What People Actually Mean When They Say Twilight Is Badly Written

Someone on Reddit asked recently why Twilight gets dismissed as "bad writing" when it reads, to them, like a perfectly solid page-turner. Here's the answer I keep coming back to.

What exactly is wrong with the writing in Twilight?
by u/Gautier_Alias in writing

There are good storytellers and good prosaists. Some wildly successful writers — Rowling, Dan Brown, Meyer — are wonderful storytellers but aren't knocking anyone out with their prose. When you read a book like that, you tell people about the part where this character did this, or the big twist. With a more prose-driven author, you'd quote a passage that states something in a way that sticks with you. Different gear, different goal.

When an author makes a lot of money on something that is pop-culturally relevant, not prose-driven, and not serious in an academically literary sense, they get dismissed as "a bad writer." Mostly, this is because quality and success aren't on the same trajectory, and many incredibly talented and marginally successful writers make a point to shit-talk every success by an author they consider beneath them. Some of that's sour grapes, some of it's fair, most of it's both at the same time.

But they asked a specific question, so here's the specific answer. The prose-level complaints about Twilight usually come down to a handful of habits.

One is repetition. Edward is dazzling, perfect, godlike, chiseled, marble, beautiful, on and on. There's a famous fan tally that "dazzle" and its variants show up about a hundred times across the series. A more confident writer trusts you to remember the guy is hot after the fifteenth pass.

Another is adverb-laden dialogue tags. People say things scornfully, breathlessly, dangerously, witheringly, when the stronger prose we're all supposed to aim for tends to put the emotional weight inside the dialogue itself and let the tag just be "he said."

A third is that Bella is a deliberately thin narrator, which is part of why the books work as wish-fulfillment. Readers self-insert and pour themselves into the empty space. But "deliberately thin narrator" and "vivid, specific narrator" are very different craft choices, and the literary crowd values the second.

So when people say "bad writing," they don't mean the book doesn't work. It clearly works. You just felt it work on you, and that's a real skill, harder than it looks. They mean that at the sentence level, it's not doing what sentence-level craft people prize.

Both can be true. You can learn pacing and emotional momentum from Meyer and learn sentence-making from someone else. Most writers are better at one than the other anyway. The lucky few are good at both.

Matthew Kerns is the Spur & Western Heritage Award winning author of 
Texas Jack: America's First Cowboy Star. He is currently querying his first novel.