Twelve reasons I hate 'Twilight'

I have a grave responsibility to understand important developments in popular culture, for the purpose of mocking them. This is why it has been my painful duty, for instance, to pay attention to Justin Bieber. But for years, I've resisted Twilight. Even as the phenomenon grew, I just couldn't quite bring myself to endure Mills and Boone with a cast of sexually-frustrated vampires.

And then, a number of people I respect got addicted to the books, and I decided that it was time to see what the latest publishing phenomenon was all about. This weekend, I was staying at a country house which had a copy of the book and not a huge amount else to do, so I finally ploughed through Stephenie Meyer's bestseller.

Just in case you missed the subtle title of my post, I didn't like it. Here's why.

1) There was no romance whatsoever

No romance? But isn't Twilight all about romance? Isn't that the entire point of the series? Well, the book's certainly full of cheesy passages where Bella and Edward bang on about their intense feelings for one another. But romance as I understand it – and certainly, the things I enjoy about romantic literature – are curiously absent because of Meyer's plotting. If you haven't read the books, I won't spoil them for you. Not because I'm not going to avoid revealing key details – I'm not – but because it's impossible to spoil a book with such a paper-thin plot.

There's no romance in the book because by definition, Bella and Edward are in love from the first moment. Well, except for this brief period when they're pretending to be angry. But Edward is immediately drawn to Bella because of how she smells. So, instead of bothering to write any chemistry between them, Meyer has used actual chemistry. Instead of having to justify why Edward bothers with such a vapid, annoying girl (see point 7 below) through the conventional devices or plot and character, Meyer simply defines her as irresistible to him.

Most romances allow love to develop between the pair. Take Jane Austen, where there is often genuine antagonism between the romantic pair, but circumstances change and draw them together. But Meyer, it seems, is incapable of this kind of emotional complexity. Bella and Edward are in love BECAUSE THEY ARE, darn it, and that's all there is to it.

And why does Bella love Edward? Well, that's even simpler a case of plot-by-definition, because...

2) Edward is perfect

He's immortal, impossibly good looking, has superhero-like speed and strength, and has an entirely noble character. He is supernaturally flawless. The novel tries to present as his one flaw the fact that he's prepared to risk everything for Bella – but as a million sighing teenage girls will tell you, that's no flaw.

In fact, Edward's perfection is surely the main reason for Twilight's popularity with teenage girls. What insecure adolescent wouldn't like to imagine that they went to a new school only to discover that a paragon of impossible male perfection was immediately and irrevocably in love with them, and would give anything to be with them until the end of time? Oh, and even composes totally amazing piano sonatas for them? Even though he's supposedly a vampire killing machine, there's no light and shade with Edward.

To me, this makes Edward's character boring. The only interesting thing about him is that he drives irresponsibly fast, although unfortunately he does it so well that he never even crashes.And yet despite his dull perfection, when you think more about it...

3) Bella should take out an AVO against Edward

Not only does he constantly battle with his desire to murder Bella and drink her blood – not usually a sign of affection, even though both Bella apparently think it is – but he regularly breaks into her bedroom and watches her sleep. Yes, devotion can be kind of romantic, but there's a line beyond which it's disturbing and even criminal, and Edward is well over this line. It may be news to Meyer, but most people who are stalked tend not to find it flattering and endearing.

I could give quotes to illustrate how disturbing Edward's behaviour is, but there's no need when the Reasoning With Vampires blog (hat tip – @msmaddiep) has brilliantly – and a little obsessively, which is somewhat ironic – charted dozens of places in the book where Edward's behaviour inexplicably makes Bella swoon instead of getting a court order.

But swoon she does, and that's largely because...

4) Being a vampire is awesome

Bella wants to become a vampire so she can stay with Edward forever, and yet thoughtful Edward loves her so much that he wants her to have a normal life. But in fact, it should be an easy decision, because in the book, being a vampire is all upside, with immortality and super powers. Sure, there's the whole bloodlust/killing thing, but the Cullens just dine on animals – and what's more, they do it in an ecologically sustainable way, not overhunting any particular species. Could they get any lovelier?! Unlike every other vampire story in history – all of which, by contrast, involve some degree of moral complexity – there is absolutely no downside to joining the legions of the undead as defined in Twilight. And still, there's more...

