Rosalie before My Sister Rosalie

How was Rosalie viewed before I wrote My Sister Rosalie, in the main?

Rosalie was a cold, cruel, royal B-with-a-capital-B itch, and everybody seemed just fine with that representation, gleeful, in fact, with the reviews I saw in stories portraying this one-dimentional hateful person.

And I was like ... Rosalie's smart. Rosalie's hurting: having had everything taken away from her. Rosalie has lived longer than most vampires on the planet: she's resilient. So, all this counts for nothing?

And the killer: Rosalie was right. Every time. She warned everyone Bella was trouble (in canon), who listened? She's seen train-wrecks before, and she was trying to help, but what did she get for that? Everyone patronized her and ignored her.

And that was okay? And she wouldn't be bitter about her mistreatment now and her ill-treatment before?

The character I don't get is Edward. He had a silver spoon, pampered his whole life, and Carlisle acted on the last wish of Edward's mother, and Carlisle was a loving and devoted father and Edward was ... 'grateful'?

And he treated Bella like a doormat, but that's okay, because he's bad-boy, pretty-boy Edward?

I don't get it.

Why wasn't Twilight simply called: "Rosalie."

There's a challenge! There's a complex character who is smart and a survivor.

Who also has a big, big heart that nobody respects until she found her Emmett, who loves her and is devoted to her, but who understands her? who is her intellectual equal?

I wish people would see Rosalie, simply as who she is.

So I wrote My Sister Rosalie.

Being True to Characters and Setting

Do you "use" settings like you use characters in your stories?
Or do you respect settings like you respect your characters?

Too many writers 'use' characters: "Oh, this character has to die because ..." because the plot demands it, or poor planning leads to a difficult situation, so instead of allowing the characters to deal with difficult truths, the writer writes the character out of the story ("I must move on." "I fell in love with this other person" or usually: PLOT-TWIST! LOOK THAT CHARACTER IS DEAD BECAUSE REASONS!)

Story, too often, is bad story, because I can read who lives and dies, who falls in love with whom, who gets their happy and totally undeserved ending because the author is pushing characters around like chess pieces.

I'd prefer a Helen DeWitt, where: I don't know what's happening, even as a good reader and writer, but I know I love these characters so much, my heart is breaking, and what's happening is a mom is trying to raise her son but he wants to know who his father is? And that's the whole story? The Last Samurai (novel) Yes, it is, and it is a beautiful thing.

So that's characters.

For setting. Too often I read works where the author (mis)treats setting as something characters step through, all bland, featureless and inconsistent ('not-held-together') ... exactly like horse manure, all the same, all pointless, and all of it stinks really quickly.

I argue that if more writers treated their settings like they SHOULD treat their characters, then we would actually learn something, and actually love, Wyoming, for example, or LV-426 on ζ Reticuli or Hydrobad, India (not just 'India') or, for example, Alaska is WARM! and WET! and GREEN! and BEAUTIFUL in the way a mountain LOOMS into your soul. Where is writing that respects a setting that you love it like you love the characters? (or should)

Then, of course, you get the writers who write and write and write the setting and it's just plain, bland, descriptive text that accomplishes nothing except me returning the book to the library after struggling through a few pages of onerous prose. A writer has to set the pages on fire, so that the reader burns with every sentence, and a writer has to know when to burn hard, and when to ease off.

Otherwise writing is just super-simple, as Hemmingway says: "I go to the typewriter and bleed all over it."

"Why did you write My Sister Rosalie?"

Bella, and Rosalie, are trying the best they can to be true to themselves, even though, obviously in Rosalie's case, she has no idea she's being true to what's hurting her and Bella. And also Bella has no idea she is better than she thinks she is. But that's the beauty of this story.

This is a story about hope, even when you don't see it anymore. 

So.

I ... my daughter died. Rose Marie. And it hit the family so hard, even today, more than ten years later. Little Isabel said: "I miss Rose Marie." That hurt. A lot. And I wonder. Can she hope now? Who would she have been as a person? I wonder that. Would she have been happy, or sad, or selfish, or generous? I wonder if she's happy now, and I don't know that, and I'll never know that.

And so I wrote MSR. I don't know about Rose Marie, but maybe Rosalie can find hope, and maybe she can be happy, and maybe that can help, her, a little.