honestly my favourite thing about my writing style being kinda oldfashioned is when it combines with very contemporary phrasings or tropes
there’s something charming about dropping a line of dialogue like “Perfectly normal, non-traumatized thing to say” in the midst of some faux‐Edwardian pre‐modernist prose
i was explaining that my writing style is heavily influenced by the Edwardian period because that was the latest stuff one could find on Project Gutenberg when i was in high school, and bea was like “you couldn’t have just pirated something newer??” lol
there is postwar literature in the English language which i feel has value, but it’s all genre fiction and i think the value is largely something other than its mastery of the literary art
i also think Twilight was a notable contribution to the English canon but that is neither here nor there
like, in my generation there was Harry Potter, right, which people loved because of its worldbuilding and the richness and mystery and magic of it all, and the plot and gradual development of the story over the course of their childhoods and there’s so MUCH to it—but the writing is mostly worthless and nobody is seriously out here like “i’m trying to copy J.K. Rowling’s Literary Style” unless they’re intentionally doing a parody (i hope)
and then there was Twilight, which is a completely garbage story built on entirely unbelievable premises which somehow manages to work anyway because the writing is actually really fucking good
i mean i think it could be better obviously and i have some notable disagreements with choices it made in story structure but it walked so that somebody else could run
as a romance author i think you will develop so much faster and better today studying Twilight and like, a handful of good anime than you will studying like 99% of contemporary popular romance literature
i don’t LIKE that this is the case, i just think that it is
if you’re a nerd, go ahead and read frankenstein and carmilla, it can’t hurt
i should qualify that i am talking about fiction here; the critical theorists have made several notable literary contributions to English nonfiction in the past decades ;P