That may be the case from a certain perspective, but the question that comes to my mind is this: if it had gone through another edit and changed substantially, would it have been the success it was? Remember, in its published form Meyer's agent turned down something like a $300,000 advance. Turned down. For a complete unknown quantity and first-time author. They settled on $750,000. That's not the sort of thing that makes you think "Hmmmm, maybe this needs to be redone."
I don't think the writing itself is that bad. I can point to a sentence here or there in many books, but on the whole it was competently done, though nothing stellar. You also have to keep in mind the target audience. Why is Bella worrying about her clothes? Because that's the sort of thing teenage girls are apt to talk about (and, consequently, the sort of thing teenage girls are apt to read about).
On the one teen-targeted project I am working on, I mention my character's clothes as well, whereas in my other writings I spend very little time on character description. I decided to do it after flipping through half a dozen of my daughter's books and seeing that all of the authors did so. So I look at that more as a target-audience decision, even though it is something I would not normally do or care about.
I read an article a while back where an author was looking at Twilight objectively, trying to come to the 'truth' about its success. i think she rightly noted that the writing was more or less mediocre, and then also rightly noted that the story itself is engaging and, more than that, told in an engaging way. To paraphrase one comment in particular, she said that storytelling trumps writing quality every time. I think this is absolutely true, and I've made that point regarding Twilight, before.
If you're not writing for the same audience, the factors behind Twilight's success are largely irrelevant, except in the statement of broad principles (like storytelling trumps writing). What I find interesting is that so many people who are actually writing the same types of material and targeting the same audience spend so much time masticating their sour grapes rather than actually looking at the book with clear eyes and figuring out why it worked. As I've said before, it is not accident that a company was willing to shell out $3/4 of a million on it (think about that - first you'd have to find an editor who was willing to offer that much, then the editor would have to get the rest of the publishing company to go along with it; and it wasn't because they thought it was terrible but could be marketed into a success). The reason they handed Meyer that much cash is that they knew there was something that very much worked about the book, and that it had the potential to be huge. And they were right.
Auror
