1/2/12 5:15 PM UPDATE: io9 has reposted ye olde Twilight snark. Check the comments for more hilarious suggestions, from Dr. Seuss to George R.R. Martin.
As I mentioned in an early post, the main problem with Twilight isn’t its sparkly vampires who lack all traditional weaknesses or its anti-feminist sensibility. When you get right down to it, the trouble is that the writing is terrible, filled with cliche phrases (“smoldering eyes”), repeated words (294 “eyes” in 498 pages) and the reductive characterization of its main characters (Bella is clumsy, and I guess she likes books. Or something).
On a recent car-trip with my husband and the writer Chip Cheek, we mulled over the question: What if great literary writers of the last 200 years had penned Twilight?
Herman Melville
“Call me Bella.” A tome about the length of the original series investigates Bella’s monomanical search for the vampire who stole her virginity. There’s an entire chapter devoted to describing the devastating whiteness of Edward’s skin, and several on the physiognomy of vampires, starting with their skeletal structure outward.
Virginia Woolf
The novel takes place over the course of twenty four hours, during which Bella is painting a portrait of Edward and reflecting on how her femininity circumscribes her role within 20th century society.
Cormac McCarthy
In the opening scene, Edward dashes Bella’s head against a rock and rapes her corpse. Then he and Jacob take off on an unexplained rampage through the West.
Jane Austen
Basically the same as the original, except that Bella is socially apt and incredibly witty. Her distrust of Edward is initially bourne out of a tragic misunderstanding of his character, but after a fling with Jacob during which he sexually assaults her (amusing to no one in this version) she and Edward live happily ever after.
George Saunders
Same as the original, but set in a theme park. Somehow involves gangs of robots, which distract the reader from the essential sappiness of Edward and Bella’s story.
Raymond Carver
Bella stars as the alcoholic barmaid with daddy issues that Edward, a classic abuser, exploits. When Bella’s old friend Jacob comes to visit and is shocked by her bruises, she thinks about leaving him, but instead hits the gin bottle. Hard.
Annie Proulx
Edward and Jacob defy society’s expectations up in the mountains.
Lewis Carroll
Bella takes acid and charts syllogisms.
James Joyce
Edward’s rapacious love for Bella reflects the way globalism has pillaged Ireland. It’s entirely written in Esperanto, with sections in untranslated Greek, except for Chapter 40, which is inexplicably rendered as a script page from the musical The Book of Mormon.
Dorothy Parker
Bella writes a brilliant takedown of the latest school play, dates a string of men, and repeatedly attempts suicide.
Kate Chopin
Stifled by her marriage to Edward, Bella has an affair with Jacob and then drowns herself.
Ernest Hemingway
Edward and Bella exchange terse dialogue alluding to Edward’s anatomical problem. Eventually, Bella leaves him for Jacob, a local bullfighter with a giant…sense of entitlement.
Flannery O’Connor
When Native American werewolf Jacob threatens her with death, Bella reconsiders her hardcore racism, and just for one milisecond, the audience finds her sympathetic.
Ayn Rand
Edward tells Bella that he intends to stop saving her life, unless she starts paying him in gold bullion. Hatefucking ensues, then Jacob spouts objectivist philosophy for the next 100 pages.
12/22/11 Update:
Novelist Urban Waite adds this one:
Tim O’Brien
It’s all about the memories these vampires have carried with them for the past couple hundred years. Just think how much that would have deepened their characters. “Bella looked into Edward’s smoldering eyes and knew all the pain he carried with him, the cross burned into the cleft of his muscular chest, 1 oz., the dash of his hair across his forehead, dangling ever-so, 5.oz, etc… etc… ”
Got more writers and renditions? Put ’em in the comments.
While I’m flattered that people are reblogging this post, I ask that you don’t reproduce it in its entirety on your own blog.
