My Relationship with Twilight

Like a lot of people, I love a good book: one that makes you laugh, or cry, or see things from a different perspective. One that spurs you to some sort of action. One that sticks with you long after you’ve finished reading it. For me, that book was Twilight. Now, before you go thinking this is going to be another ‘’Team Edward vs Team Jacob” type of piece, let me clarify what I mean. Twilight was my springboard that made me believe in myself enough to take that leap to becoming a writer.

Leading up to the Christmas of 2009, I had been reading a lot of Jen Lancaster books. For anyone who has read her work, she has a unique voice in her books – a wonderful blend of wit, sarcasm, humor, and a dash of self-deprecation, just for fun. I was sampling other authors as well, some good and some not-so-good. I even ended up abandoning one book after only a couple of chapters because the language the author used was so off-putting. I consider myself well-educated with a relatively robust vocabulary, but when it got to the point of needing to look up two to three words per page, I got turned off. And that was after a few words per page that I was able to guess the meaning based on contextual clues. The constant interruptions ruined the flow of the story, so I moved along to something more enjoyable and entertaining. Something that would be an enjoyable break in my day, rather than feeling like a homework assignment.

For Christmas in 2009, my sister gave me the Twilight series in hardback. After opening them, I laughed and reminded her that I was not a twelve-year-old girl (I was in my late twenties at that point) but she insisted that I try them. She promised me that the story was great and something that all of us could relate to. At least the part about having a crush on someone in high school, maybe not the vampire twist! She even told me if I read the first book and didn’t like it, she would keep the set for herself and go get me something else instead. As luck would have it, a few weeks later there was a massive snow storm, closing our office down, so I sat on my couch in front of the fireplace and started reading Twilight. It wasn’t long before I was drawn in. I devoured the first book, reading throughout the day and at night before bed as well. Ultimately, I power read the whole series in a few weeks, which was unlike me. At that time in my life, I had a very busy job with long hours, as well as a relationship and other hobbies, so my schedule did not leave a great deal of free time for reading. Yet I found myself dying to know how the story was going to unfold, so I would pick up the book and read every spare moment I could find.

About halfway through the series, I remember reading in bed one night and thinking to myself about how easy it was to fly through the pages. As I reflected on this, I realized that the actual book itself was not written in some lofty prose. The author did not have an incredibly unique voice like Jen Lancaster. She was simply writing a story that grabbed her audience’s attention and pulled them into the world she had created. She was not using a “word-of-the-day” approach to wow her audience with obscure words that would ultimately make the readers either feel stupid or feel compelled to have a dictionary next to them while they read. Instead, she was relying on the power of her actual story to pull the audience in.

This epiphany continued to tumble around in my head as I finished the series. I later read an interview with Stephanie Meyer in which she talked about how a vivid dream of a sparkly vampire in a meadow set her story in motion and that she would write every day after her kids went to bed. The idea that one image or scene could be fleshed out into this amazing book series that captivated the world changed my view on what it meant to be an author, and a best selling one at that! For whatever reason, I had imagined the process of coming up with an idea for a book and then actually sitting down to write it as being this mystical phenomenon, accessible only to a select few. Reading the Twilight books brought me face to face with the reality that maybe, just maybe, I could do that too.

I will forever be grateful to the Twilight series, and to my sister, for giving me the inspiration I needed to take that step forward into creative writing. I continue to write to this day, with novels in various stages: from that initial image/idea, to outlined series, to completed manuscripts, and a self-published book. Without that shot of courage from Twilight, I would probably still be thinking to myself “wouldn’t it be amazing to write a book someday…”