Alright, time for a brand new first post of W-W 2.0 (a.k.a. the new flavor of this blog). Tonight I’d like to write about something that affects me as both a writer and an avid reader.
Vampire obsession overdose.
Yes. I’m serious.
Please don’t get me wrong as I start this post out. I enjoyed the Twilight series and would have devoured the books in mere hours if I didn’t have to work. Not because they were ‘in fashion’ but because I felt they were a good read and I do enjoy Stephanie Meyer’s writing style and I don’t care what anyone else has to say about it. This post isn’t about the hordes of people who either hate or love her series. No, I have bigger concerns such as what has become of the monster known as the publishing industry and the skyrocketing amount of vampire fiction that’s out there.
After Harry Potter reached it’s peak I saw multitudes of magic and mayhem on the shelves at my local bookstores. Wizardry became a familiar friend in many of the books I opened and I was alright with that. I haven’t even finished the HP series (too much going on in my life when it was a craze) and I just didn’t get into it as much as other people but it was a good read. A lot of the books that came out around that time were awesome as well- some of them are still among my favorites. Now though, the tides have changed and instead of finding myself overjoyed at the abundance of vampire literature… I find myself more than a little disappointed.
Where once finding a blood tinted read with sexy vampires and dramatic plots was like a rare gem amidst the shelves I now wish I wasn’t so intent on looking in the first place. There’s this whole section at my local bookstore dedicated to vampire novels and I’m sad to say every time I pass through the isles I feel like it’s free range on the writing market where anything with vampires can get published. I see all these books with wonderfully dark and beautiful covers- so tempting and yet, while not total drivel… I’m just tired of the all too common handful of plots and well… some of them just aren’t that great.
At least not where my opinion is concerned though I have found quite a few who share it.
As a writer I’ve done some reading on the publishing industry and while I fear I will never understand it entirely- in which case maybe I’m better off, but one thing I do understand is this: the writing market eats them up alive. Slowly chewing and savoring each bite until it’s so full it gets sick. I’m thinking we’re nearly at the end of the vicious cycle where it can begin again with a new series of books and another genre can be gobbled up painfully. My point?
Trends are both a curse and a blessing. On the one hand- they’re awesome for the publishing industry and any writer who just so happens to be submitting the right thing at the right time but on the other end- when we all get sick of it if the market doesn’t catch on soon enough sales crash and a bunch of overstocked books are going to be sitting on some mighty lonely shelves unsold unless they’re worth their salt. Or lucky.
That’s what bothered me as a reader.
Now comes the bigger problem- when the reading material I find myself surrounded with starts to frustrate my muse and throw me into a stuttering fit everyone time someone asks me to summarize my own work in progress.
It seems like everyone is writing about vampires these days and every time someone asks me what my book is about I end up squirming in embarrassment, half unwilling to even mention that vampires are essential to my plot. Why? Because when someone says “Uhm, it’s about this girl who falls in love with a vampire…” I know for a fact I don’t take that person very seriously as a writer because it is a trend right now. Not just to read about vampires but also to write about them (obviously, else where would the books for the fans come from?). Some are still caught up in the Twilight craze and others are just following the wagon and it’s hard to tell if anyone I’m talking to after such information is a serious writer or just an over zealous fan. I don’t mean to not take them seriously, I love having more writer buddies, but so far… it just seems to be another part of the fad.
I know I don’t take a lot of the vampire fiction writers I meet seriously. Problem is… I’m one of them and I want to be taken seriously!
I could have screamed the other day. Nearly all of my coworkers know I’m obsessed with writing. I may have been working in the kitchen for five years now but that’s not even close to where my passions lay. Still, despite this knowlege I found myself in one of these conversations the other day.
Coworker: “Oh, so what’s your book going to be about?”
Me: (I suck at summaries by the way) “Well, there’s this girl who has no memory from before five years ago and she’s discovered along the way that she can turn into a cat. Her big thing is finding out who she really is and she gets really close this one time but then something happens and she’s drawn into all this drama.”
Coworker: “What happens?”
Me: “Well, this vampire comes along and…”
Coworker: “Oh… So you’re into writing those kind of books. You must have read Twilight.”
No. No. No! You see why I could have screamed?
Yes, I understand a lot of writer’s of vampire fiction were inspired by Twilight. Coolbeans for them but I’m honestly not one of them and I’m not saying this just because I don’t want to be grouped with the mass of people wearing “I love Edward Cullen” T-shirts. My inspiration- no, that’s the wrong word… The kick in the butt I needed to actually go through with writing a story with vampires in it is all thanks to a wonderful author named Karen Chance.
Yes, I did start working on my novel around the time Twilight came out but I’d been toying with the idea of writing a book with vampires in it on and off for a long time. My issue was that there are so many vampire books out there and they all seem to have a girl who either wants to be bitten or ‘turned’ or the girl is constantly being saved. The vampire is handsome, rich, and has all kinds of ways out of bad situations at his disposal- oh, and while I’m at it he’s probably angsting about having to drink blood even though (depending on the world you’re reading) he’s been doing it for hundreds of years. Cool, yeah, I like those stories too but I didn’t want to write something that had been done a million and one times before. I wanted to write something different. That’s when I came across Karen Chance’s works. She is a vampire novelist and there’s a huge difference from her stories to a lot of what is out there- her female characters kick ass, her vampires have issues, and the teenage romance dramatic happy ending couldn’t be farther away in her universe. Yay for her!
It was after I saw that it was possible to write something like that that I really started to pen down all the vampire related ideas that came to mind with a serious attitude. Not long after that my muse delivered me this really awesome plot and wham! I had my novel.
