What is "good" writing?

Many here seem to feel that there is a right and wrong way to begin, develop, and end a plot. That there are sentence structures that work, and sentence structures that don't. The same goes for POV selection, verb tenses, handling memories and asides, etc. And yet, for every rule, we can name at least one author who ignored the rule and still produced a successful, entertaining book or story. Who made up all these rules?

So what are readers looking for? (This is a totally different question than, "What are publishers looking for?")

So there is a balance of what tastes good and what is wholesome. What pleases versus what is actually good. So I wouldn't go with the "If you like it, it's good" thing. I don't think "good" should be unenjoyable, but it's possible to come to appreciate things that are good for you.

. Voice, a good voice can carry me through an owners manual for a stereo system.

So, what IS voice? What would I be coloring yellow with a marker if I were hunting for “voice” in a chapter? And, then what makes voice good and bad?

2. Character, if I care about a person I can forgive almost anything.

Character, I guess, is everything the character does or says because the choices the character makes are shown through those. If you have interesting, clear, and believable choices shown, you have a “good” characterization?

3. Plot, if the plot was good then I'll remember liking it even if I didn't at the moment of reading.

I notice that good plots, the type that have me turning the pages, do not depend on good writing. The plot can be interesting enough to drag me through the book, maybe reading it, maybe reading only the parts that show the plot. However, unless characters are interesting, I won’t reread the book or watch the movie again and again.

4. Mechanics, although there is a point where it is so unreadable that even if the other things are there I can't tell.

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1. Voice, a good voice can carry me through an owners manual for a stereo system.

So, what IS voice? What would I be coloring yellow with a marker if I were hunting for “voice” in a chapter? And, then what makes voice good and bad?

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A binary thing like a marker isn't going to cut it. A lot of things go into voice: attitude, tone, diction level, vocabulary (phrase vocabulary as well as word vocabulary), word choice, etc. (That "etc." means I'm too tired to continue.) There isn't one thing, let alone a group of words, that you could point at and call "voice."

The writer's personality is also a very big part of voice.

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4. Mechanics, although there is a point where it is so unreadable that even if the other things are there I can't tell.

What are the mechanics? Just spelling, grammar and a logical set of events (clarity of plot)?

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Mechanics doesn't go much above the sentence level: spelling, grammar, correct word choice (not in the "this is the perfect word" sense, but in the "this word doesn't have the wrong definition" sense), consistent POV, consistent tense, and a bunch more I can't think of.

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If you like it it's good writing, if you don't it's bad.

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I, for example, probably couldn't last on any story by Voice alone. Even if something is beautifully written, if it doesn't actually SAY anything, I tend to shrug and ask "so?" Also, if a story has a good plot and/or character(s) I don't have much problem ignoring a mediocre voice, though those kinds of novels I tend to categorize in my mind as fun and entertaining, but not masterpieces. For example, the qualitative difference in my mind at least between say the Harry Potter series and the Ender series (just the first examples that came to my mind), though I thoroughly enjoy the stories and characters of both, they scale quite differently in my mind on the "good book" scale.

Between story and character, I would say that while both are important, to tell any kind of prolonged story, or at least for the "lookback factor" of how long a story stays with you after you've already completed it, I would have to say that good characters overshadow a good plot (though the two are obviously intertwined---it's hard to have a good character in a horrible plot or a good plot with one dimensional characters). Furthermore, once I've become devoted to a character or characters, I tend to be willing to wade through a bad plot/subplot now and again in my devotion to finding out what happens to my beloved characters (mostly talking about series here).

Not what I am doing now.

Or someone would want to publish it.

Weapons of Choice: I almost put it down twice. Once because we had a long sequence of death scenes of people I didn't know and didn't like. There was no one to care about. Later, because the author skipped a long period of time, resolved the urgent problems of the previous section, and *didn't tell me how they were resolved*.

Good writing, though, because otherwise I kept wanting to know what happened next.

Some Haldeman book: it was all summary. First 3 chapters, anyway. Also, I didn't believe the summary.

Armies of Memory: I cared what happened to the little boy. I cared about the spy. I wanted to know about the secret colony. I was bothered that the initial hook turned out to be a cheat. The book had me thinking.

