracy, the introduction of monsters, AND it produced – out of non-smog-filled thin air – the missing mother of my protagonist.

I have to admit, after much denial, bargaining and depression over lack of other prospects, that boring, real-world-style world conflicts can make excellent background music for a story that does not have to be about those things at all. My story can still be about clockwork dragons and mysterious power-sources and missing persons and wild adventures across dangerous terrain, now everyone involved has proper motive to get started.

Hooray!

My name is Laura. It is Day 30 of NaNoWriMo and my novel has just begun.

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My Crush on Brevity

My vacation in Mexico is about to end with no further adventures other than watching (“watching”) the Super Bowl with a spanish commentary and spotting a gecko living under the TV. So rather than put up another long-winded account of my day lounging around, here is an ode to the delights of brevity.

A couple weeks ago, right before the inauguration, I heard a show on the radio talking about a contest hosted by SMITH Magazine and the National Constitution Center. The challenge was to submit a suggestion for a six-word inaugural speech, meant to inspire President Obama. Here are a few of the more entertaining entries, which I can’t find on the website, but I remember from the radio program:

“I will put away my blackberry.”

“Fellow Americans, meet our new puppy.”

And the winning entry was: “Divided by fear, united by hope.”

Now TODAY I have discovered another wonderful site dedicated completely to brevity. The site is called “One Sentence,” and it records true stories. The catch? They must be written in a single sentence. Here are a few good ones I picked out of the most recent submissions:

“Somewhere in the Colorado penal system, there is a man named David with my name tattooed on his chest.”

“When the cashier at the grocery store called me ‘sir’ without really looking at me, I was tempted to pull up my shirt and show her my boobs.”

“It took the internet to find out about my uncle’s successful career in porn.”

“My cat challenged me to a game of “Guess Where I Pooped Before You Step In It” and I lost.”

Now I need to come up with one to submit. I’m having a lot more difficulty with it than I think I should. Maybe I’ll use this thought to ponder myself to sleep. I’ll check back when I have a brilliant one-sentence story.

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Extra Tacky Year-In-Review Letter

Tis the season to receive letters from your far-flung friends and family telling you all about what they, their children, and their pets have accomplished during the past year. I really enjoy this time-honored tradition, since it is frequently the only time I get news from people who haven’t been sucked into Facebook yet.

And there is something extra special about the year-in-review letters, something about trying to sum up your life for people who you hardly care about that causes you to do very strange things, such as narrate the letter from the perspective of the family dog, or the newborn baby. Better yet are the letters that seem to be narrated by absolutely no one, referring to all the members of the family in the third person, as if they’ve hired a reporter to document life at home.

The star of this year’s collection is a letter which detailed how the new puppy got sick and required surgery, after which the vet divulged that the source of the illness was a couple pairs of fancy panties that the dog gobbled down, and would you like to have those back?

Awesome.

And now I’m going to transcend a new level of tackiness by posting my Year-In-Review letter here on my blog rather than sitting down and handwriting envelopes and taking them to the post office. I always mean to do that, but my good intentions never actually make it to the post office. If I don’t do this, I probably won’t do anything. Maybe next year.

Laura, Dustin and Minou: 2008

Hello friends and family! It has been an exciting and eventful year in the Floyd household.*

Dustin and I have spent the last year+ learning American Sign Language, a skill at which we are both becoming increasingly adept. We are capable of interpreting talks up to 30 minutes on a fairly impressive range of topics. Starting this year, we will begin focusing less on interpretation and more on using the language for conversation and discussion. I find this exciting but also a little frightening. We took a field trip to Denver in September to attend a one-day convention held specifically for the deaf community, and I felt lost and totally adrift all day. I guess that’s why I need to do more work dealing in ASL without anything audible to fall back on. Yikes!

Early in the spring, I undertook to participate in the first theatrical production to take place in the Deadwood Opera House since the place burned down 25 years ago. I fulfilled my dreams of stardom in the role of Tzeitel in Fiddler on the Roof. It was a fantastic amount of fun, even though our opening performance was canceled by a record-setting snowfall on the 1st of May. Dustin got roped into running the spotlight, so he got to be involved too. The final performance was for a standing-room-only crowd, which made everyone involved very happy. I look forward to finding out what they’re planning to do for the coming year. Rumors say Grease. I hope they’re wrong. :p

Since, in the course of rehearsals, I spent my anniversary pretending to marry another man, we headed to Vegas for a belated anniversary trip in May. The warm and sun were lovely, the shows entertaining, and the million miles of walking between casinos was a good work out.

