What happened to Jacob

I was recently reading Alice LaPlant's guide to writing and she pointed to something I'd long been trying to articulate. Stereotypes and cliches are shortcuts, yes, but they are shortcuts because they make the reader do the work. This is not the author telling you how it works, how things look; there is no show. Instead, the reader is given familiar settings and told, "You do the math."

Thus Twilight.

Mary Sue is faced with a choice: the intellectual poet or the physical, visceral body? It's a sexy problem, you can stick your fingers right into the paint and mess around for hours. Do I want him to play me piano and recite Shakespeare? or Do I want him to carry my around, break out of his clothes, turn my flesh to fire at his touch? What fun the reader has! And the author does very little work to achieve this.

I thought Jacob was the audience, I thought he was me. He would shake Bella and say, "You deserve better than that slime!" and I would pump my fist in the air. He was the physical, visceral, lusting stereotype and I loved him.

The thing I liked most about the Jacob stereotype was his embodiment. It is a character who is immediate and tangible, who responds to sweat, aches and blood. There is a deep, resonating primalism to this stereotype and it fascinates me. Contradicting CS Lewis, we are not a soul that "has a body". We are an incarnation. This body, the way it fades over time or scars under pressure, is me. It has things to say and it has intelligence outside of my own bookish learning. It dances.

The foil to embodiment, Edward, is a frozen casing. He never ages, never scars, never changes. He is smooth and new. He is fixed and mechanical. He would bring more information to this idea of embodiment by being one who entirely lacks it. Between him and Jacob, they would inform Bella about her own flesh and position in the stream of time. Edward would watch her age with envy. Jacob would teach her to listen to her instincts. They would hone her into a sharper, more potent Bella.


The problem with the author not doing the work is you leave loopholes and have to backtrack all the time. It becomes confusing and convoluted. As you try to box in the stereotype and turn it into something real you begin to alienate the reader, the one who has created most of the image. As I let my imagination wander with the free reign of these cliches, these stereotypes and archetypes, I forgot that Smeyer was still writing.

Then she ruined my playtime. Jacob became an overbearing all-physical bigot. He turned into the frightening jock who doesn't understand consent and decides he's going to kiss you because he wants to. He ignores your opinion and tells you that you like it, even when you struggle. She hijacked my Jacob, the character who I most related to, and turned him into my most real nightmare.

Twilight sticks around because it is personal. With the hollow shells and minimal etchings on each character, we built our own story. I brought my history into the Bella character, I put my theology of embodiment and the negation of that into the vying love interests. I had a pretty great story going until Smeyer came back and added retroactive plot.

How did you read the story? How did you fill up the characters and add nuance to the empty faces?

Why I made Bella Swan Fat and Ugly

Today while I was cashiering at my grocery story, a kind gentleman came through and tried to conspire jovially with me. He pointed to a magazine, purported to be a Healthy magazine, with a thin woman on the cover.

"Look at this!" He cried while I rung up his groceries, "Does she look healthy? It's sick! She's a skeleton!" I smiled kindly without engaging, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. A few things were happening in that moment, and it has taken me half the day to unpack it.

For one, the woman on the cover of the magazine was Giada de Laurentiis, a chef who I don't particularly like except for the fact that her recipes are sometimes really tasty. She's petite, she's Italian, she cooks for a living. The stress of that lifestyle, compacted by the stress of now being a celebrity chef (an a "sexy, skinny" one at that) are unimaginable. Most professional chefs suffer from overwork, alcoholism, poor eating habits, and myriad health problems. It is very easy to gain weight in a stressful kitchen.

Celebrity women, on the other hand, are required to be skinny and boney in order to be appealling. When they aren't, a great deal of attention is drawn to their avant garde, sometimes "political" statements (Adele, Christina Hendricks). Regardless of the shape of their body, it appears that we care first and foremost about their bodies. Even when these women struggle to keep their bodies sane, we critique their lines, puffy eyes, potential surgeries, and choice not to wear make-up during an errand. It is very easy for these women to suffer eating disorders.

I don't know Giada di Laurentiis personally, but I am sure that there is nothing she could do with her weight to satisfy everyone. To someone, she will always be too fat. To this man, she was too skinny.

