Happy Thanksgiving and many merry holidays!

Happy Thanksgiving to you all! If you’re not in the US or aren’t an American overseas celebrating by sharing some of our customary holiday foods (I’ve read of a couple people so far who’re horrifying people in England by what we eat here!), have a great day anyway!

Many cultures and faiths have holidays coming up soon, starting with the Islamic Ashura on Saturday and ending with the African-American and African-Canadian Kwanzaa with its last day on January 1st. In between there are many other holidays, from the best-known Christmas and Hanukkah, to lesser-known Bodhi Day, Saturnalia, Yule, and many others.

Whatever you celebrate and however you celebrate, let your days be full of happiness and love.

If our friends or daughters dates these characters

It seems that it’s unprofessional to talk in any negative way about another writer’s work, but that doesn’t matter right now.  I am greatly concerned about what the future holds for young women when we’ve got politicians talking about “legitimate rape” and telling women to talk to their doctors to figure out of rape happened.  If a man cheats, it’s the woman’s fault if she’s attractive.  If a woman doesn’t want to be raped, don’t wear mini-skirts.  If a man controls a woman, it’s…romantic?

It seems that the big love of Twilight comes from the element of forbidden relationships.  What shouldn’t happen is the most desirable.  But sometimes there are good reasons relationships shouldn’t happen.  In a few different posts around the web I’ve read comments about how interracial was once the forbidden, the rich guy and the poor woman, the prince and the non-royal.  Now that these walls have all been broken, and even human/vampire and human/werewolf and human/whatever are common, the speculation goes that something new must come along.

Are the new forbidden relationships the ones where girls are weak and must be controlled? This is extremely disturbing, especially when it’s aimed at preteens and teenagers who aren’t likely to have much relationship experience, if they have any at all. As a writer and a mother, it’s extremely disheartening that in a decade we may very well see nothing but books where female characters are being punched around as writers try to push the boundaries on forbidden. Should we look into popular books and try to go the direction they are, abuse and all (Edward and Bella’s relationship fits all the criteria for abuse, and Jacob sexually assaulted Bella more than once, yet both guys win in the end), or look into them, try to see what’s so appealing, and write better examples for our daughters?

As far as quality of writing, twenty ago Twilight never would have seen the press of a big publishing house. Now it’s being hailed as some of the best writing ever to see the light of day. Plot holes, changing integral parts of the story long after things have been firmly established, characters who lack more than a single personality trait, a willingness to completely excuse very poor treatment of women including sexual assault, and so on, are lauded as the makings of great literature. Is this what we should aspire to? Quality of writing aside, taking characters who would be seen as absolutely vile in real life and trying to make them into romantic heroes every girl should want? I’ve got nothing against fluffy stories. But my biggest concern above all is the romanticizing of controlling behavior including abducting someone and of a man forcing himself onto someone more than once.

Imagine for a moment a friend, or your own daughter, telling you about her boyfriend refusing to let her see her own friends because her boyfriend doesn’t like them though they’ve done nothing wrong (that anyone knows of anyway), and that he disabled her truck to stop her, or that he bribed someone for forcefully kidnap her and keep her locked away for a while. If it turned out he’d been breaking into her house to watch her sleep, you’d be terrified for her. If she was pregnant and he planned an abortion without telling her and she had to seek help so she wouldn’t be forced into it, you wouldn’t be supporting him. If a male friend sexually pressed himself on her even once knowing she didn’t want his advanced, you’d be trying to get her to call the cops or at least try talking her out of ever seeing him again. If these things happened even once you’d be begging her to get away, not picking sides who you hope she’ll get with. You wouldn’t be supporting guys like that at all. If your daughter was telling you about guys doing this stuff, you’d probably be seeing red and using every ounce of willpower you have not to go track down the guys and take care of them yourself. Yet so many people are cheering these people on and picking teams, hoping one of the other wins her like a prize instead of hoping she finds a guy who will treat her well and with respect right out the gate (or better yet, that she will learn to think of herself as a whole person by herself instead of going into zombie-mode without someone to glom on to), and thinking it’s sweet that the sexual assaulter has declared he and an infant will one day be sexual partners. It was established that mating is the point of “imprinting.”

