Obsession, Part III (See Part I here and Part II here)
On Stephenie Meyer’s website, she has posted the first chapter of Midnight Sun, a book she is working on that tells the Twilight story from Edward’s point of view (according to the web site, she intends to publish this after Breaking Dawn; this potential book, more than any other, makes me dizzy with anticipation).
In the excerpt, one idea snagged itself into my mind: Edward complaining how bored he was pretending to be a high school student for the umpteenth time.
This got me to thinking.
If you’re immortal, looking perpetually seventeen is a problem. You can go through high school and college only so many times before you wish you could shoot yourself. And don’t even hope for a career. A job, maybe, but you wouldn’t be able to keep it for long before people started to ask questions.
I began to wonder what I would do if I were immortal. Would I keep my job? I don’t think so. I can’t imagine it being fulfilling for all eternity. But what would I do? Is there anything that would stimulate me intellectually while sustaining my spirit for as long as I could conceive of time? What would I do to keep me going, and to keep me from going insane? Here, I envied Carlisle, the vampire doctor. He has just such a purpose in life that sustains him in the most important way. It seems like too much of a cliché, but on the other hand, I can’t imagine spending eternity worrying about my petty little selfish daily-grind issues.
(But look what I’ve done—I’ve just distilled a ridiculous musing about vampires into the age-old existential dilemma: What’s the point, anyway?)
After some thought, I came to the conclusion that if I were truly faced with the idea of forever stretching out in front of me, I would have to find something to do that was not only meaningful to me personally, but would make the world better too. I was surprised at the simplicity of this thought—was this the answer all along?
And then I had my epiphany.
Rather than living our lives, as the cliché suggests, as if each day were our last, we should be living our lives as if we were immortal.
If we were faced with everlasting life, I think we would quickly learn to separate the petty, inconsequential things from the important things. We would strive daily for the most satisfying and fulfilling lives on a deeper level, in order to combat the spiritual abyss of a meaningless eternity.
Daily decisions become easier. Don’t like your job? It’s never too late to change careers—you have all eternity to figure it out. Not in a fulfilling relationship? You have plenty of time to find a better partner, or work on the one you have. Put on a little weight? Well, think about it for a second. Do you really want to be a tad pudgy for all eternity? Always wanted to take up painting, or scuba diving, or beekeeping? Why not? You’ve got forever to learn.
Big decisions also become easier. You simply would stop caring about the majority of short-terms issues, and long-term goals and accomplishments begin to carry more weight. How your actions affect the people around you and the world at large gain more consideration.
I’m not saying that I’m suddenly going to quit my job, lose ten pounds, learn how to sail, and move to Africa to combat poverty. I’m just saying that maybe we should pay a little more mind to the big things that are important to us. Don’t be afraid of change; it’s never too late to do something meaningful. A little bit of immortality in our everyday lives wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
Naturally, I have spent a lot of time at Stephenie Meyer’s website. Surfing author websites is another thing I never used to do, but given my obsession with the books and the actual amount of great content on her site, it’s easy to waste hours at a time there. I especially love how she so openly and generously shares her outtakes and brainstorms—sections of her manuscript that didn’t make the editorial cut or material she intended to write just for fun.
Stephenie Meyer also writes about herself and her writing process. Again, this is not something I usually seek out, but I am continually charmed and fascinated by all her anecdotes. I already love her writing voice, and outside of Twilight, she is more casual, self-deprecating, and funny.
Writing about the genesis of Twilight, she says that a scene from what became the middle of the book came to her fully formed in a dream one night. She felt compelled to write it down, and, over the next three months, wrote the rest of the story. The part that fascinates me is this: “All this time, Bella and Edward were, quite literally, voices in my head. They simply wouldn't shut up.”
I have often heard authors talk about their characters as if they were completely out of the writer’s control. I love this idea, of a character with a life, a history, and a personality totally separate from the author’s. Many times, writers will say that they were completely surprised to find that a character of theirs was really such-and-such, or that “it turned out” a character had this or that background. I love this idea of the fictional having so much control over their creators.
