I’ve seen people talk about actors and artists that had a terrible time.
My own would be Anne Rice. She wrote Interview with the Vampire after her young daughter died of Leukemia. Then her husband suddenly died of a brain hemorrhage. I suspect her Christian, anti-fanfic phase was a result of mental illness and manipulation from the publishers, although I don’t think she ever apologized.
This probably won’t be popular, but in a weird way I kind of feel bad for Stephenie Meyer. I know there’s some problematic stuff in her books, but past all that - as someone who writes, and themselves has wanted to publish something in the YA sphere for years, her story seems like some weird kind of cautionary tale. She writes a book. It’s her first book, and it manages to garner the attention of the right people, and it gets published. Not only does it get published, it’s sort of an overnight success. Suddenly people are demanding a sequel. More than that - a trilogy. Of course they’re not great books. She’s a new writer who’s under a lot of pressure. But she’s managed to garner an audience, and they’re hungry. So she writes the books and they’re bad, and they get made into some pretty cringe-worthy movies. And then, every basement dweller with a YouTube account spends the next decade dumping on them, while the whole world laughs.
Honestly, it’s the stuff of nightmares. If that happened to me there’s no amount of money that would console me. I’d just want to find somewhere to die.
I don’t know why “of course they’re not great, she’s a new writer”. Plenty of new writers and first novels are amazing. And it wasn’t a case of readers demanding a trilogy, she signed a lucrative publishing deal to write a trilogy on the strength of the first book. She didn’t stumble into it, she wanted to be an author and managed it. She just managed it with work that is generally held to be low quality. Stuff of nightmares? Come on, now :)
I really love it when people prove my point exactly. Just because she made money doesn’t mean that I still don’t feel kind of bad for her. It was very, very fashionable at one point in time to shit all over her, and while I’m not defending the quality of her books, it on a human level, that’s gotta feel awful.
It was like a teen cultural movement to absolutely hate on her. It had to feel awful
I haven’t proved your point exactly, or even vaguely. Your assertion - that she was somehow forced into writing more books than she was ready for by a sudden passionate fanbase - is simply incorrect. She chose to accept a contract that obliged her to turn her single book into a trilogy.
I would have been fine with those books until… she made Bella pregnant and the whole issue with Renesme (is that how it was spelled?) and imprinting… just c’mon, lol. I remember being enthralled with those books and maybe bc I thought Pattinson was so cute, lol… but once I got to the last book, I was like “are you f-cking kidding me?”
I don’t feel bad for her though. She made a lot of money from it.She could write more. I don’t see why she doesn’t. She should move away from Twilight altogether.
That chick who wrote Fifty Shades got criticized by so many. She’s laughing all the way to the bank.