It’s devastating that so many people no longer think these actions are abusive. However I suppose I should shut up and pretend that these books are pretty great because they’re successful, despite the examples they set for impressionable women about what love is.

How Twilight: Breaking Dawn Pt. 2-many is a great study in what NOT to do in writing, movies, and TV

I was a VIP at a pre-screening.  I’m a vocal non-fan, so scored an invitation.  Scored?  Perhaps saying I was punished is more appropriate.  Since the inspiration for my first novel is Twilight’s romanticization of abuse, I figured I may as well watch the movies and read the books to make sure I understood the material.  What better way that free?  I want my brain cells back.

 

Imagine this:  

Alec slowly descended upon a man in an alley.  From his hand emanated an opaque fog.  Gently it swirled and puffed.  

As it enveloped the man, his eyes grew wide and unseeing, his hands reaching out to feel.

Aro, dressed in robes similar to Alec’s, raised a finger and an eyebrow at his comrade.*

The fog withdrew.  The frightened man shook his head, and finally could see his company.

If you won’t know what’s happening, there are two ways to inform the viewer/reader.

a) *Insert, “Alec, uncloud his senses.”

b) Have a voiceover/narrator say, “Alec had the ability to cloud your sight.  He would take away your hearing, and make you unable to smell, or anything else.

I you say the first option is what should happen, you’d be correct.  However we were mistreated to the second.

 

Here’s another fine example.

Benny’s mentor led their company to the door.  He didn’t want them to leave.  Gracefully Benny raised his hands.  Crystalline water followed, forming a liquid wall.

another scene:

Renesmee lifted her hand toward Benny.  He placed a fistful of dirt in her palm and motioned clockwise above it.  A small tornado formed above her hands, growing larger with its increasing speed.

We know he’s got the ability to control the elements.  Do we really need a voice-over/narrator actually telling us, “Benny has the ability to control the elements.  Water and dirt do what he commands”?  Well, guess what.  They all stand around admiring the tornado while Bella, in a voice-over, tells us. 

 

A third example:
Person A: How many came?

Person B: Eighteen.

Voice-over: Eighteen came.

Really, voice-over?  We didn’t know that from the conversation the characters literally just had?

 

With the visual media of moving pictures, you’d think that showing would be the only way to do it.  But, Folks, even movies can do a lot of telling.  In this case, little else.

  

How about this: We like characters with, well, character.  Characters who do nothing but stand around in a circle watching each other lack…character.  This shows a sense of co-dependence.  If you’ve got a group that is nothing more than an audience, rethink the point of having them.  All of the Cullens/Hales could have been compressed into three with nothing lost.

  

Here’s the biggest do-not-do.  A method almost universally panned in television and film is something I can’t recall being used in books, but I’m sure has been.  I don’t pretend for a moment to be familiar with every one out there.

Readers of the series already know that four books work up to an “epic” showdown where…nothing happens.  The Volturi, the Slytherins of the Twilight-verse show up, realize that the good guys didn’t do anything wrong – oh, wait, the befriending werewolves is a crime!  What?  They’re not actually werewolves though them being werewolves has been important, nay, vital, to the plot?  Okie-dokie.  It’s the bad guys’ mistake.  They go home.  

I wish I was making that up.  That’s how the series ends in the books.  But how do you make an interesting movie out of this?

This, Ladies and Gents, is where deviation from the source material must occur.  We found the characters in an epic showdown involving lots of fighting and even some good characters dying, starting with the Cullen patriarch.  Another popular character of the family soon followed in demise.  A few werewolves met their ends.  Just when it seemed all was lost for those for whom we were supposed to cheer (I’m a Slytherin-girl, a Raiders fan, a supporter of the Volturi), Benny slams his fist into the ground, creating a massive canyon down to the level of molten lava that swallowed many of the Volturi and a few werewolves.  Most of the remaining Volturi, down on their numbers, were beheaded as well.  Bella plucked the head off of the equivalence of Voldemort and, just as she was about to set fatal flame to the still-living head of the leader… 

Hey, this sounds cool, right?  Well, I hate to inform you it was all the equivalent of dream sequence, the biggest cop-out of a way to add action, suspense, and excitement, to any media out there.  Alice showed the head of the Volturi, in his mind, what would happen if there was a fight, but we didn’t know that was what it was until Bella was about to lay down that fire.  Suddenly we were pulled out of the action and saw the leader stand there looking at Alice.  “That is what will happen if you fight.”

