There've been a few threads recently challenging various orthodoxies of writing and with Terry's thread about shags, I've been thinking about quality in general.

It is a given that we all like different things, but I like to think I am open to seeing good writing even if it is a very different style. I like cutting superfluous detail to the bone but recently enjoyed reading a few things that were dripping with detail. I like wordplay but also enjoy simplicity. I abhor self-conscious writerly order word effect seeking twisting wit da fekkin miss Pelling's. Yet, I loved Kelman's 'How late, it was, how late'.

So, to me, the measure of quality is complex. But I still think I can tell good from bad, even if I don't like it.

The question is why? I'm beginning to think it is whether or not it communicates meaning, ideas, or images. In other words, writing is aimed at somebody other than the writer, otherwise it is simply notes or aide memoirs.

But is that enough?

Is it even correct?

G

One of the hardy perennial questions. I think it was probably a WriteWords thread which prompted this blog post from almost exactly three years ago:

http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/2007/10/theres-good-and.html

Emma

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"I like cutting superfluous detail to the bone but recently enjoyed reading a few things that were dripping with detail."

Quite. The argument is often simplified into Spare vs. Purple, but you can just as easily simplify it into Impoverished vs. Rich.

And I think the 'self-conscious' thing is so difficult, because that's so much in the eye of the reader: one reader's wit is another's facetiousness, one reader's intellectual fireworks are another's clever-clever pretentiousness... It's at least 50% what the reader brings to the book, as what the writer has.

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But I agree that it's very important to learn to separate your subjective reaction, to some degree (you never can entirely) from a more objective sense of whether writing is good. The Granta story in the Shags thread isn't, in the end, my cup of tea in either subject or style. But I can see that it's good.

The other thing is that the really pointless exercise is to try to arrange a single scale of 'good' to 'bad', because there are so many elements to it. How can you say that a pitch-perfect novella of crystalline prose is better or worse than a vast, sprawling epic.

Indeed, since only God is perfect, how do you weight the different kinds of flaws and merits against each other? Do you give the 'best book' prize to an ambitious novel which tries to do all sorts of complex and fascinating things to the point where it doesn't pull them all off, or do you give it to the novel which does fewer, simpler, less ambitious things but makes it all work seamlessly and beautifully?

There is the obviously bad writing technique which can spoil any good story, like dry rot through a house. But once you progress past that stage then it's purely subjective, and no novel is perfect. - Even the great writers can get it wrong, like Sebastian Barry with his psychiatrist's narrative in The Secret Scripture which lost him the Man Booker.

- NaomiM

only God is perfect

And, even God only manages it based on a limited range of metrics that seem to exclude necessity, credibility, value or actuality.

The Secret Scripture which lost him the Man Booker.

But was still adequate to get him into the competition...

It is subjective, of course, but I've recently read a selection of pieces that might be termed purple by the fans of spare writing. Some of them were awful but some of them were just fantastic, a different style rather than a different quality.

The awful pieces, I am sure, would be rated similarly by fans of rich detail too. While the fantastic pieces are likely to be loved just as much.

The difference is, I think, what I'm trying to define. I don't think it has much to do with linguistic style or skill but rather to do with a) having something worth communicating and b) communicating it.

Is that too simplistic?

Things which don't exist cannot be perfect....

IMO there is writing which is undeniably bad, then there is writing which isn't to our personal taste. It's important to distinguish, esp when giving critique.

As for good... it really is a matter of taste IMO. There are so many different ways to be a good writer - fab plots and poetic wording being two different methods - but in the end isn't it taste? I guess the best way to achieve good writing which was universally acknowledged would be to tick all the boxes without being too experimental, which could alienate some readers. Safe, good writing. But of course there are drawbacks to that!

I think it was last year's bad sex writing awards which contained, in their top ten, a scene I found quite erotic. One particular phrase I loved.

And I recently saw a list of Edinburgh fringe's best 10 jokes and worst 10 jokes... I didn't think there was much between them apart from taste, and some performers had featured in both lists.

Deb

This is the million-dollar question, isn't it. I think this is where writers have to learn to trust themselves. There are two questions:
1) What is the writer trying to achieve with this work?
2) Has s/he succeeded?
Only the writer can answer the first question, and many works fail, I think, because the writer hasn't given enough thought to it.
But if the answer to the second question is 'yes', then I think the work is good.

I think it was last year's bad sex writing awards which contained, in their top ten, a scene I found quite erotic. One particular phrase I loved. And I recently saw a list of Edinburgh fringe's best 10 jokes and worst 10 jokes... I didn't think there was much between them apart from taste, and some performers had featured in both lists.

