Though they have things in common, good writing and talented writing are not the same.
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If you start with a confused, unclear, and badly written story, and apply the rules of good writing to it, you can probably turn it into a simple, logical, clearly written story. It will still not be a good one. The major fault of eighty-five to ninety-five percent of all fiction is that it is banal and dull.
Now old stories can always be told with new language. You can even add new characters to them; you can use them to dramatize new ideas. But eventually even the new language, characters, and ideas lose their ability to invigorate.
Either in content or in style, in subject matter or in rhetorical approach, fiction that is too much like other fiction is bad by definition. However paradoxical it sounds, good writing as a set of strictures (that is, when the writing is good and nothing more) produces most bad fiction. On one level or another, the realization of this is finally what turns most writers away from writing.
Talented writing is, however, something else. You need talent to write fiction.
Good writing is clear. Talented writing is energetic. Good writing avoids errors. Talented writing makes things happen in the reader’s mind — vividly, forcefully — that good writing, which stops with clarity and logic, doesn’t.
The talented writer often uses specifics and avoids generalities — generalities that his or her specifics suggest. Because they are suggested, rather than stated, they may register with the reader far more forcefully than if they were articulated. Using specifics to imply generalities — whether they are general emotions we all know or ideas we have all vaguely sensed — is dramatic writing. A trickier proposition that takes just as much talent requires the writer carefully to arrange generalities for a page or five pages, followed by a specific that makes the generalities open up and take on new resonance. … Indeed, it might be called the opposite of “dramatic” writing, but it can be just as strong — if not, sometimes, stronger.
“we have to allow the sunken meanings to remain sunken, suggested, not stated.” - Virginia Woolf
The talented writer often uses rhetorically interesting, musical, or lyrical phrases that are briefer than the pedestrian way of saying “the same thing.”
The talented writer can explode, as with a verbal microscope, some fleeting sensation or action, tease out insights, and describe subsensations that we all recognize, even if we have rarely considered them before; that is, he or she describes them at greater length and tells more about them than other writers.
In complex sentences with multiple clauses that relate in complex ways, the talented writer will organize those clauses in the chronological order in which the referents occur, despite the logical relation grammar imposes.
Talented writing tends to contain more information, sentence for sentence, clause for clause, than merely good writing. … It also employs rhetorical parallels and differences. . . . It pays attention to the sounds and rhythms of its sentences. . . . Much of the information it proffers is implied. … These are among the things that indicate talent.
Source: Good Writing vs Talented Writing
Writing well in the sense of writing something interesting and urgent and alive, that actually has calories in it for the reader — the reader walks away having benefited from the 45 minutes she put into reading the thing — maybe isn’t hard for a certain few. I mean, maybe John Updike’s first drafts are these incredible… Apparently Bertrand Russell could just simply sit down and do this. I don’t know anyone who can do that. For me, the cliché that “Writing that appears effortless takes the most work” has been borne out through very unpleasant experience.
In the broadest possible sense, writing well means to communicate clearly and interestingly and in a way that feels alive to the reader. Where there’s some kind of relationship between the writer and the reader — even though it’s mediated by a kind of text — there’s an electricity about it.
In my experience with students—talented students of writing — the most important thing for them to remember is that someone who is not them and cannot read their mind is going to have to read this. In order to write effectively, you don’t pretend it’s a letter to some individual you know, but you never forget that what you’re engaged in is a communication to another human being. The bromide associated with this is that the reader cannot read your mind. The reader cannot read your mind. That would be the biggest one. Probably the second biggest one is learning to pay attention in different ways. Not just reading a lot, but paying attention to the way the sentences are put together, the clauses are joined, the way the sentences go to make up a paragraph.
The writing writing that I do is longhand. . . . The first two or three drafts are always longhand. . . . I can type very much faster than I can write. And writing makes me slow down in a way that helps me pay attention.
One of the things that’s good about writing and practicing writing is it’s a great remedy for my natural self-involvement and self-centeredness. . . . When students snap to the fact that there’s such a thing as a really bad writer, a pretty good writer, a great writer — when they start wanting to get better — they start realizing that really learning how to write effectively is, in fact, probably more of a matter of spirit than it is of intellect. I think probably even of verbal facility. And the spirit means I never forget there’s someone on the end of the line, that I owe that person certain allegiances, that I’m sending that person all kinds of messages, only some of which have to do with the actual content of what it is I’m trying to say.
“endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind. - wordsmith
“I am not, in and of myself, interesting to a reader. If I want to seem interesting, work has to be done in order to make myself interesting.”
There’s a certain amount of stuff about writing that’s like music or math or certain kinds of sports. Some people really have a knack for this. . . . One of the exciting things about teaching college is you see a couple of them every semester. They’re not always the best writers in the room because the other part of it is it takes a heck of a lot of practice. Gifted, really really gifted writers pick stuff up quicker, but they also usually have a great deal more ego invested in what they write and tend to be more difficult to teach. . . . Good writing isn’t a science. It’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better.
But one of the things I end up saying to the students is, “Realize your professors are human beings. They’re reading these things really fast, but you’re often being graded down for reasons that the professor isn’t consciously aware of because of an immense amount of reading and an immense amount of evaluation of the quality of a piece of writing, the qualities of the person producing it, occur below, just below, the level of consciousness, which is really the way you want it. And one of the things that really good writing does is that it’s able to get across massive amounts of information and various favorable impressions of the communicator with minimal effort on the part of the reader.”
That’s why people use terms like flow or effortless to describe writing that they regard as really superb. They’re not saying effortless in terms of it didn’t seem like the writer spent any work. It simply requires no effort to read it— the same way listening to an incredible storyteller talk out loud requires no effort to pay attention. Whereas when you’re bored, you’re conscious of how much effort is required to pay attention. Does that make sense?
Which doesn’t mean such creatures are born, but it does mean that’s why practicing and paying attention never stop being important. Right? It’s because we’re training the same part of us that knows how to
The writer tries to move stuff from his brain into the brains of his readers, using words as his only tools. Good writing doesn’t just transport ideas—it gives the reader a visceral experience, as if the writer is reaching inside his skull, grabbing fistfuls of neurons, twisting them, petting them, and sometimes crushing them.
My subjective take is that good writing is diverting while great writing is haunting. Both must be sensual, but good writing will give me a thrill and then pretty much leave my brain the moment after I’ve read the last sentence. Whereas great writing will itch at me for years.
This generally means the writer has solved one of the hardest narrative problems: injecting the perfect amount of ambiguity into his prose. Too little and it will only be diverting, because without ambiguity, it will answer all its questions, leaving me with none. Too much and I’ll be confused, not haunted. Just as too little shuts a door at the end, too much makes me slam the door in bewilderment: “I have no idea what to think, so I’m not going to think at all.”
Even if we all agreed that ambiguity is the key to good vs great, we wouldn’t all agree that specific works had the right amount of it. “2001: a Space Odyssey” is a classic example. For me, its level of ambiguity is perfect: an drop more and I would have been too baffled to enjoy the experience; with less, it might have been a fun sci-fi flick, but I wouldn’t still be thinking about it, nearly fifty years after first seeing it.
But I know plenty of folks–people who agree with me that ambiguity is vital to great storytelling–who think the film is too ambiguous and simply find it irritating or boring.
Hamlet’s famous soliloquy is another example of writing that haunts me. It’s full of great images, such as grunting and sweating under a weary life; its contains sonorous language, such as “to die, to sleep, to sleep perchance to dream…” But most important to me is its ambiguity. It’s not nonsensical. We know what Hamlet is talking about. We know he’s trying to decide whether or not to take action against his uncle.
But there are so many questions: what does he mean when he lists one of his options as “to take arms against as sea of troubles and by opposing end them? Are “the sea of troubles” his uncle and the situation and court, and by taking arms against them, does he mean murder? Or is he talking about suicide? Taking arms against himself and, thus, ending his troubles? Does he imagine that if he takes arms against his uncle, he’ll end his troubles by ascending to the throne that is rightfully his? Or does he mean that he’ll end them by getting killed in the process?
Great writing contains prose that evokes sensual experiences and which has a level of ambiguity that haunts me for years without having so much ambiguity that it simply becomes nonsense.
If you held a gun to my head and forced me to concoct a less personal, more objective, definition of “great writing,” the best I could do would be to list highly influential books. They would be great in the sense of having great impact. Alternatively, I could list books that sold really well. They’d be great in the sense of having made a great deal of money
What makes a work of literature great?
Is Stephen King good or great?
A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people
23 March 2019