In June, I got to spend a week working as a Real Live Archaeologist for the Deadwood Archaeology Camp. It was a lot of fun. Myself, two other archaeologists, a handful of counselors, and 26 kids started excavating the site where an ice house once stood. We found bricks, nails, chunks of wood, shiny rocks, caterpillars, and all sort of other indicators of civilization long past. (It’s just as well that I don’t work with kids every day… the caterpillar thing might eventually have done me in.)

August saw Dustin and I escaping the insanity of Rally Week on a road trip to Washington DC driving a very small car. We took our time, drove the backroads, and finally spent a few days with my folks in DC. We didn’t do many of the things tourists are supposed to do. Seeing the FDR monument and part of a concert on the Mall were the extent of our outings, but we did discover a bakery that makes the best macaroons ever, and we got to visit our friend Scott from college, who is a Big DC Wahoo-In-Training. It was a nice trip.

After a long, lovely fall, winter arrived with face-slapping suddenness, catching all the trees still wearing their leaves and wreaking havoc with the roads and power lines. November brought one of the earliest big blizzards in my personal memory of the Hills, trapping us in our house for a couple of days. We couldn’t get out at all until our very gracious neighbors lent a hand, since ALL the snow in the neighborhood had blown into our driveway and our shovel broke.

We escaped the freezing cold for awhile when we flitted over to California to visit my grandparents. The weather was rainy, but compared to great drifts of snow, no problem! We toured around San Fransisco and got plump on my grandmother’s incredible cooking. It was wonderful.

That brings me to how I’ve spent the last couple months of the year, which is in a flurry of fiction-writing. I decided to participate in NaNoWriMo, an event which challenges participants to write 50,000 words of fiction in 30 days. And no, despite my father’s total bafflement, no one actually reads the final product once you’re done. There’s no chance of me getting Discovered and becoming an overnight gazillionaire because of my brilliant work. (Even if someone DID read the NaNoWriMo manuscripts, there would be no chance of anyone calling what I wrote brilliant.) I completed my 50k words in the nick of time, then promised myself I’d finish the novel (50k words got me about 75% of the way there) in December, which I did not do. Maybe in January!

In Dustin news that doesn’t involve me being attached to his hip, he has taken over part of the family business, and despite the crappy economy, has managed to help scrounge up a good share of new business. Next stop: an office in Scotland. (Okay, so that isn’t in the official plans yet, but heck… optimism: pass it on!)

Minou has also been keeping plenty busy. She spent all her summer days running amok outside, escaping our yard to pick fights with the neighbor cats or sleep under the neighbor’s porch. She refuses to tell us why our porch isn’t good enough. Now that the weather is cold again, she has completely forgotten that cold = not going outside, and spends most of her days complaining about being cooped up. She doesn’t even seem to mind the snow very much, frolicking from drift to drift, just happy that we decide to let her out now and then.

Things that have not happened this year: I have not had any babies (nor are there any in the works, sorry); no personal or family disasters (thank goodness); no long-lost twins discovered (oh well). I expect 2009 will be equally full of joy and happiness and blah blah blah.

I hope the year was, on the balance, also good for all of you who might be reading this.

*I believe this opening sentence is legally stipulated somewhere. Exclamation point optional.

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A treasury of writing wisdom

As I near the end of my 50,000 word goal (6,500 words away!!), I find myself in need of a little encouragement. The NaNoWriMo organizers said that Week 2 was supposed to be the hardest, after the novelty wears off and you’ve gotten through the rush of first ideas. In my case, they’re wrong. My rush of first ideas somehow lasted three whole weeks, and now that I am SO close to the end, I feel like my head is going to explode.

And so I went to revisit all the Pep Talks that have been sent out over the month. You see, as the insanity that is NaNoWriMo progresses, we get weekly pep-talk emails from various published authors who are entitled to give advice because they’ve Made It Big. I find some of the advice has been so lovely, that I’d like to pass it on. All of it relates to struggling through that first draft, ugly, unweildy beast that it is.

Chris Baty, NaNoWriMo Founder and Director, on the excitement of getting started:

I can’t help but feel giddy as I ponder questions like: Will this be the best novel I’ve ever written? And, secretly: Will this be the best novel ever written in the history of humankind?