For me, these examples highlight how subjective the concepts of 'good' and 'bad' can become. It's one thing to pick up on objective things such as factual, grammatical or syntactical failings within a piece of writing. The question of whether the piece is 'good', though, is entirely subjective, once one gets past those objective measures. I would only ever be able to say, of a story, whether I liked or disliked it; I am always conscious that my opinion will differ from that of another person.

Alex

1) What is the writer trying to achieve with this work? 2) Has s/he succeeded?

Only the writer can answer the first question, and many works fail, I think, because the writer hasn't given enough thought to it.

But if the answer to the second question is 'yes', then I think the work is good.

I often find my answer to the second is "I think I've succeeded, but I can't tell if anyone else will." You do learn to stand outside your work to some extent, and see it as others would, - indeed, it's an essential part of the training. But you can't ever do so completely, and certainly not as all the others would who might read your work. (Only editors can).

And I may modify whether I think I've succeeded, based on someone's comments enabling me to see it as they do (she says, through gritted teeth, in the thick of another set of major revisions...).

I wonder if this is what people don't understand, when they assume that as a writer you get it just how you want it, and any feedback from, say, an editor, is about pleasing them instead of pleasing yourself - and, arguably, therefore selling your soul.

What good editorial feedback does is offer you the glassses through which they're reading your work. If, when you look at it through them, you, too, see that what you thought you'd done doesn't get across or, more often that it gets across but your success in one aspect has lead to failure in another, then you have to do something about it.

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And it's all about context and level. I might say of a student and really mean it 'She's a GOOD writer!', of work which I'd think was decidedly average for a well-regarded author. And a good writer may produce what I'd call a bad book, by their standard, which was still an awful lot better many another.

I suppose fundamentally I feel that 'good' is just too general to be any use, of a form which has as many elements and aspects and possibilities as, say, a novel, some of which will always militate against some others.

But if the answer to the second question is 'yes', then I think the work is good.

On second thoughts, I don't think I agree. A writer may have succeeded utterly in their project of writing a category romance for Mills & Boon, but I wouldn't call that a good book. I'd certainly call it 'good of its kind' if it succeeds more than its fellows. But I think for me to call a book good, it has to be a project that I think has some merit and originality of itself. That's absolutely not saying that it has to be overtly literary: the best of any commercial genre are stonkingly good. But just as 'fit for purpose' writing is only the lowest criterion of 'good prose', and I'm likely to demand something a bit more, so 'fulfils the brief well' is only the lowest criterion of 'good book', and I want something that goes a bit beyond that in interest and originality, before I'll call it a 'good book' in the greater scheme of things.

Emma

1) What is the writer trying to achieve with this work? 2) Has s/he succeeded? Only the writer can answer the first question, and many works fail, I think, because the writer hasn't given enough thought to it. But if the answer to the second question is 'yes', then I think the work is good.

Just been looking at a mss on another site where the writer is trying to write a Romance/Crime novel and failing misterably because they are writing what should be languid Romantic Fiction prose in a clipped fast-paced thriller style.

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And 2 more where the opening pages, although excellent, gave a totally wrong idea about each novel's genre. Good, but unpublishable.

But that's where personal taste comes in, isn't it, Emma? Your definition of a project that has merit and originality may not tally with someone else's.

There are two questions: 1) What is the writer trying to achieve with this work? 2) Has s/he succeeded?

I think this sounds as if it ought to be true, but some of the most captivating books I've read are those where you can sense the writer is almost but not quite in control - where the book seems to be grappling mysteriously towards something of its own volition. Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled struck me like that - found it fascinating but utterly baffling.

It's perhaps something to do with the writer's subconscious rising up and taking over the conscious design, and being in conflict with it. Sometimes books which have that sort of touch can seem in some undefined sense malevolent and subversive - Under the Volcano, Le Grand Meaulnes, Steppenwolf might be examples. With those books, you know more or less what the writer's general, conscious intention is - but it's the weird, spooky, out of control and apparently not strictly necessary stuff going on in them that makes them compelling.

But that's where personal taste comes in, isn't it, Emma? Your definition of a project that has merit and originality may not tally with someone else's.

Yes, but but then personal taste comes into deciding whether or not the writer's succeeded in their project as well.

Rupert, as a matter of personal taste I rather agree - the most exciting reads are the ones where they've set themselves an incredible challenge, and are only just pulling it off. But whether that's really because they're not in control, or whether it's because it's the only way to write a novel that doesn't feel to readers as if you're just doing the mixture as before very well, I'm not sure.

Emma

I think we have to do a Keats here, and be satisfied not to know. It is a meaningless question, really, though a natural one. What is a good book? What is a good life? It's okay not to know the answer.

It is a meaningless question, really, though a natural one.

That's the thing, isn't it. What do you mean by 'good'? The more you attempt an answer that fits everything, the less useful it is as a way of deciding anything about anything.

Emma