Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Meyow!

I know it's mean--and she'd probably rip shit on my writing too--but Kellen Rice's Twilight reviews are deadly funny. Check out her take on the Midnight Sun travesty here.
This was my reply to Kellen's threat that she will never write another article:
Kellen, I'm sorry to hear that you won't be writing any more. Would you like me to send you a care package? I'm pretty broke, but I think I could gather up some crackers and juice boxes and stuff.
Actually, I really hate myself for how much your reviews of Twilight crack me up. I haven't read it yet, but the one paragraph that I read from your "how to write a bestseller" article left me feeling a tad queasy, like I'd eaten some overly sweet candy. And I keep thinking that if I were an undead 100 year old, I would not want to be hanging out with high school students. They would seem...oh, I don't know...a tad immature? Like I was a perv for wanting to boff someone young enough to be my great-great-grandchild? Or as a friend of mine said, you'd more likely be at the bar saying "for the love of God, here's my ID. I'm 100 years old! Just give me a damn beer already!" rather than hanging around the high school trying to get a date to the prom.
In all fairness, at the age of 14 or 15 I probably would have loved this series. But being far closer to 45 the appeal of such things has lessened considerably.
And read here for her article on how to write a best-selling book. I am going to do all these things when I write the next book. I'm changing everything that was done so far. But mostly I am going to do this:
(Free gift--contains a real, actual, genuine paragraph from Twilight!!!)

1. Abuse the thesaurus (correct word usage optional; purple prose is a must). If you want to ‘spice up’ your writing so that it sounds just like Meyer’s, a handy thesaurus is key. Then you too can write glorious and dazzling (and dazzlingly glorious) passages like the following:

He lay perfectly still in the grass, his shirt open over his sculpted, incandescent chest, his scintillating arms bare. His glistening, pale lavender lids were shut, though of course he didn’t sleep. A perfect statue, carved in some unknown stone, smooth like marble, glittering like crystal.

If you do not have at least three modifiers* for every noun, you’re doing it wrong. Some authors like George Orwell (1984, Animal Farm) have rules like “Never use a long word where a short one will do” and “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out”, but since Stephenie Meyer is apparently the golden standard for writing young adult literature these days, it’s probably best to ignore Orwell and follow her example instead.

* Bonus points if you use the same modifier multiple times in close proximity of one another. Good examples of words to use this way include “chagrin”, “murmured”, and “chuckled”.

The second most important thing I will remember is this:

5. There should be no plot. Even though you may think that rising action, climax, falling action, and character development are important in a novel, they’re not. Instead, focus on the perfection of the male hero. If your editor forces you to write a plot, make sure it’s just another opportunity for the hero to save the heroine.

Yes, I will do it just like this. My vampire will change from a bloodsucking megalomaniac sociopath from beyond the grave to being HAWT! And then I will have ectoplasmic vomit all over my head when my co-author pukes on me.

As I said, in all fairness, I haven't read the books. But if that is an example of what I would be writing, it's probably just as well. Because reading it made my teeth feel loose.

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