all you ever wanted to know about Breaking Dawn but were afraid to ask
(found on wank_report)

Stephenie Meyer, in her infinite wisdom, has posted a Breaking Dawn FAQ to her website.

"I'm not the kind of person who writes a Hamlet ending. If the fight had happened, it would have ended with 90% of the combatants, Cullen and Volturi alike, destroyed. There was simply no other outcome once the fight got started, given the abilities and numbers of the opposing sides. Because I would never finish Bella's story on such a downer—Everybody dies!—I knew that the real battle would be mental."

Oh noes! There could have been ROCKS FALL, 90% die!

"Well, I couldn't call her Jennifer or Ashley. What do you name the most unique baby in the world? I looked through a lot of baby name websites. Eventually I realized that there was no human name that was going to work for me, so I surrendered to necessity and made up my own. I don't approve of such shenanigans in real life, I don't even believe in getting creative with spellings for real kids! But this was fantasy, and no human name fit, so I did the best I could. "

No human name is speshul enough for the speshul magical baby!

Actually, snark aside, this reveals some interesting things about her writing process. Is that how most writers do it? IMHO she shouldn't have addressed anything about vampire procreation. That just pissed everyone off.

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white_serpent
2008-09-03 08:05 pm UTC (link)

Oh noes! There could have been ROCKS FALL, 90% die!

You know, she sounds like how I felt when I was a kid reading fairy tales-- "I want an adventure like this! As long as I can skip the parts where she's hungry, cold, or injured, AND I don't have to end up married to the guy. Because that would be cool." When I actually found myself thinking in literally those words, I realized how stupid it sounded.

Having not read them, the main complaint people have to the Twilight books is the lack of conflict. There's no real risk in the books, just a lot of artificially imposed angst.

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charmian
2008-09-03 10:29 pm UTC (link)

That answer could have been totally compressed into "two words: wish fulfillment." The merchant of venice example doesn't work because that's not an issue of evading a physical fight that's been built up. Heck, she introduced so many new characters anyhow that 90% of their side could have been killed off with only one or two main chara deaths.

I think my main complaint, issues about feminism and other thematic ones aside, is that the narrative is poorly structured and just boring at parts, and that the fights seem tacked on in terms of the structure, That probably does have something to do with the lack of conflict.

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