A minor dream sequence here and there can show a character’s hopes, but when it’s passed off as the actual action and it’s not until afterward that the viewer/reader is informed, it can cause frustration.  There were a lot of obvious die-hards in the theater tonight.  A few people cheered aloud for Alice, but many more said, “What?”  “What the hell?”  You can think of a few other things that I won’t type into a family-friendly section of this forum.

  

For those interested in how the movie was otherwise, there were a lot more time-wasters than just voice-overs telling is what had just happened, or telling us what should happen while characters were walking around instead of showing us.  We were mistreated to many beautiful panning shots of mountains and snowy terrain that added nothing but time.  We were treated to a gratuitous strip-tease by Taylor Lautner for one scene we were only told about after in the book (he told Bella’s dad she’s alive and proved the existence of another world by stripping and turning into a werewolf).  Best moment of the movie, I tell you.  Best moment.  We didn’t need an extended PG-rated sex scene.  I’m still trying to figure out how sex managed to keep it PG.  The computer-animated baby was reminiscent of the Dancing Baby (for those of you who won’t forever remember the sounds of AOL dialing up, here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5x5OXfe9KY ).  She was that fake.  Shrek’s triplets looked more realistic.  However the girl playing the older Renesme was adorable and looks like a brunette version of my child.

Wait until a friend rents or buys it and watch it then. 

It shouldn’t be surprising that the producer of this terrible film is none other than the “how on earth was she published?” author herself, Stephenie Meyer.

Writer’s toolbox

First off, happy November!  Already November.  Wow!

Second, about the title of this post.  I often reference a writer’s toolbox.  If someone’s not feeling well, or is feeling like there’s a block in the way, or is bored, or anything else, I’ve been saying to that person, if the writerly sort, to write about how they’re feeling and to put it in their writer’s toolbox.  When you’re in the moment, you’re more likely to notice how your head can feel heavy when you’re bored, or your eyelids can feel like weights are attached when you’re sick.  When procrastinating, you may notice that your hands feel an energy and want to separate from your body and go do something else.  While tired, you may hear your bones creak though no one else can, or feel your heart beat in your teeth.  Certain sounds may be easier to hear or tune out.  Later on, when writing about these feelings, it’s really easy to forget how it feels outside of the most general sense.

When I was younger, I went through some terrible medical trauma.  I won’t even get into it.  But I got through it by viewing my life as a stage production and I needed to take notes in case I needed to “reperform” it later.  As soon as I’d wake up from surgery, I’d grab my journal and write.  My doctors and nurses learned to keep my journal and a pen near me so I’d have it first thing when I woke up.  Once I wrote three words.  “Well, I lived.”  Other times I wrote several pages.  I have few memories of writing at those times, but the words I wrote told the uncensored feelings and pains of the moments we usually forget.

Later, when I was 20, I joined an RPG back in the early days of online role-plays.  World of Warcraft didn’t exist, so RPGs were smaller and we wrote out way through it, basically a text game.  There were no graphics.  We each had a text map and knew it took two real-time days to get from this point to that. A game master could go into all the subforums.  I was an elf, so I couldn’t go into the orcs’ layer, their subforum (guess what this involved).  The game master could.  Basically it was nothing like today.

A couple orcs challenges me and a fellow elf to a battle.  The game master used our weaponry, health, and other factors, to determine our odds against each other, and from there used an algorithm to figure out who won and lost.  We elves had the upper hand, but still lost.  The winners would write the start of the battle to the point of how they killed the losers, and the losers took over and wrote the actual deaths.

I grabbed my journals and read through them, and was able to use my words to reconstruct memories of how it felt to have such raw wounds and pain that I wanted to die and be done with it all.  I would describe the searing pain so impossible to comprehend that vision was obstructed from within. When you lose enough blood, you’ll feel warm for a moment, and then cold.  Fire and ice.  My death scene was so realistic is actually scared people.  It was too real for them.