5) The extra vampire powers

If their superpowers weren't enough, a few of Meyer's characters have extra abilities which allow her plots to be even more lazily constructed. Edward can read minds, meaning that he can just save Bella whenever anyone's trying to do her in, and Alice can foretell the future – what an excellent way to avoid having an intricate plot, or any suspense? Why construct a clever narrative that leads us from logical point A to B, then C, and so on, when Edward and Alice can flip straight to Z?

Meyer's plotting is lazy even when she's not relying on the vampires' super powers. For instance, Bella spends a lot of time wondering what Edward is. How does she work it out? She happens to meet this Jacob dude, who just tells her, even though the existence of vampires is meant to be a huge, carefully-protected secret. How entirely uningenious. So it comes as no surprise that...

6) The climax is lame

Two-thirds of the way through the book, Meyer suddenly remembers that she has to have some sort of plot to make the novel suspenseful, so she just bolts one on. It goes like this: a bunch of other vampires turn up, which Alice saw coming. One of them, James, arbitrarily decides that of all the billions of other potential humans to feed on, he must kill Bella, and will pursue her to the ends of the earth to do so. Why? Because he's a hunter. But all the vampires are hunters, aren't they? No, but this guy really, really likes hunting. In other words, he's determined to kill Bella because... well, just because.

Fortunately, even when he lures Bella away from her superhuman vampire guards by pretending he's abducted her mother, Alice can easily work out where they are. After which the Cullens easily kill him, because Emmett is super strong. Too easy.

Even though it was obvious that she'd survive, I was a little disappointed Bella was saved by the end of the book, because her self-sacrifice to save her mother was the one moment when I didn't feel that...

7) Bella is annoying

We're supposed to simply accept that Edward, who has been alive for over a hundred years, finds a self-absorbed seventeen-year-old interesting, but it's impossible to see why. In class, she's an insufferable know-it-all. She claims that no-one ever found her attractive back in her home town, but when she moves to rural Forks, there's a conga line of hicks queueing up to ask her out. And yet she turns them all down, often quite patronisingly, because she thinks she's too good for them. Only literally the greatest guy ever can cut the mustard. Fortunately, he's totally into her - but unfortunately, I couldn't see why.

Oh, Bella suffers from depression, apparently, and loneliness, the poor thing. But like so much in Meyer's book, we're merely told this – we never see it. In fact, Bella is a remarkably self-satisfied young woman, with remarkably little cause to be so.

8} There is no humour

At least, not intentionally. It's a book about vampires and werewolves – couldn't Meyer have had a little fun with it? No, she couldn't. There's none of the delightful humour that made Harry Potter so enjoyable, at the same time as JK Rowling's broader plot of the war against Voldemort was terribly serious. There are no laughs in Twilight, even though the sexy cool hero vampire drives – wait for it – a Volvo.

9) The writing is dreadful

Now despite appearances, I'm not a total literature snob. I found The Da Vinci Code unputdownable, and the way he worked existing works of art and architecture into the plot fairly ingenious, even though Dan Brown's writing is such dreadful doggerel. But in Meyer, there are few redeeming features to take one's mind off the clunky writing.

Again, Reasoning with Vampires has done an excellent job of charting the depths of Meyer's writing – I won't pull apart her sentences because he's already done it so comprehensively. But let's just say that I found myself regularly stopping reading for a moment, staring at a sentence and asking myself whether I was reading an unedited first draft.

10) Too many extraneous, undeveloped characters

Meyer has a habit of introducing three or four indistinguishable characters where one would have done. There are about a zillion Cullens, all deeply similar. I assume that in later books, we come to appreciate the differences, but after finishing the first, I found myself struggling to tell them apart. All the boys who have the hots for Bella are pretty much identical, except for the one who's obviously a werewolf, and so are all of her female friends. We barely see her parents.

