Fifty Shades of Oh, Holy F***, Why Can’t You Write?

Tags

criticism, e l james, fifty shades of grey, grammar, review, sexist, writing

I’ve been meaning to talk about the Fifty Shades of Grey series for a while now, since I’ve finally fought my way through the third book.

Oh dear lord, why is this famous?

I will reluctantly give it this – and those who haven’t read both series may be surprised to hear this – it’s BETTER WRITTEN THAN TWILIGHT.

Significantly, actually.

That doesn’t mean it is GOOD.

“Better than Twilight” is like saying “better than having your eyes removed with a melon-baller”. You could still be referring to a root canal or stepping on a piece of lego in your bare feet.

To briefly compare, let’s go over all the things wrong with Twilight, shall we?

Oh, right.

Okay, well, let’s briefly sum up the WORST things about Twilight:

1. Protagonist is dim witted and a terrible person.

2. Protagonist is a weak female who promotes all those unhealthy stereotypes of the fainting, delicate, door-mat princess who tries to look feisty by occasionally having an opinion about her own fate.

3. Love interest is a domineering, condescending, power hungry bad boy who repeatedly puts his own desires first.

4. Poor plot structure – story consists of purple prose romantic fantasy briefly interrupted by a random action climax completely unrelated to the previous 200 pages of story line.

5. Cardboard cut-out characters who often act against their directly-described characterization (e.g. a character is described as terse but then goes on long rambling diatribes).

Now, let’s compare that to its spawn, Fifty Shades of Grey (for those who might be unaware, Fifty Shades originated as Twilight fan fiction which took Edward’s creepy bossiness to a whole new level):

1. Protagonist seems aware of her surroundings and doesn’t repeatedly lie to her father, flirt with someone she is uninterested in for the express purpose of extracting information, or blow off people who try to be nice to her.

2. Protagonist is still a weak female who promotes all those unhealthy stereotypes of the fainting, delicate, door-mat princess who tries to look feisty by occasionally having an opinion about her own fate. Also, slight hints at an eating disorder.

3. Love interest is a domineering, condescending, power hungry bad boy who repeatedly puts his own desires first… but at least the protagonist recognizes that this is a problem.

4. Poor plot structure – The first book ends at the climax, and you don’t get the denouement until you pick up the second book. Then a random action sequence is inserted to create further tension in later books but seems constantly tacked-on to the main storyline

5. Protagonist and her love interest are actually surprisingly three dimensional. The rest of the characters are simply extras with no depth, however.

So, as you can see, it is MARGINALLY better.

If you put a gun to my head and said I had to re-read one of these two series, I’d pick Fifty Shades, hands down.

If you want, I can do a Twilight vs Fifty Shades series at some point, although it would sort of be like pitting Cow Pats vs Dirty Diapers.

Fifty Shades has elements that, in the right hands, could actually have made it good. It brought the world of BDSM into the light (albeit in ENTIRELY THE WRONG WAY), which is refreshing if also worrying. Although it’s also annoying because suddenly bondage is a fad and I’m like “lol wut?”

Either you’re into it, or you’re not, right? Why is it suddenly hot when previously it wasn’t? If women have been longing to be tied up all these years, why didn’t they just go to their husbands and say “hey, tie me up, would you?” And besides, the BDSM style it brought into the light was female-submissive, male-dominant, which single handedly took feminism back 100 years.

Anyway, the character of Christian Grey is actually interesting, if not likeable.

But then there’s the unalterable fact that it’s badly written. It provides a hideously unhealthy relationship example – remember kids, if he’s controlling, domineering, and seriously screwed up, you should put up with it as long as he’s good looking and says that he loves you – and it has creepy subliminal-messaging-style references to anorexia.

Check it out (spoiler warning – if one can “spoil” something that is badly written erotica to begin with):

Round 5: Words. You Should Know How To Use Them

Tags

authors, books, grammar, Harry Potter, jk rowling, literature, Stephenie Meyer, Twilight, Twilight Saga, writers, writing

   VS  

 So, here we are.

