I saw that quite a few Twilight reviews mentioned the poor editing, so I spent 20 minutes double-checking whether the alleged editing mistakes were disputable and/or justifiable by artistic license.  So far, I’m up to eight errors that I consider indisputable and another that might be merely awkward.  I can’t remember reading any other professionally published novels with more than one typo.

Incorrect Word Choices and Tenses

1. Eclipse mixes up “whose” and “who’s.”

2. Twilight mixes up “moats” and “motes.”

Continue Reading »

Vampires Suck is startlingly bad.  How could try something so easy–finding something hilariously awful about Twilight–and fail so badly?  It’s like going to Alaska and failing to find snow.  If you’re in the mood for a good Twilight parody, I recommend this fake screenplay. Here’s an excerpt:

SCENE 2

BELLA: It’s tough being the new kid in school! Especially when everyone is so friendly and helpful and interested in me. Why can’t they just leave me alone so I can sit in the corner and cut myself?
CLASSMATE: You’re awesome, Bella!
BELLA: See what I have to put up with? Hey — who are those hot people over there?
CLASSMATE: Those are the Cullens. They avoid direct sunlight, they don’t eat food, they sleep in coffins in a graveyard, and holy water burns them. I think they’re Canadians.*
BELLA: They sure are spectacularly gorgeous.
CLASSMATE: Yes, they are.
BELLA: I mean seriously, those people are BEAUTIFUL. Especially the one who keeps looking at me. Man alive, that guy is stunning. I mean, wow. He is hot buttered seduction on a stick. I’m not interested in him sexually, of course, because sex is dirty, but wow — LOOK AT HIM! Yee-ikes! Hubba hubba! If you don’t mind, I’d like to spend the next 75 pages talking exclusively about how attractive he is, and then bring it up again every paragraph or so for the remaining 400 pages.
CLASSMATE: Knock yourself out.

*The makers of Vampires Suck stole this joke.

The New York Times uncovered evidence of serious detainee abuse at Guantanamo Bay:

How do you break a suicidal terrorist? Find something worse than death.

Someone got to this website today by Googling “how could anybody hate Twilight?”  Indeed!  How could anyone could hate books about vampires that are so hot they sparkle and female protagonists that are as helpless as they are flaky?  If you need more help resolving this mystery, please see this and this.

The second page of Twilight wasn’t as bad as the first, but it still had many problems. This is how I would have edited it.

Continue Reading »

This is how I would have edited the first two pages of Twilight.  In particular, I found that the main character has a bland personality and needs better motivations.

If I had been the publisher’s assistant considering this work, I would probably have stopped reading at this point.

1. Character motivation is missing.  For example, if she loves Arizona and her father makes her uncomfortable, why does she decide to go to Forks?
2. I’m not feeling the main character’s voice.  She sounds sort of pretentious (e.g. “despite the scarcity of my funds”) and not terribly interesting.
3. The sentences are unnecessarily convoluted.  (Bella really likes em-dashes!)  That particularly hampered the pacing during the death scene flash-forward.
4. I don’t think the author is on my page.  The narrator says that she’s terrified, but she actually comes across as implausibly calm.*  She denies that she’s verbose, but even her denial is verbose!  If you want readers to reach those conclusions, have your characters lead the way with their actions and words.  Telling us she has a particular trait when she’s demonstrating that she doesn’t is probably not as effective as it could be (unless you consciously want to make the character look unaware of herself).

*Across the board, the author could have done more “showing” rather than “telling.”  For example, I would have tried to show how terrified the narrator was by using syntax, her word-choice, body-language and actions. Terror is a strong emotion that should be more visible than it was. Although she’s purportedly terrified, she actually comes off as implausibly calm for someone facing death at an early age. It didn’t feel believable to me.

**********

If you enjoyed this review of Twilight, please also see my list of editing errors in the Twilight series.