Good writing for me is someone that can make the familiar fresh. You think you've seen it all before but you haven't seen it like this. Too often writers are following other writers not thinking outside the box. They churn the familiar into cliches. Take Harriet the Spy - a bratty character whose unredeemably arrogant. In the first person with her sharp witted observations - it's brilliant. Take Lolita - Nabokov masks a monster under beautiful prose. Take Francesca Lia Block - her offbeat characters and sparkly prose seem to live in some updated fairyland. There's nothing really special about - pedophiles, snoopy children or offbeat L.A. teenagers but each writer makes you think there is. For me that's the key. How do they do it? They set themselves apart from everyone else, for a start. Nabokov though inspired by road trip noir movies wasn't out to write his story like Raymond Chandler or Erskine Cadwell or James M. Cain. He goes against the grain. Same goes for Fitzhugh and Block.
Good writing or great writing? Good writing stays out of the way of the story (as already expressed by more than a few here). It's clean, noninvasive, economic. Great writing appears almost divine. It's as if the author has given the reader a piece of his soul.
There are over 7 billion people on this planet we call home. Regardless of what is written and by whom, someone out there will love it and someone will hate it. For me personally, I love a book that paints pictures in my mind. A book that tells a story like it's a movie in my head. And yes, there are books out there that I couldn't finish, couldn't get into or just did not enjoy but I would not say they were badly written.
I read for escapism (I'll try not to get too offended by your comment, DromedaryLights, lol), therefore it's the story itself that captures me. Am I being carried away to another place in a way that makes me forget I'm reading? For that to happen, it needs good flow, clarity, believable characters, witty dialogue, a driving plot, discovery, and it must make me invest and love the people in the story. It can have some message about the human condition so long as I'm not bludgeoned over the head with it. I also value author voice. I want to see the world through an interesting filter, not some vanilla "And this happened next." If there is no style, it's more "meh". Most importantly though, I want to have hope at the end of the day, not "Lord of the Flies" cynicism. I get enough of that watching the news. It's also why I can't stand the lifetime channel. No thank you. Take "The Shipping News" by Annie Proulx for example. Brilliant imagery. Great characterization. Great writing, even, but the story just doesn't inspire me. It's depressing. I do however like to look at her descriptions for inspiration in my writing. That's why I am best suited for the YA sci-fi and urban fantasy genre when I write. It's just the type of stuff I like to read. It's also why I paint orcs and trolls for video games for a living. It's just who I am.
Clarity is important because the purpose of writing is to communicate. Without clarity, no communication can occur. Then again, John Grisham's writing is easier to understand than William Faulkner's, so does that make him a better writer? Not necessarily. Still, even with something difficult like As I Lay Dying, clarity is important. While we have to work a little bit harder to figure out exactly what is going on, it's clear enough that we can do so without an unreasonable amount of effort, and that effort is ultimately rewarded by an interesting story and some excellent characters. And even though some of the action might be difficult to follow, he writes with a great deal of clarity regarding the internal experience of his characters. These kinds of clarity are what separate a difficult book from a messy one, and what separate artfully executed stream of consciousness from the ravings of a lunatic. More clarity isn't always better (although it usually is), but some baseline level must be met for a work to have any value or meaning at all. This is why Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a better book than Finnegan's Wake. Neither book is easy, but only one of them is unclear.
Portrait is a much better book than The Wake. Honestly, I couldn't be bothered to get past the first page of The Wake. There is always someone who will like a terrible book. Ayn Rand has the worship of a cult behind her. I am, however, utterly convinced opinions can be wrong. If anyone claims Ayn Rand was a good writer, they are wrong. I don't care if it is their opinion, they are wrong.
*shakes head* at @Lemex I'm also going with Clarity being an important factor but, not to the point that the writer tells me the answers as I read. I like a book that feeds me tidbits (tipbits, titbits) along the way, stories with those "Oh right, it's him!!" moments.
I'm for clarity of visual & scene not always for clarity of intent. It would intrigue me if I read a story and didn't understand it's meaning - the whys. So long as I could clearly visualize & understand what the character was doing. It's kinda like watching the movie Valerie and her week of Wonders or Black Moon or like staring at a Salvador Dali painting - you can see the melting clocks, the tiger jumping through a pomegranate but what does it all mean?.... John Hawkes is good for this.
The Wake isn't even a book in the traditional sense so much as it is a thing you buy if you want your friends to think you are very smart, with the irony being that it usually achieves the opposite.
That is very true. I struggled through a reading of Ulysses, and while some parts were great fun, other parts were very perplexing (what the hell was going on during the play bit at the end? They are just drunk at first and then time seems to shift and dance around) but The Wake, I couldn't even read it! I had no idea what was happening, or to who. I guessed there was a hotel on a beach, and two people were walking toward it, but then it started going on about the Fall of Man and Adam and Eve and then I started playing video games and drinking beer.
It's Finnegan's Wake. They're just trying to look cool in front of the forum by generating an air of familiarity with the text, cause, you know, they're so literate.
I've just made a post about it. Included the text online. I can't make arse or head of it, don't even like it, so it's not 'familiarity' @123456789.
It is a book that is famous for being impossible to understand. There are books about what it means that are much longer than the book itself. James Joyce worked very hard on it over the course of 17 years, and it is allegedly packed with references and parallels to scripture and classics. To follow what is going on, you'd have to have a reader's guide along with it and probably an encyclopedia and a dictionary as well. It is perhaps the most canonical example of an officially brilliant writer going too far. I feel like this is pretty much the same point / joke I was trying to make, that stuff like that becomes more of a cultural signifier than a proper book, almost as though people don't read Finnegan's Wake to read it so much as they read it to be the guy who has read Finnegan's Wake. I make no claim to familiarity with the text, merely with its reputation.
Tolstoy? Never read him, prefer to reserve judgement - but I don't think I'll read him. I just don't have much interest. Though if he's quoted right in a certain Orwell essay the man was a fucking idiot.
I can't speak Russian but I fail to see any brilliance in the english translations. Aren't you a scholar? Don't you HAVE to read Tolstoy?
My specialization is in Italian and English literature, sadly. I know a little bit of Russian, but not enough to read fiction with. There is a standard translation that is well known for quality for Tolstoy, and if I ever get around to reading him, I'll use that translation. The one found in the Everyman's Library, for the record.
This is true. You always tend to remember what you hated over what you liked. Or at least I do. Good books for me are the ones where the authors disappear, but interestingly I find that many of the so-called genius writers are the ones who don't disappear. You can appreciate their writing, their excellent prose, style, etc, but you always know they're there. I'm not really sure what that means---if it's good or bad or not--but as everyone already knows good writing and good storytelling aren't necessarily the same.