Because it really could be.

Then the writing starts, and by the second sentence, two new questions have occurred to me. Namely: What am I doing? And: Could this be the worst novel ever written in the history of humankind?

And you know what? It really could be. But that’s fine.

A second excerpt from that same pep-talk:

The books we write in November won’t start out like the novels we buy in bookstores. Because the novels we buy in bookstores didn’t start out like bookstore-novels either.

That is very reassuring, because mine is a ridiculously jumbled mess, full of bad grammar and worse cliches.

Jonathan Stroud, author of the Bartimaeus Trilogy, has my admiration for saying that he drags his novels “kicking and screaming into existence.” That is a wonderful mental image. Also, his thoughts on the ease of writing:

If “inspiration” is when the words just flow out, each one falling correctly on the page, I’ve been inspired precisely once in ten years. All the rest of the time, as I’ve been piecing together my seven novels, it’s been a more or less painful effort.

And on the joy of creation:

Alchemists tried for centuries to turn base metals into gold. Every time we sit down and put words on paper, we succeed where they failed. We’re conjuring something out of nothing.

Phillip Pullman, author of the Golden Compass Trilogy, was a bit lectury about the importance of regular work in his pep-talk, but this little gem is definitely true and important to remember:

…a bad day’s work is a lot better than no day’s work at all. At least if you’ve written 500 words, or 1000 words, or whatever you discover is your most comfortable daily rate of production, the words are there to work on later. And when you do visit them in a month’s time, or whenever it is, you often find that they’re not so bad after all.

Now back to Chris Baty for his Week Two pep-talk. I adore him because he pulls out the most random things. Thus:

Week One of NaNoWriMo tends to be all about characters. Our imaginations have been leaving a lot of them on our doorsteps lately, and it’s pretty much all we can do to bring them in, give them names, and teach them the rudiments of steering their battle-yaks.

Battle Yaks?? Awesome. That’s what I forgot to do with my characters before setting them loose. Now, on the pain and distress of Week Two:

Enthusiasm dwindles, fatigue rises, and we begin squinting at our manuscripts, thinking, “This derivative pile of crap is my literary statement to the world?”

Was he IN my BRAIN when he wrote that??

And now my favorite writing metaphor to date, compliments of Katherine Paterson, author of Bridge Terabithia and many other wonderful books:

I live in Barre, Vermont which calls itself the “Granite Capital of the World.” Outside our town are enormous quarries, so when I speak in local schools every child has a mental picture of a granite quarry. “You know how hard it is to get granite out of the quarry,” I say. “You have to carefully score the rock and put the explosive in to make the great granite block break loose from the face of the stone. Then you have to attach the block to the chains so that the cranes can lift it slowly out of the hole and put it on the waiting truck. That’s the first draft. It’s hard, dangerous work, and when you’ve finished, all you’ve really got is a block of stone. But now you have something now to work on. Now you can take your block down to the shed to carve and polish it and turn it into something of beauty. That’s revision.”

I absolutely adore the idea of writing as a dangerous undertaking. Reminds me of one of my favorite quotes, from Kurt Vonnegut Jr.: “I feared nothing. That was foolish of me. A writer off-guard, since the materials with which he works are so dangerous, can expect agony quick as a thunderclap.” But it’s all worth it, and when you’re done, you have this lumpy chunk of first draft to carve up into a beautiful sculpture of a novel. I think this is a step that so many would-be authors forget about: your novel needs a first draft, and the first draft is not going to be wonderful.

My friend Margit (who is a published author, and therefore eligible to hand out advice) compared this to the 10,000 pots theory which, while I don’t think she invented, she gets credit for because she told it to me. If you want to be a master potter, you don’t sit down and create a perfect pot on your first try. You sit down and start cranking out pots. Maybe your first 9,000 pots are crap, but you get better and better as you go, so that when you have 1,000 wonderful pots, you’ve really accomplished something. (I’m paraphrasing what I’m sure was more elloquent in her own words – sorry Margit!)

Okay, back to highlighting the pep-talks. Meg Cabot, author of The Princess Diaries, cracked me up with her description of the follies of cheating on your work in progress with a newer, shinier story:

…the new story always seems better than that old busted up, out-of-control story you’ve been working on for so long.  That new story has the aura of dewy freshness to it.  It’s calling to you!  It’s all, “Yoo-hoo…look at me!  I don’t have any plot problems and my characters are way-intriguing and some of them wear leather jackets and oh, yeah, you know that weird transition thing you’ve got going on near chapter four that you can’t figure out?  I don’t have that!”
I know.  It sounds good.

