Is Twilight Bad Writing?   Part One

In my secret other life as a teacher, I attend a lot of seminars on English literature and on writing; I’ve found two things to be true about Stephanie Meyer and the Twilight phenomenon, still going strong after all this time. 

One is that the “intelligentsia” among educators hated the books.  Hated them with a passion.  They deplored them as having “horrible diction” (word choice), “elephantiasis of the pen” (she uses 500 words where 50 would suffice—even her fans concede that one) and ludicrous “I-love-you-so-much-it-hurts-he-groaned” writing style. 

The other one is that a lot of people at the conventions were, and still are, reading Twilight or one of its three sequels.   Some teach it in their classes. 

The first attitude, hating the books, is easy to cop:  Stephen King did it, and the King of pop horror should know whereof he speaks.  He calls Stephanie Meyer someone who “can’t write worth a darn . . . not very good,” and contrasts her with the equally successful J.K. Rowling, “a terrific writer” who is yards beyond Meyer.   He does concede that both authors are “speaking to young people” but it’s a night/day polarity.    

And of course he took a lot of flak from Twilight fans, but he had to have expected that.

At one teachers’ gathering I caught a good friend (I’ll call her Nancy) reading Breaking Dawn.  I was more than a little surprised to see her reading the fourth book (meaning she had read the series) and asked her why she was exposing herself to the ridicule of others by reading something like that at a writing convention.

“I read what I like,” she replied. 

I asked her why she liked the books.

She paused a moment and said, “Stephanie Meyer paid attention in English class.”

No, she hadn’t had Miss Meyer in her class, so don’t write Nancy for an autograph. 

She was referring to the one thing that Stephanie Meyer got RIGHT. 

First let’s look at what her critics say she got wrong. 

Her books are accused of having horrible diction.  She’s not alone; another author who has a spectacularly famous reputation has been accused of that same flaw by none other than Harold Bloom, Shakespearean authority par excellence, author of Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human, The Western Canon, and a number of other critical works, all dealing with good, well-written literature. 

He considers this really famous writer to be guilty of “horrible diction” and concludes that many of his pieces are “unreadable.” 

The author?  Edgar Allan Poe.  (Bloom hates Stephen King and J.K. Rowling, too, by the way). 

If you’ve read many of Poe’s works, with their overly ornate and busy sentences, you may concede Bloom’s point; Poe’s sentences are indecipherable or, at the very least, make for difficult reading. 

Tons of readers, especially young ones, still idolize him. 

The second problem is elephantiasis of the pen:  she uses far too many words. 

Well, Mozart, perhaps the greatest composer ever, at his first opera Abduction from the Seraglio, was told by Emperor Joseph II of Hungary that he used “too many notes.”  

Stephen King has said about his own work, in his autobiographical On Writing, that when he opens his mouth “all [his] guts fall out”; he has written some seriously wordy stuff in The Stand and It, so he’s as guilty as Meyer of letting the words flow. 

The greatest writers of all time have excess verbiage on their plates: Melville, Hawthorne, Chaucer (not all of them, of course—Dickinson’s poetry is always close to the bone, and some—not all—of Hemingway as well).   Even Shakespeare’s plays are usually performed cut. 

As for Stephanie Meyer’s writing style, however, having finally read the books, I think I’m in a position at least to comment on her writing, and the traditions from which her books spring.  Bad or no, she paid attention to the most important element, and succeeds with large audiences because of it. 

In part two, I’ll talk about what she got right. 

It didn’t make her a good writer, but she got it right.