lliira

Overall, I find Stephenie Meyer's writing style (if it can even be called that) more offensive than anything else about her books because I feel like Meyer is actively insulting her readers by writing like this, by not bothering with grammar, coherency, or the most basic research.

I recognize a lot of stuff in Meyer's writing that's common in first drafts. Lots of sighing and chuckling and speech tags in general, lots of adverbs, lots of passive voice, lots of repetition, lots of unclear references. But most of us care enough to go back and fix that stuff because we realize that writing is work and that we are not perfect. Meyer's sheer arrogance grosses me out.

I think it's also telling that her editors didn't clean it up. Almost every writer has some blind spots, even when it comes to grammar. (Commas trip me up, for instance.) We need editors. Yet thousands of editors have been fired in the U.S. in the past decade because they were seen as expendable, and that frightens me. One of the reasons we lost so much knowledge after the fall of western Rome was that people forgot how to read and write proper Latin and Greek. A large part of that was due to politically-motivated cuts in government funding of education, particularly under Justinian.

There's only so much even the best editors could do with Meyer's scribbles, though. I feel like Meyer thinks she's doing readers a favor by letting us see her writing. She likes to play little games with us, such as telling us that Bella's mom looks just like Bella before we know what Bella looks like. Meyer also likes to tell us that Bella is thinking but not tell us what she is thinking. As if it would be too personal for Bella to reveal her thoughts in this first-person fictional narrative.

Meyer never bothers to attempt to seduce the reader. While I'm not a fan of the "bleeding on my keyboard" school of writing, the opposite isn't any good either. I wouldn't want a guy to ask me to marry him on the first date, but a guy who acts like his mere presence should grant him access to my heart and body is every bit as bad. And if he doesn't care about truth, mopes all the time, throws backhanded insults at me, has bad grammar, and is a bigoted jackass who pretends to be deep...

As a writer, Stephenie Meyer is a Nice Guy.