But how long until some other story idea comes along and twitches its enticing little characters at you, and you decide to abandon this new one for it?  How many words will you have then?

I have suffered from the inability to be monogamous to a story since I was 7 years old. I have whole notebooks full of started stories that were abandoned because other stories needed to be started instead.

Back to Chris Baty for the Week Three “get-to-30,000-words-no-matter-what-you-have-to-do” pep-talk:

If you need to have your characters sing “American Pie” in its entirety or recite some of their favorite passages from telephone books, so be it.

Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander, passes out some really invaluable advice about characters and conflict:

When in doubt, make trouble for your character. Don’t let her stand on the edge of the pool, dipping her toe. Come up behind her and give her a good hard shove. That’s my advice to you now. Make trouble for your character. In life we try to avoid trouble. We chew on our choices endlessly. We go to shrinks, we talk to our friends. In fiction, this is deadly. Protagonists need to screw up, act impulsively, have enemies, get into TROUBLE.

…the essence of fiction writing is creating a character you love and, frankly, torturing him. You are both sadist and savior. Find the thing he loves most and take it away from him. Find the thing he fears  and shove him shoulder deep into it. Find the person who is absolutely worst for him and have him delivered into that character’s hands. Having him make a choice which is absolutely wrong.

I knew this already from my nerd club, but I really could have used the pointer about Day 4. I had somehow concocted a complete premise with no conflict. Duh. Realism is not fun!

Now, from Chris Baty’s Week Four talk, I’ll share with you the entertaining opening metaphor, and let you figure out for yourself where he’s going with it:

Between my apartment and the Office of Letters and Light, there is a monster of a hill. I bike to work, and I always take a long route that steers me safely around the behemoth. I do this because I have the calf muscles of a goldfish, and because I’ve developed an aversion to feeling like I’m going to die first thing in the morning.

But yesterday, I summoned all my courage and headed up the mountain. My word count was—and still is—stuck in the low 30,000s, and I wanted to ride the hill to remind myself what the 40,000s in NaNoWriMo felt like. After struggling through an ordeal in which my lungs felt like twin meat-logs roasting on gyro spits, and my heart beat so fast that I feared it was going to try and make an emergency exit through my nose, I reached the top.

I love Chris Baty.

And those are all my pep-talks to date. I think I’ll get two more before it’s all done, and if they’re good, I’ll let you know. Until then, I need to stop procrastinating in every way I know how, and get some writing done!

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Writing Is Joy

I am on a writing buzz – an actual heart-pumping-dance-a-jig-around-the-kitchen buzz. I’m doing NaNoWriMo, you see, and I’m not losing. Yay me!

For those of you who may not be familiar with NaNoWriMo, it stands for National Novel Writing Month, and that is November. It is also an event – a bunch of crazy people from across the world attempt to write a novel beginning November 1 and finishing 50,000 words by November 30.

I’ve known about this for several years, but this is the first time I’ve been crazy enough to try. I’ve been pining for a new hobby for awhile, and while writing isn’t exactly a new hobby, the sort of writing done during NaNoWriMo is like nothing I’ve ever done before.

I have written novels before. Three, to be specific. The first was when I was 13, about 70,000 words of angstfull, tooth-achingly idealistic fanfiction based on Anne McCaffrey’s Pern. The main character was the very definition of a Twinky, and I wanted to be her so badly it kind of hurt. Yikes.

The other two are even more embarrassing than that, if you can believe it, so let’s just say that one is a terrible romance (also my life idealized) and the third is a retelling of a fairy tale which could have been better if I had started it with a plan.

So a novel: one that is theoretically publishabe (that is, not fanfiction); one that isn’t Twinkie (that is, about a shinier, better me); one that someone might actually enjoy reading some day (that is, has a beginning, middle, end, and isn’t too boring). I can do eet!

I came up with a premise that doesn’t seem too shabby, and on November 1, I started writing. I honestly did not expect to do very well when I started, but since I’ve gotten going, the bug has really bitten me. I like my characters and even though I still don’t have an actual plot (details!), I find myself excited to learn what they’re going to do next. It’s almost like reading, except it goes a little slower and the copy-editing is much, much worse.