11) 'Stephenie' isn't a name, it's a typo

Okay, so it's a pedantic point. But really, has she not heard of deed polls?

12) Her books have sold roughly a million times more copies than mine

Yes, there's a bit of sour grapes here. But at least my characters get to have sex lives. So there, Stephenie.

The joy of cross-promotion

It was very considerate, I thought, of Julia Gillard to time her election to coincide with the launch of my book about a student election. And given its theme of political ruthlessness, it was even more considerate of her to depose the elected Prime Minister in a palace coup a mere month before its release date. There’s nothing like a bit of cross-promotion to really give your product a boost. Sales of Comrades should receive a substantial boost, I reckon, and also of knives.

Since both Gillard and Tony Abbott are both former student politicians, with Abbott a former President of the Students’ Representative Council at Sydney University, which is the prize on offer at the end of the fictional election I’ve written about, it seemed like a dream marketing opportunity, especially since my colleagues at The Chaser are back on the ABC with an election show , for which I’m writing. But it seems I have a lot to learn when it comes to electoral cross-promotion.

I've done my best, but the poll-themed book that's been making headlines is Campaign Ruby, by a certain Jessica Rudd. Its plot are remarkably close to the events of late June – a popular male Prime Minister is deposed by his ambitious female deputy. When you realise that she must have started work on it last year, it’s either spooky, or proof that this scenario has long been a topic for conversation around the Rudd family dinner table.

In fact, it makes me wonder whether Rudd and Gillard cooked up this whole backstabbing thing as a particularly sophisticated form of cross-promotion for Jessica's book, and that Kevin will soon return to the fold, all having being forgiven. The launch is even being held on the day of the ALP Campaign Launch, and in the same town – Brisbane.

There are still two and a half weeks left of the election campaign, though, so all may not be lost. Clearly, I need a publicity stunt of my own. I could try to engineer a dramatic spill on the campus of Sydney University, but I'm not sure even the majority of students would care much about that. Perhaps I could get Tony Abbott to agree to another debate with Julia Gillard, about the merits of my book on a very special edition of First Tuesday Book Club?

But these are forlorn hopes. The best way to make headlines, of course, would be to usurp Jessica Rudd's position. I'm not quite sure how to achieve that, but I'm sure Bill Shorten could give me a few ideas.

If I could somehow be acclaimed as the author of Campaign Ruby as well as Comrades, I would be unquestionably the nation's premier author of election-related fiction released in August 2010.  And I have to admit, I thought that title would be mine automatically.

When I was an undergraduate, the Left managed to topple the right-wing SRC President because he'd handed out beer during his campaign, or something allegedly improper along those lines. And I bet Jessica Rudd will be handing out beer at her launch in Brisbane, just before election day. Stay tuned.

Last night, my competitor's father attempted to heal the wounds others had inflicted on him in the course of a classy interview with Phillip Adams. He self-effacingly stated that there were more important things at stake in this election than the future of K Rudd. He's right. And in my opinion, my book is one of them.

New novel on the way

Hello, thanks for visiting. I'm fixing up the site in the spare moments when I'm not working on my second novel, which is called Comrades and will be released later this year if all goes well. Stay tuned for more details!

Be careful what you wish for...

Okay, it’s time for me to eat some humble pie. Or perhaps humble Codral would be more appropriate. Because – oh, what fun I had last week with my jokey little piece on swine flu, and my little list about what I’d read if I was confined to my home with an illness. Oh how pleased with myself I felt.

Well, guess what happened? That’s right, I’ve spent the past three days stuck in bed with a cold. It’s not actually swine flu, apparently, because I don’t have an elevated temperature. And I’m not sure how to feel about that – on the one hand, I’m obviously pleased that I’m probably not going to die. On the other, if I’d been one of the first fatalities, it would have really helped with promoting my book.

