Twilight Review

So.. I’m reading a book……

My niece is reading it so it was just sitting there on my twig side table in the living room. Taunting me! I have to take a break from quilting because I’ve worn a hole in my fucking finger again. Don’t tell me about thimbles… I don’t like them. And yes I have some other books I’m supposed to read… I think Loree has handed over five or six in the last couple weeks but…. I doubt any of those is going to hit the spot and I already reread Wuthering Heights a couple weeks ago.

So there I was… curled up in the giant chair by the fire reading… Twilight.

The writing is terrible. Occasionally confusing sentence structure…. poor word choice to the point that you wonder how someone who doesn‘t have the brain power to figure out what word the author should have used even knows what the hell is going on… endless trite phrasing, predictable plotting and characters you can’t even hate - just that if the boat were going down you wouldn’t go out of your way to get them in the life raft. And once in awhile the author tosses in a bizarrely placed five dollar word and you can practically feel the swelling as  the author’s “I’m improving teenage vocabulary” ego pumps up.

But under that is the story. And it’s a good story.  It’s romance. It’s sex cloaked as vampire. It’s teen angst.

So I keep reading. And I pick at the less than stellar writing in my mind even as I get pulled into the story going on under the words and  I keep thinking Jesus god almighty this could have been so fucking good.

There are quite a few writers/ personalities on my sub list that complain about cultural phenomena’s they deem beneath them for variant reasons. They sneer and point and criticize … and it’s easy to do with something like Twilight. Sometimes they hate it just because so many love it. Other times it’s a more genuine distaste for anything poorly done. Often it’s both; that it could be so poorly done and loved so much by so many anyway is definitely something to take notice of.

But they’re missing the point. I know plenty of people who love Twilight and I’ve never heard any of them claim they love it because they think it’s great writing. (those are the Harry Potter people and I’ll read that another day)

It’s the same on the blogs. Most of us are subbed to lots of writers and honestly… how many of them are great writers? We’re not reading because they can conjugate a verb or never dangle a modifier… are we? I don’t think so. The best blogs pull us in because they make us the writers personal confidant. If they’re well written so much the better but it’s certainly not the first requirement, not the thing that pulls us in.

 It’s the same all over with our entire culture. People are rejecting the idea that the structure of a thing matters more than how it makes them feel. I find it fascinating. Of course it sucks ass for all the “great” writers NOT getting published and ending up on best seller lists who maybe have the story, the thing, and the skills. But honestly…… I don’t know many who are actually trying. Maybe you have to be a bit stupid to show up in a publishing house. Maybe all that structure would take away the feeling and that‘s really what we‘re here for.

November 20, 2009