I felt like he was personally attacking the woman on the magazine cover, not the publicists, photographers, or directors of that magazine. I'm no longer obese and I no longer pull the gaze of a room to my size, but I am still wary of how our society treats "fat" people. I'm not skinny either (though I think I'm plenty skinny) and so I think this man, also because of our circumstances, felt safe confiding in me that this woman was anorexically thin. Perhaps he felt I would agree with him, that as a woman I was tired of seeing all these skinny girls in their skinny jeans all over the media.

In that situation, my customer was blaming the women for being too thin and he was taking advantage of my position of service to agree with him (I cannot possible begin any true argument with a customer. I can be honest, have good conversations, and nod knowingly but in the end, you are still my customer and I still represent a company to you. I am no longer myself).

When I first re-wrote the Twilight series for myself, I re-contextualized Bella as fat. It was fantastic and liberating. I am still so proud of that work of fan fiction, even though I insisted on following the decrepit scaffolding of an inept writer. In the past ten years I have spent my waking consciousness becoming aware of the stories and oppression of my brothers and sisters. Every day I give thanks for being born a fat female, because without these two "knocks" against me I might have simply floated along in my white, middle-class American privilege. Only when I felt the first slap of judgment on my own body, only when I strained against the invisible binds of my so-called gender, did I find a language which would later become invaluable to me.

Mitt Romney will never be able to read Toni Morrison because he just can't relate.

When I began to notice the subtle and insidious nature of sexism and fat-shaming, I inherited a vocabulary. Later, when reading stories about racism, homophobia, gender normativity, and other restrictive labeling, I recognized some of the vocabulary and some of the experiences. This allowed me to give authority to those stories, and once they had authority I could really, truly listen. Because I finally believed them.

I wanted to write a story that would help with that, one which would pass on the vocabulary and allow others to open up to similar experiences of oppressed brethren. I don't know what it is like to be castigated for being underweight, I do not know what it is like to actually be anorexic or bulemic, but I am keenly aware of what it is like to be judged by my body first. I am daily aware that as a woman I am flesh first, sex second, and much further down the line (sometimes never) an autonomous being. I have been able (and still continue) to use that experience to empathize with others. Recently the challenge has been to recognize where I have been complicit in my own oppression as well as that of my brethren. And I hate to tell you this, but we are all complicit.

I chose to be complicit when I kept my job and my representation of the company rather than explaining to the man that he was again judging a woman by her body. I let him go without passing on the vocabulary or trying to share the experience. I would make the same decision again, but I have to live with the fact that somewhere, that man thinks I truly agreed with him.

The twin brothers sympathy and empathy

Edward (sympathy) and Jasper (empathy) should not have been superficial or foolish. Luckily due to little writing Jasper escaped the brunt of the douchebaggery, but Edward spent four whole books oblivious to the consequences of telepathy.

These "brothers" could respectively sense what anyone was thinking or feeling.

Thoughts, as we all know, are not the same as speech. On rare occasion do we find it better to articulate while sentences to ourselves. Usually our thoughts are sloppy and sporadic, as anyone who has tried mindfulness meditation soon finds out. There are bursts of memory, emotion, song, and singular images attached to meaning without context.

Have you ever remembered a song but you cannot recall the words, tune, our even perhaps the meaning? Then what is left? What is that piece we hold onto? Those are the sorts of thoughts I imagine a telepath would find.

And then empathy, not just seeing another's point but viscerally feeling it as well. No wonder Jasper couldn't continue to murder sentient beings.

Most of conflict arises from fractured communication and, while it would be entirely one-sided, these brothers participated in pure and immediate communion with any sentient being.

There was no longer "the other" our even the unknown. All motives, however illogical or cruel, are completely contextualized.

I recall a throw-away conversation in hich Edward is talking about music (his character dearly loves music and I appreciate that) but then Edward dismisses all the music between 1960 and 1990. All the "devil music" I'm sure, but honestly I think a character like him should be able to find a way to appreciate quite literally every single song made. He has the ability to guess or actively know how that song feels in the artist's head. Imagine Mozart to Mozart's ears, imagine the grandness which he felt that he fell short of. Amazing.

They should have been the most patient, sensitive and careful creatures imaginable. The one who talks you through your tantrum to the other side. The one who always "gets" you.

That alone would make them seductive and dangerous, as well as easily usurp their own characters, their own selves. As someone who is a mirror to others it would be a shock and a novel thrill to encounter a person you cannot reflect, a Bella who asks you to be yourself.