Perhaps I’ve made my point or perhaps I haven’t. Either way I’d love to hear from some of my fellow writers out there. Have you ever been afraid of falling into the trends? Accused of doing so? What do you think about book trends? Leave a comment!
I couldn’t agree with you more! I love Vampires. I really do. But in the dark, brooding, bloodthirsty humanoid kind of way, not the “oh, look at me, I sparkle” kind. I’m not saying I hate Twilight. I’d even go as far as saying that it’s a good book series. But as soon as something goes mainstream, It seems over appreciated, and you end up wanting to make people shut up about it. I read the books before they were popular, and was ridiculed for reading an ‘emo Vampire book’. Now the same people are obsessing over Edward Cullen. It makes me want to punch them in the face, and laugh at them at the same time. Ah, the irony. Anyone who’s seen Joss Whedon’s T.V show, ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ will know this. Vampires like Spike and Angel kick butt. So do the Vampires from ‘Lost Boys’. The Vampires who could beat you up, and actually have WEAKNESSES! Yeah. My NaNoWriMo story this year is going to have a Vampire in it. Poor Alex. He’s going to need to go into the Fangirl Protection program with your vampire * Fangirl Protection Program has sensored this section. Have a good day! * Remember his Jacket, I think I’ll give it to Alex now. ^-^
I have to agree, I started reading vamp novels like Christopher Pike’s “The Last Vampire” when I was 12, and started writing vampire stories around the same time. I was obsessed with Buffy and Angel, even the original Buffy movie! I’m working on a series of novels about a girl who is kidnapped and turned into a vampire. I cringe at the references to Twilight, I just want to yell ITS NOT LIKE TWILIGHT! On the other hand, I quite enjoyed the Twilight series. I’m learning to just let it go and forget what everyone else is doing. But I am scared that by the time my series is ready to send to a publisher, they’ll be SO sick of vampire novels that it will be next to impossible to get one published…
Hello Jessica, sorry it’s taken me so long to reply. I’ve been all over the blogosphere of late but I think I’m back now and loving your comment because we share that same urge. We can’t help but defend our vampires because, though I happily breezed through the Twilight series, they’re ours. They’re different. They came out of our heads with the blood, sweat, and tears we poured into them through the writing process. It takes a lot, a LOT, of courage to up and tell someone about your book sometimes and then for them to turn around and tell you ‘ohhh, it’s just like…’ is just horridly aggravating. We’re the parents of our books and we want the world to give them a chance not compare them to something else.
I don’t think you have too much to worry about- I think about it myself from time to time with that tinge of fear that ‘what if the publishing world decides it forever hates vampires novels because of this craze’ but I repeat: you don’t have anything to worry about. Remember Harry Potter? All those magic school books that came out afterward? Then the long while we didn’t see any on the shelves?
Guess what?
They’re back.
Right now the shelves are full of vampy tales, in a few more months we’ll be wondering where they went as the publishing world takes a break. Once they get that break though they’ll be back. If they stopped publishing everything that became annoyingly popular for a time,… well, we wouldn’t have much.
My advice: If your book is ready to be published- wait. Wait, wait, wait! Wait until the craze is long over else you’ll be buried under tomes of ‘not so great’ or dismissed as ‘another one’ by your publishers. Wait until it’s over and people are going ‘You know what I could use right about now, one of those vampire books…’ And if you think there won’t be people saying that then you couldn’t be more mistaken.
I’ll be one of those people, lol.
Good luck with your novel and thank you for the comment!
Great post Feeby. I agree; some times trends get “overdone” and the book market gets flooded by a lot of rehashed material, especially in the paranormal genre. Because, overdone or not, readers still like it. And it’s unfortunate when people assume that any book in a “trend” genre is derivative of a bestseller in that genre.
Stephanie Meyer’s books aren’t necessarily derivative of Anne Rice’s. J.K. Rowling’s work isn’t necessarily derivative of C.S. Lewis. Books written in the same genre will always share some elements. *steps off soap box*
In any event, I have read some great vampire books. I find that when authors take risks with the story, putting their own creative spin on an otherwise “overdone” story archetype, then the result is intriguing. For instance, Sunny writes a fantastic series of vampire books that began with her book “Mona Lisa Awakening” and continues many books later in her new series “Lucinda, Dangerously.”
Although her characters have vampire qualities, they are not classic vampires. The story feels fresh because she built this rich world around the story, and fleshed out her characters so that, even while I’m thinking “I’ve read vampire books before,” I still get surprised at some of the things her characters are able to do.
As far as having fear of writing something and fallen into a trend, I don’t think about that when I first get an idea. That comes up in the planning stages. I don’t want people to read my work and think, “that sounds like so-and-so author, so this person must have taken/derived this work from the other writers.”
One way I avoid that is by focusing a lot of characterization. I focus on their goals, motivations, internal and external conflicts. Those are things that won’t feel like retreads to readers because these conflicts should be specific to the character and the plot.
I agree. Although I enjoy writing about vampires myself, I find they are overdone. I’m not into the twilight vampires, but I totally enjoyed how Anne Rice portrayed them. They were monsters and people. I think it’s indeed a fine line when it comes to writing anything. Many people jump on the band wagon if something becomes popular…hence all the vampire stories out there…
Anne Rice is a true artist amongst ‘vampire novel’ writers. She doesn’t over romanticize them and it’s in the darkness that we start to love them even more. Very balanced and you’re right. It’s a very fine line that comes through everything.
I love writing about vampires, love reading about them but right now it just seems like the quality of what’s out there is going kaput. Hopefully as the band wagon drives on to something else some true gems will start to shine through again.
Good luck with your vampires!