What Makes "Good Writing"

There is currently some kind of battle in my brain to sort through the concrete and abstract ideas of good writing. Does minding your p’s and q’s, such as interrupting three lines of dialogue with details or exposition, make a story “good”. Or is a story with a well-conceived plot with good character development that is limping along structurally, needing the help of a good editor, the better writing?

Jack Pendarvis recently said that you can’t have one without the other. He said that you won’t have a well-written story that’s boring. I can understand what he means to some extent. But, maybe I don’t have the verbiage right when I am trying to describe my dilemma, because, as much as I respect the opinion of writers who actually make a living at this craft, I cannot fully accept this concept yet.

In journalism, I can write a great hard news story that is structurally sound. But it isn’t until I learned how to “sniff out a good story idea” that I became a better non-fiction writer.

I have heard some writers say, “A good story writes itself”. So, which should come first for new writers: learning to come up with fresh ideas, a new way of looking at the same old story, or should they concentrate more on learning structural elements?

Of course, I think it takes both to advance you forward as a good writer. I am certainly trying to learn to incorporate the rules as I go or else I will never reach that next plateau in my work. But, I don’t think I would have made it this far to start with if I wasn’t interested in good storytelling. Dr. Husni constantly emphasizes that as long as you are a good storyteller, you will always be able to work as a journalist. This is encouraging to me because I devote more time to that part of being a writer, both fiction and non-fiction, than I do on networking, learning proper grammar or writing rules, and, in the case of journalism, the techie stuff like learning html code for the internet, editing video, etc.

I said all that to say this, when I was at Broken English last Wednesday, I heard Chris Kammerud, a graduate student in the MFA program at Ole Miss, read one of his short stories, "Some Things about Love, Magic and Hair”.

It was definitely what I would call “good writing”, but it left me unsatisfied at the end. So, I thought analyzing his work might help me solidify my ideas on what constitutes as “good”. Essentially, it was a boy meets girl story. Boy meets Allison working in the porn section of a movie rental shop. They date, he dies, and comes back to life, climbs out of the grave to reclaim his girl. Although, she loved him, she says she can’t be with him. “If only you hadn’t died,” she told him.

So, as far as the plot goes, I don’t really understand the story. It was wonderfully entertaining with clear, crisp sentences; a great example of writing for the ear.

Kammerud’s story was full of good descriptive sentences and surprising turn of phrases like comparing her hair to the Jersey shore: "brown and wavy and full of broken bits of glass, the occasional condom or lost child."

But, like I said, I didn’t really understand where the story was going. Maybe Allison rejected her love because he had abandoned her. That’s believable because she and her mother were abandoned by her father immediately after conception. Her mother told her that he turned into a bluebird and flew out the window, and when boyfriend asked her if she believed that, she said it was as believable as anything else. Okay, so I get the connection of his abandonment of her and her father’s abandonment. But after he comes back to her and she rejects him, I got a bit lost in the story. Maybe I quit paying attention, or maybe his writing at that point didn’t hold my ear as strongly as it did prior to that plot point. Either way, it was here that I wanted the two concepts of “good writing” that I was struggling with to come together: the idea of good storytelling and well-crafted words. I would have to read it with my own eyes to make a better assessment but as it stood, it had an anti-climatic ending. Well-crafted words,of which I'm jealous, but somehow an unsatisfactory story.