A Lesson From Fifty Shades, via Twilight: Take A Famous Protagonist and Tie Her Up.

A Lesson From Fifty Shades, via Twilight:  Take A Famous Protagonist and Tie Her Up. 

I swear I wasn’t looking up stuff on Twilight.  Never want to get near it again, after that last movie (sure, I watch; it’s a guiltier pleasure than the books).  Unless Meyer writes another one—then one side, kids, I was here first.

But I did discover, in researching another hit novel in a totally different genre, one of the ways writers, like vampires, feed on one another, duplicating one success with something even more outrageous.

I’m not talking about teen vampire novels; those are going the tired way of all played-out phenomena.   

There are some fine vampire books out there still, and some great stuff by (and about) teens, but duplicating Meyer’s success at this stage is a waste of whatever writing talent there is left.  

I went to a Writer’s Conference a year ago.  It was really pretty much a series of commercials—they called them workshops—for whatever publishing ploy or product they wanted to sell unsuspecting authors; there wasn’t much literature being discussed, that’s for sure.  They had a workshop devoted to teen and vampire plot combinations that just might be successful in the wake of the Meyer saga. 

One author in particular was convinced he’d be rolling in the green stuff when he sold his novel about—get this, guys, this is such a great idea—an entire school of vampires!   Can you believe it?  Can’t wait for that one.   Maybe I don’t have to, I think it came and went.

All this says to me is: go your own way, and don’t try to duplicate a success by imitation.  Your imitation, no matter how hot, will be old news by the time it’s published.  No big green stuff there. 

Nevertheless, I did discover that one ingenious fan took Meyer’s characters of Edward and Bella and wrote her own version of their story, putting them into some wild bondage (and by “some” I mean a whole lot)  and numerous sadomasochistic scenarios, making them go through the most incredible master-slave relationship I’ve ever (breathlessly) read about. 

But then the author, whose name is E. L. James (maybe), having fed her hungry posts with the ever-popular characters of the dominant male and the submissive female, changed the names of her blog-post characters to Anastasia and Christian.  She took her blog, which had been drooled over faithfully by her mostly female readers (with, I’m guessing, a gratifying increase in kinky sexual activity when their significant others came home), and named the whole shemozzle Fifty Shades of Grey.

Thus the hit of the summer arose from the ashes of the hits of two, three and four summers ago.  

I’m going to try something like that.  I don’t expect the kind of success James had, but just as an intellectual exercise and challenge, adding bondage and lots o’ sex to a familiar protagonist’s life sounds dauntingly invigorating. 

How’s this:

 “The spent and gasping whore, reamed inside and out by the tender yet brutal thrusts of the sailor’s manhood, had, even while chained to the bed, experienced a sexual ecstasy she could not name and had never come close to in all her sodden and love-starved life before.  Nevertheless, she summoned enough strength to wave at the sailor’s crotch-swollen departing figure, remembering the true, warm and sensual wonders of the seaman (no pun intended), and call out, “When you get back to this town again, call me, Ishmael.”

I just know it’ll be big!   The book, I mean.