How do you feel about the Breaking Dawn controversy?

How do you feel about the Breaking Dawn controversy?

By Stephenie Meyer

Meyer, Stephenie. “How do you feel about the Breaking Dawn controversy?” Stephenie Meyers, Web. 29 Mar. 2010.

http://www.stepheniemeyer.com/bd_faq.html

Summary: This article begins by asking Stephenie Meyers how she feels about the Breaking Dawn controversy. She explains how it did make her sad, but it was something she expected. There was more than she expected, but says it was because she sold more books than she expected. She also said it was bigger on both the positive and negative sides. Meyers explains how the bigger the audience gets, you’re going to have a larger group of people who won’t like it. Everyone has their own tastes in books and that is why there are so many varieties of books out there. No book is a great book for everyone. She tells how there are many really popular books on the shelves that she didn’t enjoy at all and vice versa. There are many that she loved that not very many people enjoyed.

When she publishes her books she knows they are not going to be right for everyone because she writes them for a very specific audience. With Breaking Dawn, there were expectations so big and intense that she predicted there would be a big negative reaction, but she says that in the end it is really just a book. No kind of entertainment is going to meet everyone’s expectations. It might be exactly what some were hoping for, but there is always going to be another who was hoping for something else.

Meyers ends by saying there is nothing she can do, Breaking Dawn either entertained you or it didn’t. She says that if she could go back in time she would write the exact same story. She said this is the story she wanted and she loved it. It was everything she was hoping for in her last novel of the Twilight saga and people’s reactions can’t change that. Meyers does clarify that she did not write Bella’s character as an anti-feminist heroine and that Bella is not promoting teen pregnancy because she is married on her honeymoon when she gets pregnant.

Analysis: From this article I get a sense that Meyers doesn’t care about all the negative attention. She comes right out and says she expected it and in the end she wouldn’t change her story line. It is hard to have people unhappy with her, but she is okay with it.

Response: I was interested to read Stephanie Meyers comment about all the controversy with Breaking Dawn. I think most of the controversy she is getting from this book is ridiculous. It seems like most of the people are just going off what they have heard without ever reading the book. Like trying to say she is promoting teens to have a baby, when she was married when she got pregnant. I don’t know anyone who feels it’s inappropriate for married couples to get pregnant. Overall, I feel it was important for Meyers to have a say in what she feels about the Saga controversy.

Stephen King Vs Stephenie Meyer: The Controversy

Stephen King Vs Stephenie Meyer: The Controversy

By Marciano Guerrero

Guerrero, Marciano. "Stephen King Vs Stephenie Meyer: The Controversy." Article Alley. Yedda, 4 Aug. 2009. Web. 8 Mar. 2010. .

Summary: This article begins by giving a quote that Stephen King said in a recent interview. He said “Both Rowling and Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people… The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.”

Guerreo then says that from this interview King gave the impression that he was jealous of young popular writers. Fans of Stephenie Meyer well telling people to not buy his books and that he has no popular books today so he cannot see a young writer succeeding.

The author then states that he has read almost all of Stephen King’s books and not one of Stephenie Meyer’s books, so he bought a copy of Twilight and read it. Guerreo then gives an excerpt from the first paragraph in chapter 8 of Twilight. After the quote he picks apart the entire thing. He says it’s inartistic, childish, and as Truman Capote would call it she is “typing” not writing. The whole paragraph is just subject, verb, object. To compare her writing he then bought several of Jo Rowling’s books of the Harry Potter series and he was surprised. He said Rowling is a master of writing. There were balanced sentences, rhythm, and rhetoric. Because Stephenie Meyers writes for children her books are not consider literary by critics and he say that eventually she will just be known as “Mark Twain, C.S. Lewis, Kipling, and Dickens. “

To finish the article Guerreo concludes by saying that Stephen King might be right in his criticism of Stephenie Meyers, but not because he is jealous, but because she “isn’t writing at all, but typing.”

Analysis: From this article I get a sense that Marciano Guerreo agrees with Stephen King. He does not say he hates Stephenie Meyers writing, just that she writes childish.

Response: I disagree with the article. Marciano Guerrero is basing his opinion on one book and more specifically on one paragraph from Twilight. If this were my article I would at least give a list of horrible paragraphs, but he can only state one. This to me comes across that he had to search for one and finally 152 pages into the book in chapter 8, he finds one.

He also says he bought Twilight and then says he bought several Harry Potter books and has read almost every Steven King book. He is not equally comparing all three authors so I don’t think he has a valid point.

As far as what Steven King says I would think he would have to be jealous in some way. This article says he has written several books and I do not know of one of his books, but people across the world know of Stephenie Meyers and it has only been 7 years since she started writing.