Another book, I forget the title. We went through a whole chapter talking to a little girl who'd been near the alien gateway. Near future. She had a pet on her shoulder, which looked like a monster toy. It hurt someone who tried to take it, by some weird means. Then she said it had told her something, and the MC thought, oh s***, this is big.

And I thought: are you serious? An alien pet shows up, in near future, and nobody thinks anything about it for several pages? That's when I put that one down.

Another, Titan, by Ben Bova. We saw the aliens on Titan reaction (prolog) and nothing happened. I was wavering about reading it. Then we learned that the evil fundamentalists persecuted people for space exploration, or some such -- a throwaway line -- and I'm so sick of this sort of thing that I put it down. I'd have kept reading anyway, though, if it had hooked me.

Bottom line: I want this reaction

Cool!

Rather than these:

Oh, yeah?
So what?
Huh?

and I want someone I care about in the story.

Let's see. All the dialogue can be blacked out. That is the characters' voices, not Voice in the story. Right?

That leaves all the narration. Voice must lie somewhere in there.
How is Voice different from Attitude in the narration?

Regarding the dialogue: the characters should have slightly different voice, but all will somewhat resemble the narrative voice. If you could somehow intersect the set of characteristics of every character's voice and the narrative voice, you'd end up with that unique part that the author's personality contributes.

Attitude is part of voice.

Those were the easy ones. These, though:

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Does Voice affect simple descriptions of background setting? Character descriptions? Is Voice involved in the choice of incidents -- which are shown and which are summarized?

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I don't even know where to start answering, but my gut says that's not voice.

I read in some book on writing where a published author was talking about a book she had written. She said that she decided that the narrator -- all the narration in the book (a steamy Peyton Place kind of romance) -- she'd write as if she were the subdivision's developer looking on what was going on in what he had made.

I thought about that view of narration a lot.
I have noticed that, while the narrator is usually not a character IN the story, the narrator CAN be (is always?) a character OF the story, even if that character is merely the author, though it is often NOT the author.

I notice this most starkly when the narrator steps out from behind the curtain and makes a comment on what is going on.

Frederick Forsythe did this in THE FIST OF GOD. Tom Clancy does this in his novels. Lots and lots of people have the narrator comment. If it is well-done, the reader doesn't even notice.

Having read through the whole Dan Brown thread (maybe here is as good a place to apologize for starting that madness) the main point I took from it is that even if you write poorly, if you have an good enough plot you'll get away with it. (I stand, bind-folded, by a wall, waiting for the shots to be fired).

So I think plot is a strong component of good writing. Bad that's tricky because it's not to do with the individual words you put on the page, but to do with the underlying story structure. It's not something you can go over with a highlighter. (Personally I handle it by plotting everything out in advance and then getting people to read a plot summary and give me feedback, but that doesn't necessarily work for everyone).

I have been told flat-out that I am a very good writer.

Good writing is perception.

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Briggs: If you have a story that starts with two threads and the first chapter has some interesting events from one thread but no likeable characters, would you keep reading to the second chapter, where the likeable character is introduced? Consider the chapters to be 10 pages or less.

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Think about someone you love. Think about him talking at his most cynical. Then think about him talking at his most optimistic. This is one person, and therefore (generally speaking) one voice, but two very different attitudes. This same voice might describe the same scene very differently when in these two attitudes.

Repeat the process for someone else you love, preferably someone from a totally different part of your life or a different place or time. She may have a completely different voice, but the attitudes may be similar to your other friend's attitudes.

That's how I see it, anyway.

In other words, I don't demand that a character (or the narrator) be nice, or cheerful, or ethical, or philosophical, or literate (though it helps a lot if the writer is, at least) or anything like that. All I care about is that somebody shows the ability to understand the present well enough to adapt to the future, whether or not that is consciously expressed.

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What is "good" writing?

Many here seem to feel that there is a right and wrong way to begin, develop, and end a plot. [snip] Who made up all these rules? [snip]

How do you rank the importance of character, plot, voice, and writing mechanics?

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I've been stewing on this. As usual, I'll write as if I'm adamant about what I'm saying -- it must be the marketing person in me, constantly selling people on ideas -- but I'm sure people can pick out flaws in what follows, and I encourage that.

It seems to me that "good writing" is writing that effectively communicates something to its intended audience.