There’s another thing I didn’t consider. Oh sure, I thought – it’d be fun to be stuck at home, unable to go out because of possible flu contamination, if you were actually well. But if you have most of the symptoms, as I do, you don’t exactly get to partake of a full intellectual diet while stuck at home. For one thing, I’ve got a headache and watery eyes. Which has meant that I haven’t been able to read a thing since I’ve had this cold. I’m certainly not up to tackling Infinite Jest, which is hard enough to follow when my brain’s functioning normally.

My activities have been severely restricted Other than lying in bed and feeling sorry for myself, I only did three things over the weekend. The first was watching The West Wing, and fantasizing about a world in which the politicians’ speeches are actually eloquent because they were written by Aaron Sorkin. Secondly, I spent about four hours hours playing a game called Flight Control on my phone, the point of which is to make aeroplanes land on three different runways without crashing into one another. And let’s just say we can all be thankful that I’m not an air traffic controller. My  landing skills are roughly equivalent to Mohamed Atta’s.

The other thing I did was go and see Star Trek on Friday night. Sure, I probably infected most of the cinema while I was there, but it was worth it – at least for me, since I’d already caught had the cold. I’ve never been much of a Trekkie – while I like Patrick Stewart as Picard, most of the series is way too cheesy for my tastes. It’s hard to take Captain Kirk’s preaching about tolerance for other species seriously when he’s a) devoting most of his energy to trying to suck in his gut and b) the supposed other species is clearly just a dude in a lame rubber mask.

It looked good, and the cast is young and spunky – especially, I thought, Uhura, who featured in her underwear in a scene so gratuitous it could have come  from Underbelly. And, as those who’ve seen it can attest, she’s apparently got a thing for nerds! Woman of my dreams. Anyway, the main reason the new Trek is wowing everyone, with an extraordinary 96% on Rotten Tomatoes, is because it has a great story.

It’s sad that a tight, well-constructed plot is so rare in mainstream cinema, but Hollywood thinks nothing of putting tens of millions of dollars into special effects and approximately zero into developing a story. Or worse still, I imagine, they get promising scripts rewritten by a committee, until they’re leached of any spark of originality and you get movies like Quantum Of Solace, which have a few impressive action set-pieces linked by a dour plot and dialogue consisting largely of clichés. James Bond has beaten SPECTRE and Smersh dozens of times, but he seems powerless to resist the evil cabal of Hollywood script doctors.

This is very different from the novel-writing process. Sure, you get feedback. My novel was sent to an external editor who wrote a very thorough report detailing its flaws. There were quite a few, and I had to rewrite it extensively – which, since it was my first attempt writing a novel, was hardly surprising. But the rewrites were still completed using my own words. Even the copy edits were only ever suggestions which I got to approve. So the novel, for better or worse, is very much my own work.

And I think that’s where Hollywood so often goes wrong. Though other writers were apparently involved in the overall shape of the plot, every word of the first four  seasons of The West Wing was written by Aaron Sorkin, and that’s probably why they are so extraordinary. Sure, this process can backfire, as we saw with his subsequent series Studio 60. Very few writers always deliver gold. But good writers often do, whereas, compelling stories are almost never delivered by committee.

Similarly, this delightful blog post has been written entirely by me. Any bit you liked is due entirely to my own brilliance. Its deficiencies, though, I will blame entirely on my cold. I realise it’s been a bit random (although hey, that’s the name of the blog…) but that’s just how my brain works when it isn’t feeling terribly well.

Alright, it’s time I returned to today’s primary activity, air traffic control. Those computer-generated planes aren’t going to land themselves. And seriously, I’d consider wearing one of those face masks, no matter how dorky it looks. You don’t want to catch whatever I’ve got.

This post originally appeared on the Random House Australia blog.

The Joy of Marketing

Marketing is a bit of a dirty word for writers. We like to think of ourselves as releasing our work into the world like a precious, special patch of flowers that discerning readers will bend over and pick, sniffing gently and appreciating each petal’s delicate beauty.

