|
Renee
read and liked
Meg's
review of Breaking Dawn (Twilight, #4):
"Stephenie Meyer is really starting to piss me off. I'm actually ANGRY at her. Why? Because she's the great untapped potential of our time. She was born with such an innate gift for storytelling. It's uncanny. I mean, as a storyteller, she...more
Stephenie Meyer is really starting to piss me off. I'm actually ANGRY at her. Why? Because she's the great untapped potential of our time. She was born with such an innate gift for storytelling. It's uncanny. I mean, as a storyteller, she's one of those six-out-of-five-stars kind of talents. But as long as her writing clocks in at the zero mark, she'll never reach greatness. HER INTERMITTENT GENIUS IS KILLING ME!!! I really love her stories--a fact which embarrasses me... and it doesn't have to! I could be PROUD of the fact that I love her, if only... Actually, I'm plagued by a long list of "if onlys" as I read her novels. Here are a few:
IF ONLY SHE COULD SERVE THE MAIN DISH WITHOUT A SIDE OF CORNBREAD SMOTHERED IN CHEESE SAUCE. Actually, to say her writing is corny or cheesy doesn't even touch it. Some of Edward's dialogue actually gets the bile rising in my throat. Literally. Maybe you guys go for that kind of stuff, but it makes me want to scream, "Yeah right!" These poor teens addicted to Edward are destined to increase our future divorce rate a hundred fold. Why does that drive me crazy? Because of Meyer's intermittent genius. Every thirty pages or so, she will write a truly touching moment full of honesty and warmth--and absolutely NO CHEESE--and I think to her, "See, Steph! You can do it! Why include all this crap in between???" (I forgot to mention that I sometimes give her pep talks in my head, huh... It's a little weird, but go with it.)
IF ONLY SHE DIDN'T HAVE THAT PER-PAGE CLICHE QUOTA. I'm sincerely convinced she has to include a minimum of five cliches per page or her editors won't publish her. There's no other excuse for it! Aren't you guys tired of things happening as quick as lightening, or reading the way the protagonist's heart breaks into a million pieces, etc.??? I AM! By the time Stephenie wrote that Bella literally began to "see red" when she was angry, I wanted to scream at her, "NO!!! Don't make her see red when she's angry, like she's Sponge Bob or something!!! Why all these cliches??? You obviously have a decent vocabulary and a wonderful ability to craft words, why write the exact same phrases we hear everyday in soap operas??? Why, dear Stephenie, why???" It makes me... (so mad I could spit--or insert any other hackneyed phrase of your own choosing). It's like she doesn't actually write her own sentences. She just cuts and pastes from the worst lines in history. SAVE ME!!!!
IF ONLY I COULDN'T SEE WHAT WAS COMING AS CLEARLY AS ALICE CAN. The plot is so predictable, I feel like I've already written it in my mind. Don't you? Maybe it's just me, but being taken by surprise is one of my greatest thrills as a reader, and in the thousands of Stephenie Meyer pages I have read, it happened only ONCE (page 360 of Breaking Dawn... didn't see THAT one coming and it knocked me flat on my unsuspecting butt... easily the best moment in the whole series). That is positively INEXCUSABLE. Didn't Meyer's beginning writing class instructor tell her to make the list of possible things that could happen and go with the most INTERESTING. He must have said PREDICTABLE that day in his lecture, and that's how she got confused.
IF ONLY ALL HER CHARACTERS WEREN'T MORMON. Obviously Bella, Edward, Jacob and the others aren't Mormon. But she wrote them that way. (Lest someone be offended, let me clarify that *I* am Mormon). They do not talk like real people in the real world. Sorry. They talk like Mormons (with the occasional "damn" thrown in, proving she did make SOME attempt at fighting her natural Mormonness). I'm not saying they need to swear more... I just haven't heard as many euphemistic substitutions since I watched an episode of the classic Batman TV series as a kid. Holy cow! Geez! Golly! It's distractingly corny. She talks like... ME! A Mormon! Each time I turned the page, I half expected Bella to exclaim, "Oh my heck!"
IF ONLY STEPHENIE WOULD EDIT. I'm not talking about the approximately 500 typos that caused me to re-read entire paragraphs in order to understand what was going on (dear fancy publishing company, can't you afford just three anal readers like me to proofread for you???)... I'm talking about WRITER'S editing. It's like Stephenie sits down, turns out about forty pages a day and never looks at them again. Didn't she learn to go back over the writing? To circle the cliches and to-be verbs? To iron out the script so it flowed? To truly CRAFT her writing, instead of just settling for whatever popped into her head first??? (which happens to be brilliant, just not POLISHED). SHE'S KILLING ME!!!
Once again, why is she killing me? Intermittent genius. It's not that she always sucks. I'll read some amazing paragraph and talk to Stephenie again in my head. "Why? Why do you do this to me? You obviously CAN write. SO WHY DON'T YOU????" I love her sense of pacing. I love the way she captures the electricity of crucial moments. Her dialogue is dazzling. There are so many moments of intermittent genius. If she could only be consistently, ridiculously awful. Then I just wouldn't read her.
Aren't you being too hard on her, Meg? YES!!! Yes I am! That's what makes me the angriest of all. I'm reminding myself of this judge I had once in a piano competition. I finished my twenty page solo and he said, "That was very good..." then he leaned forward menacingly and added, "Now why wasn't it PERFECT?" I thought to myself, "Um... because I'M not perfect, maybe..." Then he added, "The first page was perfect. Why wasn't the REST of it perfect?" He then concluded that I must have been lazy, which was far from the truth. I'd almost literally worked my fingers to the bone (see, if I were proofreading my novel right now and read that cliche, I would have replaced it at this point) preparing for the competition.
Am I asking Stephenie to be perfect? NO!!! Just worthy of her own talent! It all came to her too easily. That's the problem. She even admits it herself. She just sat down at a keyboard one day, decided she was going to be a novelist, started writing, then immediately found an editor (who obviously sucks) and a publisher. Instant success! There's a reason why writers usually have to work for it! IT MAKES THEM BETTER AT WHAT THEY DO.
I still haven't read "Host." Honestly, I'm afraid I'll like it. Then I'm afraid that I'll rip out each page one by one in maddening frustration. This is my future Stephenie Meyer plan. Maybe someday, when I stop "seeing red" over reading this last evidence of her wasted potential, I'll pick up another of her books. And I'll read it obsessively in two days, like I always do, because she's a genius. BUT I'LL EXPECT MORE OF HER. We ALL should. And if she doesn't try harder... SOON... I'll stop reading. Because it's just too painful.(less)
"
|
]]>
Renee
took the never-ending book quiz.