Stephen King: Edward and Bella are voted prom king and queen but Jacob is jealous so he dumps pig blood on Edward who then exacts his revenge by drinking the blood of everyone in the gym…
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch: Edward is initially attracted to Bella due to her imperious, despotic, unknown allure, and once he gets a date with her, spends a ridiculous amount of time and rhetoric convincing her to fulfill his dream of being whipped by a woman in a luxurious fur coat. Bella is at first willing to accommodate his kink, but Edward becomes disenchanted with her when she sometimes wants a relationship of loving equals rather than to stay in the character of a dominatrix all the time. Finally Bella takes up with the rather less high-maintenance and traditionally masculine nobleman (and werewolf) Alexis von Jacob, in whom Edward finally discovers the sharp-toothed, furry abuser of his dreams.
Lucy Maud Montgomery: Bella the orphaned waif is taken in by the father she never knew, and persuades him not to send her back to the orphan asylum with her great wit and talent for storytelling. Bella then meets Edward at the one-room schoolhouse, and breaks school supplies over his head when he mocks her hairstyle. She then spends the next several years as his furious academic rival while denying their intense mutual attraction. Bella and Edward then go off to college, where Edward meets the beautiful, charismatic Victoria and Bella meets the dashing, romantic Jacob, who shares his umbrella with her in a rainstorm. Then despite the obvious greater attractions of Victoria and Jacob, Bella decides she prefers the hometown boy and accepts his marriage proposal. Then we get another book about their courtship, another book about their newlywed days, and about three more books about the adventures of their many plucky children.
Enid Blyton: Bella goes to Malory Towers, where she is initially unpopular because she doesn’t like open-air swimming, has an imagination and likes boys. Slowly she becomes normal and learns to play lacrosse. Edward isn’t in it at all.
HP Lovecraft. Edward cannot reconcile his own horror at becoming a vampire. He rapes and kills Bella but attributes it to the desires of an ancient Deity outside our power to understand. Everyone thinks it’s ok because he calls his devil by a cutesy name.
William Gibson:
Plot: Bella is a failed prototype of Artificial Intelligence living in an Archology in the suburbs of the Neo-Seattle Cyberspace and is a hyper-hyped celebrity-artist wannabe. As her scuptures made of discarded Hitachi Magic Wands don’t pay for her addiction for designer nanoprobes, she is about to consider selling her lines of pink code to a Snuffer-than-snuff Albanian memory implant service. There, she meets the dashing/doomed hacker EdWard_v0.9. At first unimpressed by his online-persona (A vampire, like everybody else), she is strangely attracted by his demure if not vacant attitude (he’s mostly AFK, to be honest). EdWard is running away from a mega-corporation who has unleashed a new breed of software agents called Werewolves on his virtual ass. One of them, called JacobShavenTorso will kidnap her during an epic cyber-heist/exploit whose description will last for five chapters. Once Bella is extracted, they hide in the darkspace, out of the reach of any known search engine and wins her CPU over. Unfortunately, during a slow-mo tedious-core lovemaking description, Jacob hits Bella’s reset button by mistake and EdWard_v0.9 gets another chance at making it work… but he is AFK again, operating his Toyota-Monsanto sandwich maker. Bella falls in love with him again, triggering a final philosophical one line pop-shot from the author about the recursive nature of non-reality, or something.
Style: No sentences are more than four words but 50% of the time contain a cool brand made of the fusion of two existing but unrelated corporation names. The rest have a random allusion to a fiercely emerging third-word country.
In the future, even English grammar is tortured by cyber-implants…
Haruki Murakami:
Bella has sex with Edward, who is half a ghost. Jacob is a talking cat. Most of the prose is given over to descriptions of Bella making pasta.
Awesome, team. Keep ’em coming. I love all these additions, particularly King and Murakami!
L.J. Smith:
Everything almost exactly the same…oh, wait “famous writers”…never mind.
Diana Gabaldon: Bella inexplicably time travels back to 1919, just after Edward is transformed. When she finds herself pregnant, instead of staying with the man she loves in a time she’s adjusted to, she decides to hop back to the 1940’s to live with her previous husband, who she tolerates, and becomes a doctor. Twenty years later she abandons her daughter to jump back in time to Edward. (Though this begs the question of where the 1940’s version of Edward is, as he would still be 17 years old)
Marcella Hazan:
Edward prefers the center of Bella’s right calf for his new braise, Osso Bella, but has trouble finding the Sicilian sea salt essential to its proper preparation.