You can communicate a lot of things: tension (thrillers), fear (horror), love of a setting (think Tolkein), curiosity about what the world would be like "if" (SF and fantasy), and so on. I don't mean that you communicate the abstract concept "tension"; if you do it well, you actually communicate tension into the mind (and often, the body) of the reader. A thriller makes you feel what it would be like to be _that_ person in _that_ kind of perilous situation.

With that in mind, think about why many best-sellers lack specificity despite near-universal agreement on its importance. As Card pointed out in one of his columns, people relate to a more specific character more easily than they relate to a less specific character. When the reader relates to a character, the author has effectively communicated more about what it would be like to be that character, along with all of the fear and love and ego et cetera that goes along with it. Lovely. But when the author is trying to communicate things that aren't centered much on characters' character, he might be able to get away without it.

Dan Brown is one example. A better one is Tolkein. I love his work, but you never really experience life as any of the characters did. I don't bash him by saying so; that wasn't his point.

So the question "who made up all these rules?" is somewhat misplaced. A better question is, "in what ways can I communicate effectively with my readers?" And that depends a lot on who your readers are.

I just read a collection of stories -- the Flannery O'Connor award winners from 1998 -- and by Hatrack standards, they were all awful. Most of them had little-to-no point and almost no plot. They reeked of ambiguity, as if the author couldn't decide what the story was supposed to be about or what the characters were supposed to be like. Several of them had vicious turns, in which I simply didn't believe that the character would do what she did. The first one I read was in second-person present tense.

As bad as I found most of them, these were award winners. They communicated something to somebody, and did it effectively enough that publishers bought them and another publisher anthologized them. For that market, that's "Good Writing".

Dan Brown's a lousy writer by most writing standards, but his writing is good in that it effectively communicated a sense of urgency -- "turn the page! find out what the self-flagellating albino monk is doing!" -- to a couple of million readers, including many that wouldn't normally read novels.

The fantasy / SF market has a different intended audience than the literary fiction audience. Its publishers and readers typically want a plot, excitement, and larger-than-life characters. The "rules" that people give are advice on how you can ensure that you're targeting the audience correctly, promising them what they want and delivering on the promise. The relative importance of character, plot, voice, and mechanics varies radically depending on what you're trying to communicate, and to whom, even if you limit discussion to the SF/fantasy genres. And if you step outside of those genres, all bets are off. Many of the rules for people who want the Flannery O'Connor award are diametrically opposed to the rules for people who aspire to publication in _Asimov's_.

As you know, you're perfectly welcome to violate every rule in the book. But you have to know that each rule that you violate alters what you are communicating to your reader. That changes your target audience and your likelihood of getting published in a particular market. It also may be the thing that sets you apart from the pack, in a good way. You're the author: your job is to choose what you want to communicate and to whom you want to communicate it, and then follow the rules that make it most likely that you'll be able to do so.

Regards,
Oliver

edited to fix quote

If someone can list atleast 5 things wrong with that paragraph, be it style, grammar, etc, I think they know enough about good writing to get published.

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Cortez gazed upwardly at the sky that was above him. The blue sky, so navy in color and airy in texture. He watched as two serendipitous clouds floated over his head, up in the sky. They looked like puffy, white tuffs of marshmallow; soft, and almost divine in their splendor. And as he gazed at that sky, and at those clouds floating in that sky, he suddenly felt a yearning to fly amongst those heavenly bodies in the sky.

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Though I love the wonderful transitive redundancy exhibited in this post, I'll try it.

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Cortez gazed downwardly at the sky that was below him. The blue sky reminded him of his service in the navy, because it was blue. He reached down and fondled the airy texture. He fixed his blue, sky-like orbs on two serendipitous, luck-laden, very privileged clouds that floated under his head, down in the sky. They looked like puffy, white tufts of marshmallow; soft, and almost divine in their splendor--and taste. Yum. And as he gazed at that sky, and at those clouds floating in that sky, at those divine, lucky collections of misty bodies, he suddenly felt a yearning to fly, like a submarine--they were down, see--amongst those watery bodies in the sky. Down in the sky, if you catch my drift.

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Cortez saw clouds. Fly. Desire.

Wow. That's almost poetic. Can someone do it in four?

I lost no content cinematically, and it would only take a few well-chosen words to put back the thoughts inside the head of Cortez. Efficient writing helps to put the writer in the background and let the story stay in front, where it belongs.

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Efficient writing helps to put the writer in the background and let the story stay in front, where it belongs.

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