One of the main points of trying to do so much writing so fast is to just get the words on the paper. Every writer I’ve ever talked to says that is the hardest part, and it’s true. Attempting perfection on the first try is asking for failure. It was the doom of Novel #3 I mentioned up there. If you want perfection, you’ll never get far before giving up in despair. Here, you just barf the words onto the page, and if you still think they have potential when you’re finished, you go back and do your revising and editing later.

NaNoWriMo: The best part is watching your inner editor writhe in agony.

I am actually quite amazed at how easy it was to turn my inner editor off. Spelled that word wrong and the automatic-spell-fixer can’t figure it out? Oh well, we’ll get it later. This paragraph brought to you by the department of redundancy department? No problem, it’ll come out in the wash. Renamed a supporting character three times in the first six pages? I’ll have a vote-off on a favorite name at the end. Keep using the same catchphrases over and over again? That’s what proofreaders are for!

And so I’m plowing forward in a fairly linear fashion, leaving little notes for myself in places where I’ll need to fill in missing information later, or where I suspect I might have created a plot hole that will need later filling. It’s fun and liberating and if I accidentally write something worth reading, all the better!

When my plot finally starts to congeal, I’ll put up an excerpt or a synopsis or something. Stay tuned. You might get a first gander at a future best seller.

(Please forgive the ego. I just hit 20,000 words and I am, as I mentioned above, on a bit of a buzz.)

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Customize Me!

In honor of all the delightful free time I’ve had in the last couple days, I’ve gotten back into the habit of blogging and find myself thinking “why do I sometimes forget how much I like to tell people what I think?” So I’ll be better now.

The old theme I had for my blog seems to have gotten out of sync with some browser updates, leaving it in a rather sad-looking state where the spacing went all wonky. So it’s time for a change! And while I’m going wild, I think it’s time to customize a bit. So I’ve picked this as my new theme, and I’ll be pondering how best to customize my header image. If anyone has any great ideas, let me know.

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The Twilight Saga & Why It Shouldn’t Piss You Off

Hello my much neglected blog! Something about beautiful weather in the summer and my current revulsion toward sitting at a desk all day makes it difficult to spend any time typing at a computer that isn’t strictly necessary. But there’s a topic that’s rattling in my brain, so I might as well have out with it.

(Before I start, let me note that there are no direct spoilers in this post. I comment on my opinion of the plots without saying what those plots are. I do, in one case, say what the plot is NOT, and that is noted in case you don’t even want to know that much.)

I just finished reading Breaking Dawn, the last book in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga. I picked these books up originally because I was impressed with the commotion they were causing in the press. I like to read books that are wildly popular, because I figure there’s usually a reason for the popularity. In most cases, I’m not disappointed, and in the case of Twilight, the first book in the series, I was absolutely delighted. Twilight is a perfect love story with all the right elements to make it really delicious: a girl who is just like I was in high school, a boy who is too perfect to be true, forbidden fruit, and creepy secrets.

I read the whole thing in one day, and Dustin asked if it was any good. I thought about the question for a minute, then replied, “I really liked it, but I’m not sure if it was good.” To clarify, I reeeeally liked it. I immediately reread it, which I haven’t done to a book since, well, high school. I will probably read it again in the future. Perfect escape fiction, with no deep themes or unpleasant ties to reality, beyond those which are necessary to keep it just this side of believable. And that’s what I meant by saying I didn’t think it was “good.” I wouldn’t rank it in the annals of literature. It is not Austen or Tolkein. It is not a book which will change your life or challenge literary archetypes. It is, plain and simply, a fun read.

And so I dove into the second book, New Moon. I did not enjoy it quite as much as the first, because some of those painful ties to reality, mentioned above, started creeping in. Fortunately, the conclusion was adequate to counteract these irritants, and I was satisfied.

Before I go on to books three and four, let me introduce the reason I’m writing this blog to begin with. After reading the first two books, I was very anxious to read the last two. Then a friend of mine who works in a bookstore (and apparently doesn’t know better yet) let slip that the last book really pissed some people off. “They’ve been asking for their money back,” she said. “Can you believe that?”

“Nooooo! Don’t tell me!” I wailed. I hate hints about how stories end.

“No, it’s not a big deal. I just mean, I can’t believe people can be that dumb about books,” she said.

