Tipsy Tuesday

Good writing versus bad. It's like art--you may not be an expert, but you know good art (or writing) when you see it.

In a recent interview with USA Weekend, Stephen King said about JK Rowling (Harry Potter) and Stephanie Meyer (Twilight): "Both Rowling and Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people... The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good."

But then King recalls that when his mom was alive, she read all the Erle Stanley Gardner books, the Perry Mason mysteries, obsessively when he was growing up. "He was a terrible writer, too, but he was very successful," King says. "Somebody who’s a terrific writer who’s been very, very successful is Jodi Picoult. You’ve got Dean Koontz, who can write like hell. And then sometimes he’s just awful. It varies. James Patterson is a terrible writer but he’s very very successful. People are attracted by the stories, by the pace and in the case of Stephenie Meyer, it’s very clear that she’s writing to a whole generation of girls and opening up kind of a safe joining of love and sex in those books. It’s exciting and it’s thrilling and it's not particularly threatening because they’re not overtly sexual. A lot of the physical side of it is conveyed in things like the vampire will touch her forearm or run a hand over skin, and she just flushes all hot and cold. And for girls, that’s a shorthand for all the feelings that they’re not ready to deal with yet."

So, does it matter if you're a bad writer or a good one, if what people are attracted to are the stories? Do you think Stephanie Meyer isn't laughing all the way to the bank, regardless of of how you feel about her writing?

In my opinion, yes it does matter. You're doing your readers a disservice if you're not learning (and applying what you've learned) how to properly structure a sentence, how to plot (and plot well), how to create vibrant, motivated characters, etc. I will tell you right now that I haven't read Meyer's books, or Rowling's, either, so I'm not going to debate whether either is good or bad. They have each managed to reach out and strike a chord with readers, in different ways. And, I guess, at the end of the day, that's what every author's looking to do.

Some just do it better than others.