But that’s not how it works. It’s a struggle to get a book published, and a far harder struggle to get people to read it. The Australian publishing market is small and crowded, and it’s tough to break through and tell people you exist. For that, you need publicity, of course, and marketing.Why? Well, of course you want people to read your book because of your own hideous vanity because it will change their lives for the better. I personally believe that if the Israelis and Palestines could only get together and read Disco Boy, peace would break out faster in that war-torn region than my skin did when I was 16.

But of course, there’s the money. As much as I subscribe to the ideal that creativity is its own sweet reward, the truth is that I have a mortgage, and in the event I ever sort out my personal life, may  have other mouths to feed at some stage as well. So, in a bid to prolong how many years I can make some kind of a living from this writing thing, I want to actually move units.

When I was talking to the gurus at Random House about how to market my book, they were firmly of the view that these days, it’s all about social media. You know, web 2.0, interactivity and a whole lot of other buzzwords.  And above all, that means one thing: Facebook.

So, like the obedient first-time author I am, I set up a fan page for myself and invited my friends to join it, as awkward as it seems to have to ask your mates to become your “fans”. I even did something that I would usually go to considerable lengths to avoid, and put up a video of myself.

I guess the point is to set off a grassroots groundswell that makes geeks across the nation realise that they need my book in their lives as badly as they need sunlight and interaction with the opposite sex. (And I’m allowed to make that joke because hey, I’m one of them.) That hasn’t exactly happened yet – after a strong beginning, my fan army now numbers about 130 – but I’ll bet that it’s helping to sell books.

But there’s a problem with all this. Facebook has already proven a great way of getting in touch with my friends, and it seems to be quite a good way for me to reach members of the general public as well. Here’s the thing, though. All of this social media stuff is destroying my ability to concentrate.

I have developed a compulsion to check Facebook for the latest update on the minutiae of friends’ lives. For some inexplicable reason, I must constantly keep in touch with who’s getting married and having kids. And, just as prominently within Facebook’s hierarchy of information, I must constantly keep in touch with who had a nice lunch, or didn’t much like that Wolverine movie. Sure, it’s almost entirely a bottomless well of non-essential information, but because it’s about people I know and like, I can’t back away.

Mind you, I’ve always had a bit of an online addiction. To get the novel written in the first place, I kept having to take myself off to cafés without wireless access. But now, I’ve got Facebook on my phone. So there’s literally nowhere except underground bunkers and the Outback where I can’t check it. And this is starting to make me worry makes me worry that perhaps I’ll never actually get my second novel written. So Random House, by encouraging me to use Facebook to promote the first novel, may have also ensured there isn’t a second. Hmm, perhaps it was deliberate?

But there is a way forward. I can simply write my new novel a sentence at a time, via Facebook status updates. Here’s how it might work for the first lines of some classic novels.

Dominic Knight is Ishmael (Moby Dick)

Dominic Knight must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. (The Trial)

Dominic Knight, light of my life, fire of my loins (Lolita)

Dominic Knight died today (The Outsider)

Dominic Knight don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter (Huckleberry Finn)

Dominic Knight, it is a truth universally acknowledged, is a single man in possession of a good fortune who must be in want of a wife. (Pride & Prejudice)

Actually that last one’s true, at least according to many of my relatives. Well, except for the fortune bit. After all, I am trying to work as a writer.

Anyway, that’s enough blogging for now. I need to go and check Facebook.

This post originally appeared on the Random House Australia blog.

Blogging cameo

I'm doing the Random House author blog this week. Really fun writing about writing, I've never done it before.

First review, and other articles

I've added Disco Boy's first review, from the Sunday Age, and a few other profile pieces to the new Media page. I'll figure out how to make the page look spiffier soon, but at least it's up!

Announcing my first novel, Disco Boy

My big news for this year is that I wrote a novel. It's called Disco Boy, and it's a story about living in Sydney, and being a bit immature, two areas in which I have considerable expertise.

Disco Boy was published by Random House on 1 May, and I'm currently gallivanting around the country to disprove the theory that if people meet me, they might want to buy my book. Click on the links above for details on the book and my various appearances.