We’re compared these authors by their prejudices, their morals, and their ability to construct plots, devise good narration, and describe the action (as well as their ability to describe the characters).

But there is one important point that we haven’t covered, and it seems like a fairly important one, considering the medium in which these ladies work:

Words. You Should Know How To Use Them.

I really feel that this is the ultimate requirement for a writer, don’t you?

A writer uses words as her medium the way that a painter uses paint. What you write and how you write it is important, of course, just as the subject and execution of a portrait is important…

…But if you don’t know how to mix those paints on your palette before you put them onto the canvas, you’re never going to get a great result. So now I want to examine the skill with which each of these authors wields their pen.

First I’m going to break down their use of the individual parts of speech – nouns, verbs and so on. Then we’ll talk about how well they are put together to make coherent (or not) sentences.

Note: You may notice that a lot of the examples I give come from the same books/sections. I hope you’ll forgive me for grabbing examples in chunks, rather than carefully trawling through the whole series to find a varied selection.

Things Carol Thinks When Sleep Deprived

Tags

English, grammar, musings, thoughts, words

…Wait. Is the word “adjective” a noun? 

I’m a geek, ok?

Tags

funny, geek, grammar, humor, jokes, knock knock

Courtesy of Dana over at Reasoning With Vampires:

Knock knock

Who’s there?

To.

To Who?

To WHOM.

160,601 morons could be wrong

Tags

Beethoven, facebook, grammar, idiots, misspellings, morons

*weeps*

Reading: Eclipse

Tags

authors, books, Eclipse, grammar, reading, Twilight

Dear Ms. Meyer,

I’ve been reading the first few chapters of Eclipse, and there are some things I feel that I need to say.

1. When you introduce someone as “my best friend (and werewolf)”, you imply that this person is also your best werewolf. If you want to say that he is your best friend and also happens to be a werewolf, you could say “my best friend (a werewolf)” or “my best friend (who is also a werewolf)”. Or you could stop treating your sentences like clown cars and write the information in totally separate phrases.

2. By the end of the first chapter, I noticed that Bella had another incident of forgetting to breathe. She really is the dimmest protagonist I have ever had the misfortune to encounter.

3. I’m confused.

Bella is up in her room when she smells “the unmistakeable scent of a smoking burner rising from the kitchen”. Now, leaving aside any discussion of the smell of levitating oven elements, it is revealed in the next paragraph that the smell comes from noodles in a pan (a pan?) that were not stirred and have now congealed into a “mushy hunk that was scalded to the bottom.”

It seems like the problem must have been more an issue of boiling dry than stirring, but both are bad, so ok.

While I try to suspend my disbelief to the point where I could accept that a grown man who batched it for 16 years doesn’t know how to boil pasta, I continue reading and see this: “the pasta lump bobbed in the boiling water as I poked it.”

So, wait, it is in water?

It’s in water, but it burned enough to make smoke? Has this ever happened to you?

Please explain. I may need this information for personal reasons.

4. Your readers think independently of your protagonist, so you can’t create a mystery just by making Bella confused. When Bella fails to put two and two together, your readers are not equally mystified. Instead of thinking “OMG double twos, what does it mean??”, your readers are thinking: “four. Four. Four. FOUR, YOU EVERLASTING MORON.”

So when Jacob calls Bella and tells her he desperately needs to talk to her about something, and then asks her if she’s going to be at school tomorrow, there really is no mystery created. Bella may spend the next two pages thinking deeply, desperately trying to figure out how Jacob’s need to speak with her could possibly be related to her attendance at school… but your readers have already figured it out. You aren’t creating mystery or suspense. You’re just showcasing Bella’s idiocy, especially since she never does figure it out.

