Quote Originally Posted by PhoeKun View Post
Not to put too fine a point on it, but... her skill at writing is far from excellent. It is bad. Actually, factually, bad.

To wit: she does not have control over her language, and her books are stuffed to capacity with unnecessary words. Themes, lines, words, and descriptions are repeated ad nauseum, occasionally even in rapid-fire succession. Largely, these fall on Bella's attempts at describing her darling Edward, but it's quite common throughout the books. These are the marks of amateur writing, and the Twilight series would be drastically improved if she were to take pruning sheers to her published drafts. Compare her writing to, say, Robert Olmstead (for the sake of dropping a lesser known name), and it becomes easier to understand.

You may be wondering how it is that the books read so "smoothly" if the writing is indeed as bad as I'm accusing it of being. Luckily, I've got an answer. Stephanie Meyers (I keep seeing it written both ways, does it have the s or not? Arg!) is not an idiot, by any stretch of the imagination. She has a very screwed up sense of romance and what is acceptable behavior, but she's not stupid. She's able to conceive of a story from start to finish, and she doesn't need to wrestle with grammar to pound out her sentences. What she writes does nothing to get in the reader's way. She does not move carefully, but she does move in a straight line from beginning to end. There's almost nothing but the story, that goes a long way to making it "flow". You will encounter nothing in Twilight more difficult to read than a Golden Age comic book. It can't help but read steadily, the poor thing tripped and fell down a hill at the very start. There's no way to get lost, and the pace can neither slow down nor speed up.

If Twilight can be praised, then the thing to praise it for is containing a whiff of mystery and wonder that will make most readers turn the next page. One cannot say she did not have an interesting idea for a story. Everyone has one novel in them, and nearly everyone has at least enough skill to put it out on the same level as Twilight. However, not everyone can find that one story inside them, so Ms. Meyers deserves some credit for unearthing what she did. But there's no value, no substance to Twilight. The writing is not good. It's merely there.
THIS. This right here... Is why I fan boy over Phoe. :3
Quoted for unalienable truth.