Twilight for Boys

There is a style of writing popularized by Stephanie Meyer but existing long before her and her creations. It is characterized by a fast paced, creative plot and a sloppy dramatic writing style. It originated with pulp fiction and dime store novels. I always thought that pulp fiction was just something to do with that weird movie that seems to have something to do with Halloween, but the term came from quick writing printed on cheap wood pulp paper.

 I'll freely admit that I read Twilight, and I liked them a lot the first time through. In the beginning, I was quick to defend Meyer against her attackers, but after trying to get through the books again I realized that most of her talent lies in storytelling rather than writing. I just read a popular juvenile fiction book called The Maze Runner by James Dashner. The plot could have made it really exciting, but Dashner's haste to tell his story and inattentiveness to detail made reading his book a chore.

I know everyone reads for different reasons, and I have found that I relish reading writing that has been labored over and worked and reworked till it is in its finest form. I love authors that use long and previously undiscovered words that I can look up and enrich my own vocabulary. One of my favorite authors who practically made this style her own is Robin McKinley. What kind of writing do you prefer? What are some good examples of it to share with me?

Some of McKinley's books

Gillmore Gush

That gush stands for gushy, as in the sound two fat things make when they splosh into each other, not as in I'm about to gush over the Gillmore Girls episode that I just watched with my girlfriend. Truthfully, it is not my first time attempting The Gillmore. In high school I ended up watching The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants after a prom date. I thought the dark haired girl was really pretty, and I learned that she was on Gillmore Girls, so next time I was watching TV I flicked it on. Then off again a few minutes later. I was surprised that a popular show like this had cheap cinematography and (super) cheesy lines. The portion I watched even had spoken lines that didn't match up with lip movements like a Chinese translation movie. Anyway, watched Gillmore Girls yesterday. The episode included a renaissance wedding for those of you who want to orient yourselves. I passed over the cheese-gush, since I already had witnessed that, and my overarching feeling coming away was that it made things kind of awkward between my girlfriend and I. There wasn't anything hugely uncomfortable or sexual going on on-screen, but there were some innuendos I wasn't expecting and a male stripper scene in which Jayni covered my eyes with her hand. End of story: Leave Gillmore to the girls.

Imbibed Opinions and Ideas

This afternoon I was reading from "The Best American Essay 2006" although I was supposed to be reading for another class. You know how tempting essays can be though :) And I found a fantastic quote about media by Poe Ballentine in his essay "501 Minutes to Christ". The protagonist is watching TV here goes:

"One night, without warning, H. Ross Perot's earnest nasal rant about the arrogant complacency of the American people triggers the realization of my own arrogant complacency, and self-reproach suddenly gurgles up to my eyelids like storm water in a backed-up sewer. I think to myself: I'm thirty-six years old and rotting in front of a television set. The electrons that bomb that cathode-ray tube are crumbling the cartilage of my soul, eating away my youth and the children in my loins. I don't need to see another riot, or plane crash, or evil twin, or clever light-beer commercial, or guy pointing a gun at me, or steroid millionaire swatting a home run. I snap off the tube, and all those emotions that have been sluicing into my veins, all the opinions and ideas I have mistaken for my own, zip dizzily up into the atmosphere, and I am suddenly a man alone on a fold-out couch in the empty darkness of an add-on room."

That last part especially is what motivated me to climb back up to the top floor for this book so I could type it up. The first is admittedly melodramatic, but I liked the phrase that the ideas and emotions from the TV were actually not his own, and when the source was switched off, they fizzled away and he was left empty.