Stephenie Meyer’s story of how New Moon came about is filled with this sort of thing.
[A]s I began to sketch out New Moon, I went back to Bella's senior year of high school and asked my little cast of characters, ‘What happened?’ I swiftly regretted asking them for the story. Because they gave me a story I wasn't expecting. More specifically, Edward told me something I didn't want to hear.
I should probably mention here that I am not crazy (that I know of), it's just that I am a character writer. I write my stories because of my characters; they are the motivation and the reward. The difficulty with strong, defined characters, though, is that you can't make them do something that is out of character. They have to be who they are and, as a writer, they're often out of your control.
As I started plotting New Moon (untitled at that point), it became clear that Edward was Edward, and he would have to behave as only Edward would.
See? She even admits that what the characters do is out of her control. Sometimes I think that was separates the great storytellers from the rest of us. I, at least, may be too much of a control freak to write fiction. I mean, this would never happen to me:
Something happened then that I didn't expect. Jacob was my first experience with a character taking over—a minor character developing such roundness and life that I couldn't keep him locked inside a tiny role. (Since Jacob, this has reoccurred with several other meant-to-be-minor characters. I really love it when this happens, though it often destroys my outlines.)
A character taking over! Wrestling the plot from the author and taking it in a whole new direction without the author’s consent! It sounds like the stuff of fiction, right out of Inkheart or something, but that’s how it works. I bet this is how it works with most fiction writers, too. And while I have no experience at all with this, I love thinking that in any creative endeavor, there are things that are simply out of our control—that’s what makes it art.
I am thirty-something years old; I am self employed. I am married, and I own real estate. By all normal reckoning, I should be considered a mature adult. So it is with more than a little chagrin that I admit my full-fledged, heart-pounding, passionately-consuming, brain-melting, fanatic obsession with Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series.
Without going in to the entire history of how I came to check out the audiobook version of Twilight from the library, or how, during the two weeks of car rides it took to listen to the book, I walked around in a foggy daze, my mind completely absent from my own life here in sunny California (my brain deep in the lush, wet forest of Forks, Washington), I will simply relate one anecdote that will illustrate Twilight’s unnatural hold upon me.
[Those of you who know me well will find the following quite shocking. Those who don’t should read this.]
When the final disc of the audiobook came to an end, I sat in the silence for a moment, speeding down Interstate 680 heading home. I put the disc back into its case (I have become quite adept at doing this with one hand, blindly), thought for a moment, then stuck disc one back into the player.
I'll say that again. I stuck disc one back into the player.
And then, when I got home, I ordered the paperback from our retail distributor, so that it would arrive the next day. When it came, I read it again. It was like an alien had abducted Renee and replaced her with… a re-reader.
Now, I have read a good number of romance novels in my day—mostly in high school, when I was supposed to be reading YA novels—but not a single one of them seized me the way Edward and Bella’s story kicked me in the gut and turned my brain to puddly mush for two weeks. Maybe I was just in the right frame of mind at the right moment. Or maybe I should just come to terms with the fact that I have the mentality of a fifteen-year-old. Maybe I’m OK with that.
After all, as Sheryl Crow sings, if it makes you happy... it can’t be that bad.
I don't think I can stay away much longer. The voices inside my head are threatening mutiny if I don't let them out soon-- I never imagined that I'd miss blogging this much, or feel the loss as a physical pressure inside my skull pushing outward.
This time, I hope that the voices and I will get along better, or at least for a longer period of time. I'd like to shoot for a sustainable level of blogging, so I just need to set some new ground rules for them. For example, "Book of the Day," doesn't have to mean a book for every day, it could just mean book of the day-it-happens-to-be. Whenever I feel like it. And if I have more than one thing to say about a book, it can be a book of more-than-one-day. Whatever. More rules, fewer rules. My rules.
Stay tuned. Something's bound to show up here soon.
Obsession, Part III
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