Friday, July 27, 2012
While most of the non-teenage girl universe has acknowledged that the Twilight books are not particularly well-written, some literary experts from Arizona's middle-of-the-state institute of higherish learning, Girls Gone Wild University and Casino, are taking a bold stance in a new book, that Stephenie Meyer's series of books are...good?
So what has drawn so many fans, particularly teenage girls, to the “Twilight” series?First, according to Blasingame, Meyer’s skill at “conjuring caring and intertwining between her protagonist, Bella, and young women readers is undeniable.” She also has been successful because she writes with detailed description, Blasingame said.
“She avoids passive voice and opens sentences with what she wants the reader to see and know first, getting right to the action of the sentence.”
Blasingame added, “In every sentence, Meyer leads with the picture that she wants in the reader’s mind and then moves on to the sentence’s action, described by verbs that are spot-on accurate for conveying exactly what she wants the reader to experience through Bella.”
Blasingame used a computer program to analyze the language usage Meyer’s writing, choosing three random but consecutive pages from the first and last books in the series.
He found that Meyer’s writing style/voice “is remarkably consistent, almost mechanically so. One of the most difficult things for authors of novels, especially new writers of long novels, is to sustain voice and style. This author’s statistics, however, change not a whit from the first book to the last.”
He also found that Meyer’s writing style is “simple and uncomplicated but also clear, coherent, and never ambiguous,” the readability is high, and that she consistently uses participial phrases to end sentences.
“Stephenie is a master at giving you a reward for going to the next page,” Blasingame said. “She builds suspense well with very selective prose. She has quite an imagination. It touches something in the unconscious mind.”
Another possibility: teenage girls like vampires and enjoy stories in which boring, uninteresting young women are swept up in an exciting world not of their own creation, regardless of how well those stories are actually told. That's just my theory, though.
[HT: Phoenix New Times]
Tags: Stephenie Meyer , arizona state literary criticism , girls gone wild university and casino , twilight series , twilight literary criticism , James Blasingame , Kathleen Deakin , Laura A. Walsh , Video