despite the flack I'm going to get....

[meg_evonne]

Despite flack, Stephanie Meyer's The Host from page 118 on has a strong female Heinlein style to it that I like. At least through page 200 where I am.  I refuse to duck.  Okay, who threw the tomato?

[Apocrypha]

  Okay, who threw the tomato?

Not me, I threw the pineapple.

[KWPech]

Huh? Sorry, I didnt hear you. I was working on loading the trebuchet. 

[MoSeS]

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.

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

Her prose is not bad, it's not great like Anne Rice,

I think you just made my head explode, dude.

[MoSeS]

I think you just made my head explode, dude.

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]

I had to fix that for clarification, it was a little ambiguous.

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]

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.

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.

         

[Thrythlind]

I haven't read Meyer yet, but Anne Rice's book is only the second one that I set down without ever finishing.  The other being Moby Dick.

I've read the Silmarillion multiple times for the fun of it, even the Book of Lost Tales and Unfinished Tales (rife with Tolkien's son putting in commentary all over the place so that it breaks up the text)...heck I got an unabridged audio CD copy of the Silmarillion which I read along with to make sure it was unabridged...

and enjoyed it

But Rice?

Rice...

I don't think there's enough money to make me pick up another of her books....ever....

One bout of torture was enough

Rice's Interview book just plods and plods and plods.  It's like an emotional black hole that just leaves you with a numb lack of interest where the only thing keeping you going is a sheer determination to finish any book you start reading.

Seriously, she's the Mordor of the writing world and I'm not going back into that.

As to King, his writing style seems to be somewhat inconsistent (some parts are incredibly more technically competent than others) but I'm wondering if that's not on purpose.  One thing I can say, I thoroughly enjoy most of his stories.

[Enjorous]

Read this topic and my head just exploded. I don't think I could post a reply right now without getting banned.

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

I haven't read Meyer yet, but Anne Rice's book is only the second one that I set down without ever finishing.

*cheeerlead*cheerlead*cheerlead*

 The other being Moby Dick.

...darn. And you were doing so well.

Moby Dick is awesome, it's like the Cryptonomicon of the 19th century, and also does amazing pacing things.

[Biffy Pyro]

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.

1) JK Rowling is NOT a good writer, she is popular there is a difference, for one her constant use of deus ex machina (roughly translated "gods in the machine") excludes her from ever being great and her books often suffer from pace and clarity issues especially her later ones.

2) the same goes for stephanie meyer from what i hear although i have never read her books.

I don't hate twilight per se but i hate the massive amounts of attention it gets and the fans

[Enjorous]

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 to fundamentally disagree with this statement. Yes some of Kings books are long winded, wordy, twisting, etc. But he has all the elements necessary to tell a story correctly, his characters always develop naturally (even when they do take a long while to make basic changes), conflict that develops from page one. Take The Gunslinger for example conflict is established on the first line. "The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed." Meyer does very little of this. Twilight for example has no real hard hitting conflict until several hundred pages in, the character development is almost non existent and when it does exist it is very artificial. A character going from avoidant to co-dependent in the course of a few months is absurd.

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.

Hemingway is not a good example of good prose. He's a reporter at heart and it shows in his lexicon and syntax. For good prose look to: Twain (for his use of dialect) Orwell, Steinbeck, and for someone writing in a similar time and style Jack London has much better prose than Hemingway

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.

I have to agree that King does tend to bounce from place to place, It comes to mind. But as darenthered said he writes without scope, he doesn't limit himself to one character or one particular event. A lot of his books take place over long periods of time with the build up happening slowly. Very rarely does he start in medias res as Jim does.