LJ Smith:
The close proximity of vampires and werewolves, not only upsets the local ecosystem, but the global one. This disturbance begins a course of events that will end in apocalyse without the intervention of Bella, the heroine. Then the story ends abruptly before the finale and readers are left with a ten-year cliff hanger.
Joss Whedon:
Bella carries a wooden stake tipped in silver. She kicks butts of misbehaving vampires and werewolves alike. Neither Edward, nor Jake can reconcile themselves to dating a woman as powerful as themselves. Bella wanders the world as a protector of humanity.
Margaret Atwood: Bella is a strong, independent woman who takes pity on Edward, in keeping with her Canadian hospitality. Jacob runs off into the wilderness, never to be seen again. Bella ponders the symbolism of the wilderness. Fin.
Robert Heinlein: Bella is a polymath genius who meets the equally brilliant Edward after developing a dimensional portal. They get married after fifteen minutes together, and spend the rest of the book running from an ever-changing Jacob. At the end of the book Jacob is revealed to be Lazarus Long, and everybody has sex.
Samuel Beckett prose: Bella roams the earth on a quest for something that she forgot what, picking up stones and sucking on them and lying prostrate in gardens. Edward is searching for Bella but doesn’t remember why. There is only one paragraph break.
Samuel Beckett play: Bella, Edward, and Jacob are all in large urns. A spotlight lights each of their faces and they can only whisper of what they each wish they could do to one another (kill, have sex with, run from, run to, etc), but none of them can move any body parts except their lips and smoldering eyes.
Douglas Adams
Bella is the last of a discontinued series of robots made to emulate the now extinct human race. She whines gears and randomly pouts moronic gibberish while falling over. She is accompanied on her travels across the cosmos by Edward, a sparkly giant space banana and Jacob, a small wooden box of doom.
Twilight ala Isaac Asimov:
Much of the book is devoted to Bella and Edward discussing how to circumvent the Three Laws of Vampirics…
Geoffrey Chaucer: Bella, Edward and Jacob are on a pilgrimage to Candlestick Park along with others. To pass the time they decide to tell stories. Bella tells the story of Troilus, who falls in love with Criseyde without ever speaking to her and spouts 2000 lines of poetry while lying on his bed, weeping. Edward tells the story of three men who meet death on the road, make bargains with him to be rich, famous, and powerful, and end up sparkly feminized vampires. Jacob tells the story of a young woman married to a really old vampire and the young handsome man who moves into their house and woos her. The story ends with a red hot poker and someone peeing out the window. They never get to Candlestick Park.
You know, if you spent as much time writing your own book as you do regaling us with why the Twilight Saga is terrible writing, I might actually be impressed. The truth is that the Twilight books struck a chord and they’re loved by millions. The rest of this is just sour grapes and trying to prove that you are one of the ultimate “cool” people because you don’t like it. Give it up.
I happened to enjoy the story and in MY opinion, the story telling is just fine. I appreciate the Romeo and Juliet motif, the metaphor for alienation of youth, the vampires and werewolves representation of the Capulet and Montague rivalry, and if Romeo and Juliet could go on and on about their angst about their love and how they would rather die than be separated, I don’t have problem with Bella and Edward’s devotion. No one bothers to make comment about how Juliet needs to woman up and get over this Romeo obsession as if that’s the only thing in life. No one makes the snide comment about how the romances of the time were about the glory of battle in Renaissance Italy and R & J were about one child’s obsession with getting laid.
Did Shakespeare write it better? Well, sure, because he’s Shakespeare. But that doesn’t take away from the modern retelling and I appreciate it for what it is. And all of you reviewers wasting the space about how crappy the book was — well, those who can do, those who can’t review.