I just sat there and grumbled. She’d tainted the story. There was only one thing I could think of that would piss off the rabid sort of mostly teenage fans that follow this series: a not-happily-ever-after ending. And that would piss me off too. But I couldn’t quite believe it would happen that way, so I went ahead with the last two books anyway, vowing (at least) not to try and return them if they did end that badly.

(Mini but not obvious spoiler about what doesn’t happen: my biggest fear was that Edward would croak and Bella would somehow wind up settling for Jacob. Or worse – Edward DOESN’T croak, and she STILL winds up with Jacob. Ew.)

Book three, Eclipse, exacerbated these fears. The three-way relationship tangle just got worse, uncertainty of every flavor enters the picture, and who wants to read about that? And puh-lease: who really believes it’s possible to be in love with two people at once? Nuh uh. No way. Especially the way Bella supposedly loves Edward. That doesn’t leave room for accidentally falling in love with another guy at the same time. Gross.

And so I began Breaking Dawn with trepidation. Halfway through, all my major fears (see mini-spoiler above) were relieved. Now, the worst that could happen was that EVERYONE ended up dead, therefore doing away with the happily ever after but at least no one was settling. I could have felt okay about that.

But I needn’t have worried; everything resolved into a perfect, fluffy ending with whipped cream on top. It was wrapped up so very neatly, in fact, it even erased my irritation with the plot of Eclipse, providing an elegant explanation to what I claimed was an impossible situation. I couldn’t have written it (much) better myself, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what could have caused people to be pissed off enough to try getting their money back.

So I did a little looking. It turns out that most people were tweezed off about the exact things that I loved: the story was shallow and predictable, the conclusion was rushed and not bloody enough, Renesmee: what the hell? Okay, so I’m ambivalent about Renesmee. I’d've been okay without her, but it would have needed to be a completely different story without her. As for the rest – isn’t shallow and predictable the very reason we read books like this? Attempting to write these books any other way would have robbed them of their easy appeal as tasty escape fiction.

Heart-wrenching tales of characters with depth who live in realistic worlds do not exist in the young adult fantasy-fiction section. Heck… they hardly exist at all. If that’s what you’re after, allow me to recommend The Grapes of Wrath or even Lord of the Rings. If you want polished and beautiful prose, I’d stay out of the young adult section and contemporary fiction all together.

It’s one thing to pick up a fluffy book, read it, and think, “gee, that was kind of twinkie and too unrealistic for my taste,” and then never read a book by that author again. But why read a whole set of books like that if you knew from the start that you wanted realism and quality?

The moral of this story is: don’t get yourself so worked up about things that are not worth the effort. If you’re looking for no-brainer escape fiction with an entertaining love story that’s not too difficult to follow and will occasionally make you giggle out loud or sigh with satisfaction, I’d give these books a read. Otherwise, let it go. You can’t have your money back regardless.

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Reality vs. Fiction

I found a quote I really love today, which completely sums up the whole philosophy behind this blog:

The only difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to be credible.

- Mark Twain

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Illustrating Absurdity

In my spare time these days, I am editing a manuscript for a novel written by a family member. It’s turned into quite an undertaking, likely because I am a little anal retentive when it comes to coherent writing. I’m having to learn to let stylistic differences by, and I think I’m getting better at that. What remains, however, is still very awkward. The author is an avid reader, and has written prolifically in the non-fiction spectrum, but fiction is a new adventure and she makes a lot of the mistakes I mentioned awhile back in my list of Fiction Pitfalls.

I had to make her promise not to disown, fire, or disinherit me before agreeing to give her honest comments and opinions.

The payoff for me is that sometimes the mistakes are really entertaining. I came across one today that was so good, I had to illustrate it for her. The paragraph, pre-editing, read:

“Uh, wh-what,” Yates jerked to attention and looked around dazedly. His large frame had been hanging languidly off the side of the saddle.

Okay, so I’m not going to win any illustrator’s awards. But I do entertain myself. I hope she’ll also find it just a little funny. If we can’t laugh at our own absurd mistakes… well, what’s the point?

The edited paragraph, if anyone’s curious will (as suggested) read like so:

“Eh? What?” Yates jerked to attention and looked dazedly around. He had been dozing in his saddle.

(My qualifications as an editor, by the way, are completely based in the fact that I’ve been writing amateur fanfiction for the last decade, so I have seen a LOT of writing done wrong, and a lot of writing done right. So I’m not making any grand claims of being professional at this, just practiced.)

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