Now, I haven’t read the next chapter, but let me guess: Jacob’s going to show up at school and try to talk to her alone, right? And Bella will be super surprised?

Thanks for your time,

Carol

Jane Eyre Versus Bella Swan – Let the Bash Begin!

Tags

books, characters, grammar, heroines, Jane Eyre, literary criticism, literature, Twilight

VS

Now, to anyone who has read Jane Eyre, this comparison may seem ridiculous… and it is.

But there is a need, mostly because Stephenie Meyer has put Jane Eyre in the same sentence as Twilight several times (trivia I could have lived without: originally she named Rosalie “Carol”). She said that she got Edward’s name from Mr. Rochester, and has listed Jane Eyre as one of her “inspirations” for Twilight.

“I read it when I was nine,” says Meyer, ”and I’ve reread it literally hundreds of times. I do think that there are elements of Edward in Edward Rochester and elements of Bella in Jane.”

You heard it right folks – literally hundreds of times. So, she must know Jane better than I do, because I’ve only read it a couple of times a year since I was 13 years old; sometimes I read it more often and sometimes less. That means I’ve probably only read it between 20 and 40 times, but Stephenie Meyer has read it literally hundreds of times. Yikes! She must read it at least seven or eight times a year to get that number.

There is a parallel between the creation of both characters:

1. It is said that Charlotte Bronte wrote Jane Eyre to prove that a heroine doesn’t need to be rich or beautiful to be interesting. Similarly, Meyer has said that Twilight was based on an idea about a “normal” teenage girl and a vampire.
2. They are both teenage (17 and 18, respectively) brunettes who are exceptionally pallid in complexion.
3. Both Bella and Jane have somewhat weak constitutions, with a tendency towards fainting episodes.
4. Both Bella and Jane closely resemble their creators. Bella looks like Stephenie Meyer and Jane looks like Charlotte Bronte.
5. Both of them get to experience the fantastical love of a Byronic hero which their authors never had in real life. I feel fairly safe in saying that Meyer probably never actually got to be worshipped by a vampire and I also know that Bronte’s real-life Rochester, Constantin Heger, probably never loved her back and definitely never married her.

When I list it like that, it seems like they’re practically sisters, doesn’t it?

Nevertheless, Jane could kick Bella’s ass from here to eternity using the sheer force of her awesomeness.

[Beware of spoilers]

TwiBash

Tags

book reviews, books, characters, grammar, literature, mary sue, Twilight

Santa gave me Twilight in my stocking, and I was pleased.

Because I hated Twilight.

Allow me explain:

I have long been opposed to Twilight, but had never actually read it or seen the movies. I objected to it on principle.  I read that teenage girls were dumping their boyfriends for “not being enough like Edward”. I also heard that Edward was an obsessive creep who stalked Bella and couldn’t decide whether he wanted to eat her or kiss her. That he tried to physically stop her from seeing people he was jealous of, and that he bossed her around constantly.

This offended me.

So I wanted to read Twilight so that when I got aerated about it, I could actually have something to go on other than sheer hearsay. I asked for it for Christmas, but with the condition that it had to be a used copy, so I didn’t end up funding the publishers. This way I could give it a chance. Much the way I gave caviar a chance, even though I hate both eggs and fish. I was right, I did hate it, but it was worth a try, right?

So I read Twilight, and I came to three conclusions:

• That Twilight is even bigger literary garbage than I had expected, and consequently hilarious.
• That Edward is not so bad, if you give him leeway for being undead.
• That I hate Bella.

Perfect Husband said it best. On page 2 of Twilight he looked up and said, “My gawd, this reads like Mary Sue fan fiction. It’s fan fiction of itself.”

That’s totally what it is.