Dostoyevsky: In the first chapter, we learn that Bella is an impoverished ex-student in St. Petersburg who conspires to kill Edward for the money he has taken from his victims during his life as a vampire. The rest of the novel investigates Bella’s tortured internal argument as she seeks to justify staking Edward because of all the good she plans to do with his money, versus her guilt at killing him, which simultaneously represents her desire to kill her father and the prevailing spirit of atheism that is threatening to kill society.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez:
Bella meets Eduardo at his own funeral and moves into an abandoned house with him. The town disapproves, not because she is living with the risen dead, but because Eduardo fought on the side of the Conservatives who defeated Colonel Aureliano Buendía.
Eduardo stays faithful to Bella for seventy years, despite her having borne eight children by Jacob, the man-beast who lives in the jungle.
Kazuo Ishiguro:
The story is recounted by Bella, who is prone to long tangents and frequently changing her recollection of past events. It comes out that Bella missed her chance with Edward because she is too British to understand her own emotions. Ultimately, the ending is bittersweet, as Bella stumbles across her childhood friend Jacob in an incredible coincedence, only to learn that he is dying. Edward marries someone else, but has bouts of unhappiness, and Bella convinces herself that the best thing for her is to focus on her career and not look back.
Henry James: Bella is an independent, but complex woman who affronts her destiny while being courted by both Edward and Jacob. Although Jacob’s charisma is attractive and he seems like the man who will offer her the most stable life, she rejects his marriage proposal because she fears marrying him will threaten her freedom. Edward does not possess any charm or attractive qualities, but Bella decides to marry him anyway. She simple becomes a collectible for Edward. The story ends with Bella regretting her decision, but adhering to her duties as a wife despite how unhappy she is.
Neil Gaiman:
Jacob, a woodsman, travels through a dark land, speaking to hermits, talking animals and forest spirits of his quest to slay Edward, the vampire lord who stole his true love Bella, turned her and then grew bored of her. In return, he learns the secrets he needs to find his way to Edward and defeat him. Eventually, it is revealed that Edward has engineered his own demise, as his immortality has robbed him of all emotions except for guilt over the death of his love for Bella. With Edward’s death, his and Bella’s grown-up daughter takes over his kingdom and the story ends on an ambiguously hopeful note.
Tom Robbins:
Bella is a bowl of over-cooked spaghetti and Edward is a stick of chalk. The entire novel consists of an argument that takes place over a Chia Pet named Jacob. Edward insists that she should water him but Bella likes to admire the top of his smooth head.
Robert A. Heinlein: After much talk about sex, the vampires, werewolves and humans get together under the tutelage of a wise old 2200 year old human named Lazarus Long and decide to build a space-time-fantasy ship to look for a cat who walks through walls.
Gustave Flaubert:
Edward is a young and angst-filled boy, new to his school. There, he meets, Bella, a spoiled, but indecisive young woman. He stalks her briefly and then they marry. Edward trains as a doctor. Bella grows tired and disillusioned by Edward’s relentless angst, while happily spending all his money. They have a daughter. She attracts the attention of and flirts with many of the young men in the town. After a few years, a rich and wolfish landowner, Jacob, seduces Bella. However, he creepily runs away with Bella’s young daughter instead. Bella is crushed that she can’t have both men at once, but decided to flirt more and spend more of Edward’s money. Having placed Edward in heavy debt and with her reputation in shreds, Bella commits suicide by bleeding herself very slowly to death. After she is dead, Edward slowly finds he can’t live without Bella and builds a shrine to her and dies of a broken heart.
Laurence Sterne:
Recounted by a consumptive Bella at the end of her life, attempts to tell the story of whether she chose Edward or Jacob, but never makes it past her her mother’s inexplicable love affair with a minor league baseballer.
Faulkner:
The entire saga is a monologue inside Bella’s head as she drives to Phoenix and back with Edward’s corpse in the trunk of her car, in which descriptions of Edward’s topaz eyes are interspersed at random intervals with descriptions of Edward as a horse and a fish. Jacob mysteriously disappears, and after many years his skeleton is found in Bella’s bed beside the indentation in her pillow where she has apparently been sleeping for decades without ever changing the sheets. Her parents are cousins.