Before that, in high school, we had to write a poem in the style of an author known for his heavy themes of darkness and death.  I’d been close to death before, dead twice and revived.  Since I always demanded journals near me, yes, I’d write the first chance I had.  My teacher didn’t credit me for the poem.  The realism again caused discomfort.  The points just weren’t factored into my grade, and while the rest of the class read their aloud, I wasn’t given the chance.  I showed it to a few kids in the class, one who happens to share the name of one of my characters, after whom I actually named the character, and they were stunned.

While in an abusive relationship, I journaled like mad.  The relationship started in high school, and having a journal with me was so common that kids I didn’t know would point it out if it wasn’t in my hands.  I journaled five years of it, even when I didn’t realize it was happening.  Because of this, I was able to write Juliette’s abusive life in a realistic way that is difficult for those who haven’t been there to understand.  You can be so beaten down that you no longer feel dread because it’s just normal.  It becomes a comfort zone.  Then one day it all comes to a head and panic to survive often sets in.

What each of these situations have in common is that I wrote in depth about how it felt to be in these moments.  I can write very realistically because I don’t have to rely on trying to remember what it’s like when I’m having happier times.  There’s no rosy glow tinting difficult situations.  I think Stephenie Meyer can write so romantically about abuse because she’s never been there.  I don’t think anyone who has been could compare a crush to heroine, or describe abuse as romantic and sweet and ideal.  At the same time, when you’ve been abused and no longer are, it’s easy to shove things deep down that it’s hard to remember in as vivid detail as when going through it.  It’s a self-preservation method.  You can remember, like with childbirth’s pain, but at the same time, not vividly remember the full pain aside from saying that it was bad.

For each of these situations, I took my writing of them and put them in what I called back then, and still call, a writer’s toolbox.  When a character is going through a certain situation, I can pull out the writing and use the words I felt and thought enough at the time to write down.

Imagine standing in a forest.  What do you hear and feel and see?  Can you describe it in more detail than some trees and sunlight and maybe the scent of dirt if it’s recently rained?  Can you go in more detail?  Try for a moment, the continue reading.

…

…

…

Do you hear the crisp crackling and snapping of twigs and branches in the distance, their clear high pitch carrying on the wind to you as if you were inches from the action?  Do you hear the bubbling and crystalline babbling of a creak with its water sprinkling and rushing over pebbles and rocks racing away from its source?  Can you hear the rustle of leaves as wind sweeps through the branches of trees and bushes?  Do you see a random leaf or two falling from above, riding the wind gently to the ground?  If you open your mouths and refrain from breathing, can you smell and taste the wind coursing through your nose and out your mouth, forcing some freshness into your lungs and filling you with a renewed sense of vitality?

If you take a notebook to a forest, sit, and experience with abandon, writing every sensation that comes to mind, you will notice things you probably wouldn’t have otherwise.  If you use stick this in your toolbox, you can use it later to make a trip to a forest that much more realistic for your readers.  Try it with an afternoon sitting on the beach.  Try it when you’re waiting in line to get on a roller coaster, or, if you’re a passenger in a car or are stopped in stop-and-go traffic (but stop doing it before taking your foot off the brake, unless you’re recording yourself speaking).  Making dinner with kids running around getting into things?  Write that down.  Sick to your stomach and hoping you don’t heave yet again?  Trickier, but still wrote what you can, even a few words or phrases.  How about when you’re eating sauce-slathered BBQ’d ribs and getting sauce on your face while bits of meat get stuck between your teeth, making them feel out of alignment until you track down some floss and feel relief after eagerly removing the bits?  Wipe your hands off first, and then write what the sauce on your cheeks feels like.

Your writer’s toolbox is your collection of described experiences to use later when you’re writing about someone going through the same.  You can turn your negative experiences into positives (at least to a small extent) if you write about them to use later.

So when I say to write about what someone’s going through and stick it in the writer’s toolbox, this is what I mean.  It only took me 1460 words to tell you. 🙂