It’s written about as well as the standard fanfic slush you’ll find on the net. The characters are about as three-dimensional. It’s just… garbage. I wasn’t surprised by that, although I was a little baffled. Considering how successful these books were, I was expecting them to be entertaining, if vacuous. Like a Dan Brown novel. Instead I had to read it in segments, filling in with a Stephen King book when the awfulness became too much (as an aside, King once said, “Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn” and I trust Stephen King’s judgment . I like children’s fiction best, so his subject matter doesn’t usually appeal to me, but GAWDDAMN, that man can write well).

I had also read that Twilight is loosely based on Pride and Prejudice. Whoever said that is off their nut, because Twilight bears the same resemblance to Pride and Prejudice that a turd bears to a diamond. If you want a good modern re-telling of P&P, pick up a copy of Bridget Jones’s Diary. But Twilight doesn’t come anywhere close. If anything, it’s closer to Jane Eyre, and by “closer” I mean the proximity of the Earth to Pluto as compared to, say, Betelgeuse.

On the bright side, Edward didn’t piss me off nearly as much as I expected him to. I mean, he is a terrible model for a boyfriend – the man suffers from such radical mood swings that he might benefit from lithium, and he is possessive, insultingly bossy/condescending, and a creepy stalker, but actually he has a couple of redeeming features.

First of all, I feel obligated to cut him some slack because after all, he is an undead creature. But barring the wants-to-drink-your-blood issue, he seems like a decent person. For one thing, he is aware of the fact that he is a creepy, obsessive, undead monster and frequently warns Bella that she really should try to stay as far away from him as possible.

Now, I am a bit of a sucker for a Byronic hero, and Edward fits the mold so well that Meyer might as well have drawn his character directly from the Wikipedia definition (and she very well may have). The love of my literary life when I was an impressionable thirteen year old girl was Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre (for whom Stephenie Meyer named her male hero). These two Edwards could go head-to-head when it comes to passionate, obsessive love… which is extremely attractive to pubescent girls for some reason.

Edward Cullen’s love for Bella is selfless, passionate, and unreasonably unconditional. He is about as two-dimensional as you could ask for. He’s pretty much written to spec: *Insert Female Fantasy Here.* Characters like him are to women what porno women are to men – a fantasy object, not a person. That is what sells the Twilight books. It certainly isn’t Meyer’s writing ability.

So here’s what pisses me off: Unlike Jane Eyre, who is awesome, Bella deserves no such attention.

Bella is a self-centred, melodramatic, self-martyring twatwaffle.

While I can suspend my disbelief cling to the supposition try to pretend that an extremely sexy and selfless vampire with extraordinary willpower is attending high school in small town Washington, I can’t believe I refuse to accept I find it impossible to imagine that he would choose Bella to fall in love with.

If you haven’t read Twilight, but aren’t afraid of spoilers (and I assure you, spoiling Twilight would be like trying to spoil last year’s fish heads) or if you have already suffered through this book, read on:

My response to Gordon Campbell’s TV address last night

Tags

Gordon Campbell, grammar, politics, speech writing

Dear Mr. Campbell,

The correct grammar is “one in five children in grade four doesn’t read at a grade 4 level”

NOT

“one in five children in grade four don’t read at a grade 4 level.”

Maybe your speech writer was one of those children.

Or maybe you were.

Or both.

Maybe you were trying to illustrate a point?

Or maybe you wanted BC to have its very own George Dubya?

The cost of that speech was more than I paid for my house.

I’d rather you spent that money on a few extra teachers. Maybe ones who can teach grammar at a fourth grade level.

I’m sad, and that’s hilarious

Tags

grammar, Inanity abounds

I find it really funny when people use internet sentences with abbreviations like lol in totally socially inappropriate contexts.

When someone says something like “I work at an ice cream place with a drive-thru. lmao.”  I choose to believe that it is not because they are mindlessly adding letter combinations to sentences without regards for meaning or context, but because they are actually laughing their asses off in real life as they type.

Now picture these people as they talk about their  depression and cancer even being  bored.

Ahahahahahaha.

Er, I mean,

Lol.