Milan Kundera: Across the span of four novels, Bella and Edvard torrid love affair builds into an allegory for the transition of Czechoslovakian communist regime into the Velvet Revolution. Eventually Bella and Edvard emigrate to Paris, where they spend lengthy, passionate nights discussing the transcendent nature of various ephemeral joys and sexual agonies of their past.
Phillip K Dick:
Ed is a B movie actor currently hiding out from his agent in a seedy motel in Santa Monica. Convinced he contracted vampirism from an extra during the filming of a recent feature; he is currently trying to come to grips with the shift in his consciousness as the disease ravages his physical body. Bella, an aspiring visual artist working as a call girl catches a glimpse of Ed as she is leaving the room of her client. She is so moved by the ethereal shimmer of his skin that she begins bringing all her tricks back to the same motel hoping to get a chance to see Ed again. Ed is so disturbed by Bella having sex with different men in the room next to his that he finally confronts her. A short physical altercation ensues between Bella and Ed. Her pimp, the wolfish Jacob, steps in to protect his investment. During the fight Bella experiences a shift in reality. Bella concludes that Ed’s skin is secreting a psychedelic substance, (accounting for his glittery appearance) and decides that Ed is essential to the genesis of her art. She devises a plan to capture him and hold him captive. Jacob discovers her plan and agrees to help her with the provision that he will become her agent. Bella lures Ed into a relationship and they settle into a curious sort of domesticity. Bella becomes a famous painter of reality. The book ends with Ed ruminating on the nature of vampirism while Jacob stands in the doorway making references to Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf.
Bella, Jacob, and Edward meet on the train to wizard school….
J.R.R Tolkien: Bella sits around while Edward is the heir to a long-lost throne, goes on a massive quest, gains his inheritances and comes back to marry her. The main story ends there but there are 4 other books that deal with genealogy, culture, and language of the world in which they live.
Jacob becomes a dwarf who is unconcerned with Bella and thrown in for comic relief.
Brian Jacques:
Bella is a mouse on a quest to save her home. Along the way, she meets the quirky bat Edward, who takes her in for a time and introduces her to his bat-clan, and then accompanies her on her quest. They eventually run into the wolf Jacob, who tries to eat them but then convinces the other wolves to let them be provided they solve a number of riddles. Eventually, they all live in an abbey, Bella’s home saved, and she marries a mouse completely unrelated to either Edward or Jacob, who become fast friends.
Stephenie Meyer: Bella (who is Stephenie Meyer’s self-image) suffers from self-loathing and lack of personality, but that changes when she realises that she can have sex if she falls in love with a corpse… she becomes even more confused when she also falls for an animal, and can’t decide between necrophilia and beastiality for some time, before settling on necrophilia as her preferred vice.
George R. R. Martin
In the war-torn country of what is probably supposed to be the Pacific Northwest, different Houses rule their realms and clash often. Bella of House Swan (which is an insult to the other House Swann in ASOIAF) is actually a brilliant and sharp young woman. She manages to see the reclusive knight Edward of House Cullen ride in a tourney and becomes enamored with him. She notes that he has peculiar habits, but it doesn’t deter her from her intent.
She manages to talk her dullard of a father, Charles the First, into letting her marry Edward to add to their realm of influence. However, Bella is scheming to have Edward murdered shortly after their wedding night so she can rule the lands of House Cullen unopposed. The family realizes this plot and enlists the the beast-men from the outer haunted forests: the Blacks. Bella discovers that the Cullens are essentially blood drinking abominations, Edward included. So basically it turns into a bloody battle of the Cullens vs the Swan family guards and the Blacks swarming the holdfasts and butchering everyone where they stand.
Bella dies for her scheming, and so do Houses Cullen and Swan. The Blacks ascend to the throne and rule with an iron fist.
David Foster Wallace:
Edward suffers from a dizzying array of unfortunate conditions, including one that requires him to drink blood to survive and another that makes his unnaturally pale skin break out into a rash when exposed to sunlight, leading other characters to refer to him as a vampire. Several hundred pages are spent detailing his physical disfigurements and his depression in painstaking detail (the pun is pointed out in a footnote).
