McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
despite the flack I'm going to get....
MoSeS:
--- Quote from: neurovore on July 30, 2010, 03:26:25 PM ---I think you just made my head explode, dude.
--- End quote ---
I had to fix that for clarification, it was a little ambiguous, and I added some more comments.
I agree that Rowling is a much better writer, but I have read King's writitng and he really isn't a very good writer so I am not sure where he gets off telling a girl almost half his age that her writing isn't very good.
Kind of like if I took a elementary school kids paper and told him it sucks, and that his writing is not as good as mine.
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: MoSeS_ on July 30, 2010, 03:31:43 PM ---I had to fix that for clarification, it was a little ambiguous.
--- End quote ---
I got what you meant; it's just the thought of considering Anne Rice's prose great makes my head hurt. Mind you, I could say the same for Dickens, against whom I bear a non-trivial grudge for breaking the omniscient narrator.
MoSeS:
Well to be honest I am probably not as well read as most, and of most that I have read Rice has been one of the better IMO and when I read her it always reminded me of Dickens style for some reason.
I have also read much of King and I kind feel the same about King as I do Meyer. It's like the both have potentially GREAT stories, but they also have an equal amount of shortcomings as the do quality material. (except King has had more time to improve but doesn't, in fact I think he get worse and worse)
I have read many classics as well such as Ernest Hemingway, etc. in school, so I have an idea of what is considered good prose.
To me Jim has a nice balance. Not overly pretentious (which Anne Rice might be a little), and not overly simple, but simple enough to enjoy, and not all over the place bouncing off the nuthouse walls like King.
Ironically Roland Deschain of Gilead is in my top 5 favorite characters....maybe......
ok I know he would be in top 5 book characters, but if I include super-heroes and movies, maybe not.
Starbeam:
--- Quote from: MoSeS_ on July 30, 2010, 03:16:15 PM ---Personally I am a love/hate patron of Meyer, I hate most of the things that make Twilight popular, but having read the books, they ironically have much going for them as they do going against them. Her prose is not bad, it's not great like Anne Rice's is, but it's not bad considering she is pretty young. It is at least better than Stephen King's prose. Her character developement is pretty good, but Twilight mostly suffers from the dialogue and girlyness.
I have heard good things about The Host, I will have to give that one a whirl.
Considering that this is early in Meyer's career, maybe if the fame hasn't gone to her head, maybe she will mature into a great author.
*Trebuchet? I learned a knew type of catapult.
Interestingly enough:
While comparing Meyer to J. K. Rowling, Stephen King stated, "the real difference [between J. K. Rowling and Meyer] is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer, and Stephenie Meyer can't write worth a darn. She's not very good."
Meyer was the second bestselling author of the decade, according to a list published by Amazon, beaten only by JK Rowling. Meyer had four books on the bestselling list, compared to Rowling, who had three.
Funny that King criticize's her prose when his prose is not so great and is light years behind great writer's like Anne Rice, Charles Dickens, JRR Tolkein, etc.
--- End quote ---
Meyer's writing is mediocre, which is okay for a YA book like Twilight. Rice is extremely purple and verbose, with a lot of words that could really be cut, and really, she didn't get much better over time. King knows how to write, and he does a really good job when he writes about writing, but he doesn't take his own advice most of the time. And he's all over the place because he sits down and writes without much of any kind of plan. I would think his editor is also somewhat at fault there, too, for not making him rewrite. Though that's just a guess. Rowling is decent, though she has her own problems, though those are more with the actual story than the writing, other than over using adverbs in dialogue tags.
On a somewhat related tangent, you really can't compare Rice, Dickens, Tolkien, and King. Maybe King and Rice, because they are contemporaries, but the others are from different times with different writing styles. And on knowing what's considered good prose because of classics--that can differ by opinion. Plus something like Dickens might be considered a classic, and might write well enough, but he was very verbose. He got paid by the word.
I would also take pretty much anything Stephen King says with a huge handful of salt because he's also said that he wishes he remembered writing Cujo cause he thinks that's one of his best books. I've read a lot of his stuff; that one is probably the worst I've read.
daranthered:
The best I can say of Meyer's writing is that it's workmanlike. It's the characters I really can't stand.
King's writing is actually pretty good, especially in relation to other bestselling authors out there. His characters are some of the best developed I've ever read in stand alone books. That he writes without a plan, I view simply as one way to approach writing. You can't change how you write.
Tolkien was a scholar of Middle-English, and it shows in his writing. It's long on descriptions and speeches, and short on action. If you think differently; you're thinking about the movies. The rather dense writing is forgiven, when it is forgiven, because of the scope and idea of the novel.
In all the examples the important aspect is the story. Meyer's story can, at best, be said to have a very narrow audience. Both King and Tolkien tell very different types of stories, but they are interesting stories. King, by using suspense, and Tolkien by sheer scale and almost mind numbing detail.
One of the ironic twists to a discussion like this is, that if you look at the nuts and bolts technical aspects of writing, J.K. Rowling usually comes out as the winner. The series is written for children who are still learning sentence structure and vocabulary. As a result, they were held to a very high standard of grammatical correctness. The sentences are simple, true, but I think that makes what she did in creating the world she did even more amazing.
Anne Rice scares me. possibly because she's a born again fundamentalist vampire from beyond the Missisipp' So I wont say anything bad about her.
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