in which there is some long-overdue Twilight hate

_{A preface
[I'll admit, I read all four books. All my friends were doing it, and it seemed like the thing to do. I know, I know, peer pressure is bad. Well I found that out. Anyway. I have lots of problems with the Twilight series, some of them more fleshed out in my head than others. Probably first and foremost are issues of content, that is, subjects, themes, and particularly the disturbingly anti-feminist messages that seem so glaringly obvious throughout the books. However, I'm in English-student mode this evening, so this post will focus mainly on form and style. Okay, disclaimer out of the way. ¡Adelante!]}

So, I've made this rant to a few people now, but I really just want to put it out there: speakers of American English DO NOT SAY "ER." Y'know, "er," the little filler word they use in place of "uh" in the Harry Potter books. They don't. Think about it. Have you ever, EVER, in conversation, heard a speaker of American English say "er" without consciously thinking about it? No. No you haven't. Because speakers of American English do not say it. They say "uh."

Now, the reason it's in Harry Potter is because the British *do* say it; however, spoken with a British accent, "er" would be basically indistinguishable from the American "uh." It's the same sound. They just spell it that way because they're British, and their 'r's don't work the same way ours do.

However, whenever I see it in a novel by an American, about American characters, it ticks me off, because it is WRONG. And it is particularly prevalent in one of my favorite targets of hatred, the Twilight series. Stephenie Meyer loves "er." Seriously. Pick a section of dialogue from any of those books, and besides horribly stilted and crappy prose that would make you cringe to hear out loud, you will also find "er" in large quantities.

I'm fairly sure this is because of Harry Potter, and the semi-creepy fetishization of all things British that has followed those books' rise in popularity among some groups on this side of the pond. I mean, you read any half-decent Harry Potter fanfiction (or even the truly terrible, actually), and you will likely find "er." And really, the only things that distinguish Twilight from really crummy fanfiction are that 1) the characters' names are not recognizable from a previously published work (though their personalities are generally direct lifts from any number of stock characters throughout the history of FOREVER), and 2) you're reading it on paper, not a computer screen.

And besides that, it really does have all the hallmarks of truly terrible fanfiction. The heroine is an obvious Mary Sue (didn't Meyer even come right out and say that Bella was based on herself? I can't find it now, but I'm sure I read that somewhere...), with a "flaw" (klutziness) that is supposedly major in her life, but perceived as everyone around her by adorable and/or endearing. The characters are, for the most part, completely and utterly flat. Seriously, some of them have real potential—the dad, hello?!—but Meyer just leaves them blank, with a few tacked-on adjectives or superficial descriptions serving as placeholders for depth. The dialogue is stilted and cheesy, and the prose in general is overly descriptive and weak (I love adjectives and adverbs far more than is healthy for a creative writing major, and even I was fed up!). And the entire plot is glaringly predictable: Edward wins. Edward is going to win from the first moment Bella sets eyes on him from across the cafeteria. Those die-hard Jacob fans were fooling themselves the entire time, because Bella's feelings were were described so heavy-handedly, it was like Meyer took one of the Cullens' baseball bats and whacked the reader over the head with it, shouting, "EDWARD IS GOING TO WIN!" Really. Just like that.

But the coup de grâce, the absolute most truly terrible fanfiction moment, was the child's name in Breaking Dawn. I thought real people knew you weren't supposed to combine two fairly normal names into some strange, exotic-sounding bit of nonsense and then label a person with that. Seriously. Reneé: perfectly respectable name. Esme: a little soap-opera-y, but okay, I can deal with that. But Renesme?! If there were a kid named that, she would be laughed out of kindergarten, by the teacher if no one else. The epilogue to the Harry Potter series was bad enough, what with the kids being named things like "Albus Severus" and "Theodore James" or whatever the hell they were...I remarked to numerous people at the time that I loved the book, up until that, at which point it sounded like bad fanfiction. Which is exactly what the Twilight books sound like, except all through.

Oh and speaking of Harry Potter, I must express my extreme distaste with the near CONSTANT comparisons between Stephenie Meyer and J.K. Rowling.* They have both written extremely popular series of (at least nominally) fantasy books geared mainly towards children and/or young adults. This is where the comparisons should end. While I recognize that J.K. has her faults as a writer, her stories were well plotted, her characters were (for the most part) fleshed out and realistic, and the books were genuinely entertaining. The Twilight books share none of these characteristics. Even Stephen King thinks so—in what is probably my favorite bit of reporting ever, he is quoted in the U.K.'s Guardian as saying, "The real difference [between Meyer and Rowling] is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can't write worth a darn." Now, let's be honest kids, Stephen King is not a stellar writer. He writes entertaining stories that sell well (though I found his Dark Tower series to be highly enjoyable). And if even Stephen King thinks you're a bad writer, well, that's saying something, y'know?

Anyway, I'm beginning to exhaust my hate for the evening, but I do want to quote this passage from an article in Time Magazine, contrasting Meyer's writing with J.K. Rowling's:

Rowling pieces her books together meticulously, detail by detail. Meyer floods the page like a severed artery. She never uses a sentence when she can use a whole paragraph. Her books are big (500-plus pages) but not dense--they have a pillowy quality distinctly reminiscent of Internet fan fiction. (Which she'll readily grant: "I don't think I'm a writer; I think I'm a storyteller," Meyer says. "The words aren't always perfect.") Whereas Rowling's works maintain a certain English reserve, Meyer's books are full of gusting emotions. Bella never stops gasping and swooning and passing out and waking up screaming from nightmares. Her heart is always either pounding or stopping. (Bella's histrionics don't feel at all unrealistic. When you're writing about adolescents, melodrama and realism are the same thing.) Rowling labors over her intricate plots, but Meyer's stories never bend or twist or branch. They have one gear, and she guns it straight ahead till the last page.

This passage in particular, and the article in general, were written in what seemed to be a praising tone. That makes me sad. If any of the above were ever said about a piece of my writing, I'd probably want to throw it out and start over from scratch. If this is what the public wants, I shall never, ever be published. And I can't find it in my heart to say that'd be an entirely bad thing.

_{*But, you might be saying, isn't that exactly what's going on in most of this post? And I would answer you no, what I am doing is contrasting, not comparing, which is entirely different and completely warranted in this situation.}