It's Time To Retire The Fallacy of "Good Writing"
Simplistic criteria deny the obvious talents of popular fiction writers
My father is a pulpit rabbi of a synagogue, and one of his oft-quoted jokes is, “Some people don’t know how to weigh sermons; they only know how to measure them.” Meaning, of course, that some people only care about how long the rabbi speaks, not about the substance of that speech. They look for a simple, easily quantified element (in this case, length), rather than looking at the whole.
I found myself hearing that quote over and over in my mind as I read this bizarre profile in Wired Magazine, written by Jason Kehe about the prolific fantasy writer Brandon Sanderson.
My intent here is not to criticize Kehe personally, but rather to take the opportunity he’s provided to open a long-overdue conversation about certain sincere misconceptions that many people have about writing, particularly fiction writing.
Throughout the piece, Kehe seems intent answering one core question: Is Sanderson a good writer? And the way he seems to define a “good writer” is exclusively on a sentence-by-sentence level. Is his sentence structure sufficiently ambitious? Are his vocabulary choices sufficiently innovative? Are his metaphors sufficiently sharp? Yes, fans seem to latch onto his characters and his worldbuilding, but what does that have to do with good writing if his vocab and syntax are too conventional and pedestrian?
And since they are so pedestrian, Kehe has already decided, then the only possible conclusion is that Sanderson is a “bad writer.” And how can a bad writer have so many fans? It must be that his legions of fans are appreciating the Cult of Sanderson, the person, rather than admiring any writing talent displayed in his works. Hence Kehe’s shift to focus on attempting to analyze Sanderson, his family, his home, his religion, all of which he finds equally puzzling and unimpressive — he complains that Sanderson doesn’t speak in “usable” or “quotable” soundbites — and the most he can come up with is the ultimate “Sanderson = God” conclusion.
One big problem with this conclusion is that it stems from fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of “good writing,” specifically good fiction writing. Kehe’s approach is seeking to measure Sanderson’s writing — in very small, superficial, quantifiable terms — rather than weigh it. It is zooming in only on the micro level, rather than zooming out to the macro level.
It’s the equivalent of judging a photograph by the quality of the individual pixels.
I’ve seen this done countless times before, with numerous popular works ranging from Harry Potter to The Hunger Games to The Twilight Saga — non-fans love to prove that the writing is “bad” by citing how many times a particular word or phrase is used, as if that is the decisive factor in evaluating a fiction writer’s skill. It’s an extraordinarily myopic argument.
Look, I appreciate well-crafted sentences. They can be beautiful, artistic, evocative. They can take the most mundane topic and imbue it with meaning. They can succinctly and compellingly encapsulate an idea.
But that doesn’t change the fact that the art of a sentence and the art of a novel or series are two completely different skill sets. And that both of them deserve to be considered “good writing.”
Sentence writing is just one kind of writing
I can tell you who, straight up, out of all the fiction writers I’ve read, I consider to be the most gifted sentence-level writer: Jonathan Lethem.
Have you ever read any of his books? The way he viscerally taps into all five senses, conjures stunningly vivid imagery, thoroughly immerses you in an atmosphere — the things that man can do with language are exquisite.
But I’ve only read one of his books. And it was a sloggy uphill battle to get through even that. Why?
Well, here’s the meat of the review I dug up from my 2018 post about that one book, A Gambler’s Anatomy:
…On the downside, the characters are awful people, the plot is threadbare and all over the place, there are weird elements like the protagonist's telepathy that make very little sense and make even less sense the more you think about it, the main motive anyone seems to have for doing anything is boredom (which is really boring as a motive, I have now learned, and have resolved never to use boredom as a primary motive in my writing), and the female characters are hypersexualized and objectified and just overall abysmally portrayed in that classic pretentious male literary way that gets rightfully mocked on McSweeneys.
Ouch. Past self did not hold back. Sorry, Mr. Lethem. I still think your sentences are incredible please teach me your ways.
I’ll confess I’ve had some similar problems with other highly stylistic writers like Michael Chabon and sometimes even Neil Gaiman — while the sentences may be doing some truly impressive linguistic acrobatics, the story they’re telling is not automatically great simply because the sentences are. “Kill your darlings” is a perennial piece of writing advice for a reason.
(And it always gives me a kick to remember that one beloved classic, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle, begins with the most pedestrian sentence possible: “It was a dark and stormy night.”)
Sentences are the building blocks of all writing, including fiction. But what Kehe and others seem to miss is that the most crucial tool for a fiction writer — particularly a long-form fiction writer like Sanderson — is not sentences, but structure.
