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On Twilight
I had a choice of two things to blog about today based on what was flooding the Blogosphere and what was filling the news. The most obvious thing would be Obama’s inauguration, with all its history and emotion. But aside from me understanding what the moment means, and feeling all warm and fuzzy at the emotional pictures, my head has a much more real and critical outlook of what Obama’s presidency holds. So in order not to piss everyone off, I’ll hold out just now.
The other thing everyone seems to be talking about is Twilight. I seem to see a score of people reading it on the train every morning, it packs bookstores, and the movie is everywhere. So what’s the big fuss?
One of my younger sisters, Jessica is a voracious reader. She ploughed through all of the Harry Potter books and usually consumes anything I give her. So it was no surprise when she was raving about the first Twilight book last year. I bought her the second and she finished it in four days!
So without reading the books or knowing much about its content, you can have a reaction that it’s great this had made reading popular, like the Da Vinci code and Harry Potter.
But within writer’s circles, this book has caused a massive stir. I’ve been involved in forum discussions, mailing list arguments, read blog posts, all of them ranting about how stupid people are for loving this ‘garbage,’ saying it’s badly written.
My gut reaction to this is that this is all plain snobbery and elitism. Just because the prose is not eloquent doesn’t mean it’s not good. Writer’s circles often slander Stephen King in much the same way, whereas I love King’s books. He may not be the most eloquent, but it tells a damn good story.
The other problem I have with simply defining a bad book by its ‘bad writing’ is that it’s subjective. People have different tastes, different standards etc. So in order for me to weigh in on this, I needed to read it for myself.
I read the first few pages via Amazon.com and wasn’t weighed either way. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t totally terrible either. I can see how people would love it for the story it tells rather than how it was written.
But the crux of the issue comes down to the story it tells. This is something to grasp and concretely assess. It’s full of puritanical nonsense, about abstinence, waiting until marriage to have sex, all veiled behind a vampire story, which from its history is full of sexual innuendo.
It butchers it all to get across this disgustingly backward view about relationships and sex. And young women are the prime target. That’s the problem with Twilight, not its ‘bad writing.’
I don’t really have a problem with people reading it on mass, but it would be nice to expose the puritanical crap for what it is, pure fantasy. Hopefully people will enjoy it for the story it tells and that proper sexual education means that people feel free to enjoy their sex lives how they want.
Technorati Tags: Twlight, Stephanie Meyer
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I’ve yet to come across anyone that’s called a fan of Twilight stupid simply for liking the series. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion of it so long as they’re not slinging feces at anyone that doesn’t like it, something the Twihards have a tendency of doing. Say one bad thing about Twilight and you’ll be torn to shreds, sometimes literally if you’re in bodily presence of some Twihards. From the accounts I read, anyway.
Even fans of the books admit that this isn’t the best writing, not to mention how horrible the final book was because of all the plot holes, character deviations and such. So it’s not just the “elitist writers” that are condemning the book for being poorly written. It’s a lot of the masses too.
Read the books. You’ll have a better understanding of where the writers are coming from and I’m sure you’ll shift your view on the abstinence thing, since there are greater message issues with the book than that.
I said my gut reaction was that it was elitist, mainly because of what’s happened to King. But I admit there could be much more to it. It doesn’t help that a lot of the people I’ve read that bag Twilight bag everything under the sun so they don’t have much credibility.
I guess the abstinence thing is one of many similar issues, to do with relationships and such. Are you getting at the idea that its sending a message that women need a man to be happy? Because I could see that being a serious problem.
Funny. I posted about Elizabeth Alexander’s poem for the inauguration.
I got over vampires w/Anne Rice. And yeah, I’ve seen the fights about Twilight. I’ve seen the same ones about Harry Potter. Even moreso. And I agree that it’s the storytelling that’s the thing people respond to more than the writing.
But you’re forgetting one other thing — in writer groups you’re running into a lot of BITTERCAKES because writers have yooge egos and to think that someone who can’t write grammatically or use words quite correctly is making piles of $$$$ with compelling stories rather than sentences of literary merit drives them into green-eyed tizzies.
As to your Obama skepticism? It’s not so much about what HE will do or wants to do, it’s what Congress, his advisors, and so on will LET him accomplish. And he can’t do it all at once. Nor should he.
Me? I’d love to have the WPA again so artists and others would have funding and a way to make a living wage. And yeah, national health appeals to me a LOT. Well, duh, right?
xoxo
Virginia, the BITTERCAKE thing is what I was trying to get at too.
The thing about Obama is that there are things he won’t do, because he’s still at the head of US Capitalism. He very much wants to reinvent the US Empire which I find quite disturbing, because some how be puts a new gloss on war justification and then everyone supports it.
I think his stance on Israel-Palestine will show him for who he really is. At the demonstrations for Gaza, I found these people are the most critical of him.
Only successful writers tend to have huge egos, and then only the rude fuckers. Most struggling or emerging writers tend to be humble and somewhat insecure. As for writers reactions to things like King, Twilight, Potter, or Eragon – Writers spend many long hours trying to perfect the craft. We struggle over sentence structure, gramma, and many other stupid rules. We are told over and over again that we need to find a new twist on things, a new way to look at things in order to portray a sense of originality when all the stories have already been done.
And then someone makes a million with an idea that everyone has seen before. The sentence structure, gramma, etc isn’t worth a toss, and the story tends to spiral into chaos with crappy endings.
Little wonder it causes issues with writers. Every single one of them wishes they’d come up with it first. They wish they’d stopped worrying about writing well and just written a tale which took hold of the publics imagination (or at least a lot of teenage girl’s imaginations).
As for the story telling aspect of it, it’s no better or worse than others, it just struck a cord with a particular group at the right time. Good for them. Every writer hopes to do the same each time they get a book published. It is just a fairly rare event that when it does occur, everyone jumps up and down about it.
I’m happy people are still reading. Books will never die. People will still want books during bad economic times. They will still read regardless of who is president or who is bombing who. Left, right or somewhere in between doesn’t matter as long as we are still able to lose ourselves occasionally in a well told tale.
Personally, I don’t give a shit about other writers successes. I enjoyed Eragon, Potter (what I have read of it), and I love King. I’ll probably read Twilight one day and I’ll probably enjoy that as well. I enjoyed Dan Brown’s code as well. I just hope one day, I’ll be able to write something that people will give me lots of money for.
I love writing, but one day it would be great to be able to do it for a living, and that means getting paid enough so I don’t have to do the shitty job I currently do. I get paid pretty well at the moment so I’ll need to write a crappy series to cover it.
Better get to work ;c)
Yeah, I suppose writers putting hard work into it does make people touchy when something they don’t like makes squillions.
But like you, I don’t mind much about the success of these types that I wouldn’t read anyway.
What BT said.
It’s frustrating, to say the least, to be here working my butt off to make my manuscripts as good as they can possibly be when there are people like Meyer that publishes first draft material and shoots from the hip while proudly wearing the fact that she doesn’t research anything on her sleeve that’s not just violated the semantics of writing we know but violently raped them to a bloody pulp, all while making millions doing it.
It’s not the success that gets my panties in a twist about her. It’s the way she shits on the craft as if she’s above it all. That’s what’s come to really bother me.
But it’s not like I seek this stuff out. That article I posted in my blog came from Children’s Bookshelf on Publisher’s Weekly, a site I visit every week. It just happened to be there. But when I do see it, I twitch a little.