I sit in my best friend’s basement, watching the credits roll on one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen.

“Oh, my word,” I manage. “I honestly feel bad for Robert Pattinson. And Kristen Stewart. No one should have had to take part in such a disaster.”

“It’s accurate to the book, does that make it any better?” Best Friend 1 asks.

“No,” Replies Best Friend 2.

“Listen, I read the first book. I want you both to share in my suffering.”

I leave her house that night feeling shameful. “I have a reputation as an English major to uphold,” I decide indignantly. “There’s no way she’s getting me to read that book.”

A few days later, I started the book.

And this is what I learned from editing Stephanie Meyers’ Twilight:

1). Don’t let passive voice remain undead – let it die (mostly)

Deciding when to use active vs. passive voice is a difficult line to tread sometimes. For example, if you verbally recount a story to your friends about how your vampire boyfriend carried you through the woods, you can probably say, “So, he was carrying me through the woods, when suddenly blah, blah…isn’t he handsome?” (Then all your friends can say, “Yes, Bella, you’ve told us a million times.”)

But when writing, the pacing of your work changes dramatically. When your teachers tell you not to you use passive voice in your essay, they want to avoid reading “This is helpful because that, this was working because that was working,” and instead read “This remained a helpful tool because that, and this other thing worked as a result.” Read these two out loud. Doesn’t the second one sound more concise? No matter what you enjoy writing, using active voice helps your readers stay more engaged with your content.

2) “Suck out” the semicolons.

Semicolons are like Meyer’s vampires—rare, magical, and vague. They are not to be taken for granted, or overused, lest the reader grow triggered at the very sight of them in another piece of literature. When you use a semicolon, you bring two complete thoughts together to create a Frankensentence. In other words, semicolons are not substitutes for dashes or commas; they are a tool to be used sparingly if the sentence goes a little long, and you need to add a comma or two, but still want the result of one sentence. Do not use a semicolon like a sprinkle of salt, but a slice of jalapeño. Make it worthwhile.

The next time your friend shows you her new vamp experience with “I was surprised; I looked down, flushing, of course” You can say, “Bella, those might be complete sentences, but you have linked them together quite unnecessarily, and have failed the Frankensentence challenge.”

3) Bad pacing makes your readers batty

For those who remain pure and have not partaken of this book of masochistic vampires and bad writing: there is a scene in which our dear Bella is gang-herded into a bad part of town. It’s supposed to be terrifying, haunting to the core, but the author takes five full pages to get to the part where Bella is completely surrounded. Now, I’m all for building action. You need tension in order to get to a climax. But she takes so long to hype-up every single detail of this event that by the end I wanted Edward Cullen to come and bite my head off to spare me the rest.

When writing creatively, either in essay format or fiction, pay attention to how you want your reader to feel at any given time. Say you want her to experience the action, have her sit on the edge of her seat, holding on to your next sentence for dear life. Then, keep your sentences short. Make your readers wait. Keep their heart pounding because there’s stuff! Happening! How will the character make it? You just have to keep reading! The sentences flow quicker when they are shorter, because that’s how your character is experiencing good-paced action. Even when writing an essay, pacing can make a difference in how your reader engages with your text. If you continue a steady flow of short, medium-length, and long sentences, keeping it varied, you have a better chance of keeping the attention of your audience.

4) Don’t get lost in the…sparkle…of details (I know, that one is bad, sorry).

Whether you’re writing a paper or a story, getting lost in what you’re writing about can be pretty easy to do. In fact, sometimes it’s a good thing to look around and realize you’re swimming with all these details and poignant parts. But that’s the key word—poignant. Remember the heart of your piece. Recall why you chose this setting or that choice of words in order to reconnect with the over-arching theme. Your work’s message, the point of it all, is why your reader picked up your piece in the first place. Don’t let him or her down by giving him or her an info-dump on how you felt in every single class period of every single day for 249 whole pages. Make your details matter.

If you want to describe a leaf you found on a walk during your hike, the point is not to say, “The leaf was cool, I put it in my back pocket,” the point is to take your reader to a mind-space beyond the leaf to a question about life or humanity. Was the leaf still alive? If so, was it red like the blood of a cut you got last night? Or was it dark green, too pure a color to have originated from this messed-up world?

5) Make the heart of the piece immortal

This brings us to our fifth and final writing tip. Though Twilight was a long, nearly pointless waste of a perfectly good tree, it remained a cathartic experience for me to edit to my heart’s content. As I was doing this, however, I realized that this book has no plot. It has no final heart, no message or final battle that makes the readers say, “Yes! It was all justified for that one scene!”

In the preface, Bella muses that it’s probably significant to die for someone. The author introduces what she thinks is the heart of her piece on page 1 (also not a good idea). While Bella is right, when you arrive to where this musing lies chronologically, you realize that the person she wants to save is her mother. Her mother, who’s only contact with her daughter this entire book is a few emails and two distress calls. While saving one’s mother is indeed noble, it’s important for the reader to understand why you’re willing to do so other than “because she’s your mother.”

Bringing the heart of the piece to fruition is where your voice—not just your character’s, but yours—sets in. It’s the climax of all the claims you’ve made thus far, and it remains imperative that it resonates with your reader’s heart because that’s what she’ll remember the most after she puts your piece down. Therefore, dear writers, storytellers, and starving artists, don’t waste your time writing something that won’t matter after the final page is turned. Don’t write a mediocre story just so you can be done with it. Make an effort to connect with your reader on every level imaginable – break their hearts and speak to their souls, so they might see the glory you bring to your Father in Heaven through the talents He’s given you.