Structure: the unsung hero
Just about anything you enjoy in a long piece of fiction is rooted in structure. And it’s weird to me that we don’t talk about that more.
Yes, we talk about the Hero’s Journey sometimes, and occasionally critique various media for being too formulaic (or embrace certain media precisely because it is comfortingly formulaic), but by and large, when people talk about whether or not someone is a “good writer,” they’re referring to sentence-level writing and not even thinking about structural writing.
But fiction without structure is just a puddle of words. That can work in poetry, or short-form vignettes, flash fiction, that sort of thing. But long term?
How do you hook a reader? How do you keep them turning pages? How do you make them fall in love with a character? How do you keep them invested in that character? How do you establish the stakes? How do you raise the stakes? How do you convey universes with entirely different rules and expectations in a way that leaves readers intrigued rather than overwhelmed? How do you get readers to celebrate at moments of triumph, to despair at moments of devastation? And ultimately, how do you tie up a narrative in such a way that it feels earned and satisfying?
While there is no one-size-fits-all answer to any of these questions, I can assure you that the answer to none of them is “brilliant sentence-level writing.”
That can be a bonus, but it should be used to gild an underlying structure, a structure that keeps a narrative moving; that introduces details and complications at just the right moments; that enters and exits scenes in the right places; that navigates between emotional highs and lows, between drama and humor; that answers enough questions along the way to build trust with the audience, but raises enough new ones to keep the mystery alive; that builds on itself and its elements in service of its characters and overall story; that brings plot threads and character arcs to a crescendo, slotting together into a coherent whole.
These are all hallmarks of good fiction writing, of good storytelling. And they are things that Sanderson excels at. Kehe belittles his “write for the ending” mentality, seeming to miss that writing for an ending means that you structure your entire story in a way that adds up, resulting in the whole feeling like the maximized self-actualization of its parts. Jonathan Lethem may include telepathy in a character, but Sanderson will integrate that telepathy into a character’s arc and the book’s overall plot in ways that feel essential and consequential.
Kehe cites “surprising” as the key component of a Sanderson ending. But in fact, Sanderson much more strongly adheres to the advice I recall hearing in my college days (while getting the degree in Creative Writing that now qualifies me to write substack posts on the internet) — that endings should feel “surprising but inevitable.” A seemingly impossible task, but look at any ending that satisfied you and you’ll see that oxymoronic truth in action. And Sanderson manages it with an impressive frequency, both in his individual books and in the culminations of his various book series.
This is a skill that I have noticed is often lacking in long-form media, particularly serialized television. Some writers have freely admitted that they’ve made serialized shows with no idea where their story is going, but even when they do know the ending, it’s apparent that they don’t know how to write for it. So viewers wind up with meandering fragmented storytelling that — as many starship conduits on the set of the Original Series of Star Trek were labeled — GNDN: Goes Nowhere, Does Nothing.
(Sorry, that’s my favorite Star Trek factoid and I never pass up an opportunity to use it.)
To be clear, I’m not claiming that Sanderson’s books are all structurally flawless. Sometimes I find the endings almost too neat, in a way that makes the characters feel less like people and more like chess pieces. And personally, I had a tough time with his first Way of Kings novel because I found it less structurally coherent than his other work (for instance, he jokes about how many prologues and prefaces there are before you get to the main story and yeah, it’s a lot), but I had read enough of that other work to trust that in time, Sanderson would pull it together.
Still, he has way more hits than misses, is what I’m saying.
A final note on Sanderson’s sentences
As mentioned, Kehe expresses a lot of disdain for Sanderson’s writing on a sentence level. And I get that; some people prefer sentence-level writing that is a bit more ambitious and shiny. I’m not going to claim that Sanderson’s sentence writing is phenomenal.
What it is, though, is accessible. In a Sci-Fi/Fantasy genre that is often burdened with dense, opaque prose, packed with excessive flowery description and technical info-dumping, Sanderson’s sentence writing is refreshingly simple. It’s not showy; it’s not doing one-armed handstands on a swinging trapeze yelling “LOOK AT MEEEEEEE!!” It gets out of its own way, lowering the barrier to entry, making it easier for readers to get to the real star — the story.
Thank you for reading this edition of SM’s Movie Cramming Project, where I, SM, mostly watch movies so that you don’t have to, but occasionally also give the internet a stern talking-to and encourage it to think about what it’s done.
You can read Sanderson’s generous response to the profile here. And if you want some books by a writer who is often fantastic on both a sentence and structural level, I recommend The Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold, particularly if read in this order.