Jacob, the only supernatural character in the novel, is a werewolf. He does not interact with the other main characters in any way. Jacob is killed midway through the story by a werewolf hunter, whose specific sexual fetishes we learn entirely too much about.
Bella is a normal high-school student. Chapters told from her perspective are written entirely in chatspeak.
Including its five hundred pages of footnotes, the non-linear novel is over two thousand pages long.
Paulo Coelho:
Basically the same, but when Edward leaves to protect Bella, he stays away for many, many years. Bella marries Jacob even though she never loves him the way she loved Edward. Her broken heart never fully recovers and she is never able to forget him. When Bella is old she meets Edward again and the love between them is still strong. They have a wild, passionate adventure together lasting for a few hours. She dies in his sparkling arms on a hill bathed in the rising sun.
Stieg Larsson: A tale of political conspiracy that reads like a cross between The X Files and Sucker Punch.
Franz Kafka
Edward leaves Bella. She spends the rest of her life looking for him. In the end, she is executed for a crime she didn’t commit.
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Terry Pratchett: Bella is a troll from the mountains who falls in love with Edward, a charming, handsome assassin. They have various adventures in a parallel universe until Jacob, who is Edward in the future, disrupts everything by being heir to the throne. Bella nearly dies but is saved by Edward/Jacob + a comical, mythical ingredient. Instead of 4 books there are 103.
Jesse, I just want to say that you are taking this far too seriously. I like the Twilight Saga, but I also recognize mediocre writing. I let it slide because I see that it’s written simply for the audience it’s intended to reach, teens. That’s not to say teens don’t deserve good writing.
This exercise is one that stimulates your mind and get you thinking about other authors and their styles. I also enjoy making fun of Twilight. You can be on both sides. And I think these examples are great.
Get over yourself and just enjoy these posts and this blog. It’s funny.
Ok, with my defense of this written, I’m contemplating an Edward Gory version.
Bella comes to the Cullen mansion during a storm, the wind tosses her hair as she runs.
She roams the halls in the night in desperation and depression. Edward stalks her, never able to completely voice his love for her. The constant watching drives Bella mad.
Jacob, in wolf form, rushes the mansion and changes to human form. He declares his love for Bella and insists that she come with him. Edward watches as Jacob trips on the Cullen’s fountain and drown.
Jacob’s death affects Bella deeply, but she’s conflicted with the feelings she’s developing for Edward. She never sees more of him than a hand or an eye, but the stalking is wearing her down.
Edward, in a fit of self confidence tries to reach out for Bella as she stands in the hallway crying. The cold touch startles her and she runs away.
Blinded by her tears, she doesn’t see that she approaches the window, and screaming she falls. She is impaled on the spire of the fountain in which Jacob drowned.
Edward spends centuries watching the scene, unable to resolve his preternatural attraction to Bella even in her death.
(I wish I could draw, I can totally see the pictures for this in my head.)
Jacob and Edward are both born shortly after midnight on the first day of American independence. However, due to a mixup, Jacob is raised by vampires and becomes a violent mass murder while Edward lives in a small town in the Northwest and loves organic green chutney.
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Bram Stoker:
While Bella is a confused young village girl of little import as a character, Edward and his family rampage through the countryside killing and maiming everything in their path. Bella, Jacob and the rest of the original cast die, while Edward and his family live happily ever after in coffins of bone. Little to no sexual activity involved.
Kurt Vonnegut:
Edward lived through World War 2 as a poor-mannered American soldier captured for a short time. Trauma leads him to believe he is a vampire and thus drinks blood (actually he drinks altogether too much red wine, as the anonymous narrator intones) and avoids the sun. Bella is pretty much exactly the same and obsesses over Edward.
Reply to “If Famous Writers Had Written Twilight…”
They wouldn’t be famous after their death…or before it even.
I have to admit, I love the Edward Gorey version… the illustrations from the Gorey alphabet are vivid in my brain and make the version so much fun!
Nicely done!