How to be more receptive to "good" writing?

[Ruben Meijerink]

Does anyone has tips on how to appreciate (good) writing style more? I hope that this could enhance my experience with great art, by being able to marvel at the brilliance of writing style an sich.

A fun little experiment would be to read some literary classic and then a pulp novel, for comparison. Or you could try to write yourself, for example: can you imitate the style of Bukowski convincingly. Or maybe there are books on this subject?

To be sure, I'm aware that "good" must have a purpose or values ascribed to it to be deemed a meaningful word.

Thanks a lot

[MorpheusSandman]

Firstly, good is relative (relative to individuals, cultures, societies, time periods, etc.). The canon is merely what a lot of people, usually of the influential variety (academics, critics, other writers, etc.), consider to be good. Secondly, I know of no short-cut to appreciating any artistic medium except experiencing a lot of it. Trying to imitate certain writers can help you appreciate the craft to a certain extent, but appreciating it from a writer's perspective isn't the same as appreciating it from a reader's perspective. I also think it's important to understand that you aren't going to like ever style even if you can understand the appeal. Hemingway's terse, directness has never appealed to me, even though I get why it appeals to others. Likewise, I love the richness and complexity of Faulkner and Milton, but I also get why it turns some off. In that light, it becomes less about "good" VS "bad" and more about the recognitions of certain qualities and understanding what appeal it holds. A lot of times, "goodness" is just about cultivating a style that is subtly unlike what's been done before.

[Ruben Meijerink]

Thanks, that makes sense:)

By the way, does anyone know an accomplished writer with an particular lucid, direct, simple prose style, beside Russell and Orwell?

[kev67]

Thanks, that makes sense:)

By the way, does anyone know an accomplished writer with an particular lucid, direct, simple prose style, beside Russell and Orwell?

Jack London and Rudyard Kipling are two I have read recently that come to mind.

[Whosis]

Would Ernest Hemingway be one? His style is direct and simple to a fault, particularly in dialogue. I'm not sure who you mean by Russell. I assume that's a last name.

[MorpheusSandman]

By the way, does anyone know an accomplished writer with an particular lucid, direct, simple prose style, beside Russell and Orwell?The aforementioned Hemingway was notorious for it.

[free]

Simple style was used by Erich Maria Remarque. His style is famous for being the style of a journalist, news reporter. On the other hand, Thomas Mann had an opposite style, full of 'writer's interference', phylosophy and elaborate descriptions.

[JBI]

The aforementioned Hemingway was notorious for it.

Then again, Hemingway was probably one of the top 5 Fiction prose stylists in the American 20th century. Simple and simplistic are two different things. And anyway, direct is hardly a good way to define Hemingway's style; his writing is the least direct of the modernists by my understanding of the notion. He generally never makes things obvious and relies more on inference and irony to bring the story to life.

[MorpheusSandman]

Then again, Hemingway was probably one of the top 5 Fiction prose stylists in the American 20th century.I would agree he was one of the top 5 most influential, but, as I already mentioned, his style has no appeal for me, so we'd be back to the relativity of "good."


And anyway, direct is hardly a good way to define Hemingway's style; his writing is the least direct of the modernists by my understanding of the notion. He generally never makes things obvious and relies more on inference and irony to bring the story to life.I think it's just semantics; we're thinking differently about what "direct, lucid, and simple" means. To me, those aphorism also describe, say, Jane Austen despite the fact that she also made her points subtlety and through inference and irony to achieve her desired effects. I was thinking more about direct lucidity on the surface; Hemingway is far more easy to grasp superficially than Joyce or Faulkner by comparison.

[Ruben Meijerink]

I'm not sure who you mean by Russell.

Bertrand Russell :) Being keen in logic and mathematics, he wrote in an unambigious style

[Poetaster]

Bertrand Russell :) Being keen in logic and mathematics, he wrote in an unambigious style

I've not always agreed with Bertrand Russell, but his prose is pretty darn good.

[ladderandbucket]

Thanks, that makes sense:)

By the way, does anyone know an accomplished writer with an particular lucid, direct, simple prose style, beside Russell and Orwell?

Somerset Maugham. Orwell described him as "the modern writer who has influenced me the most, whom I admire immensely for his power of telling a story straightforwardly and without frills".

[mal4mac]

Somerset Maugham. Orwell described him as "the modern writer who has influenced me the most, whom I admire immensely for his power of telling a story straightforwardly and without frills".

Hitchens, Wodehouse and Burgess do not agree with this estimation:

"How about old S. Maugham, do you think?" P. G. Wodehouse wrote to Evelyn Waugh. "I've been re-reading a lot of his stuff, and I'm wondering a bit about him. I mean, surely one simply can't do that stuff about the district officer hearing there's a white man dying in a Chinese slum and it turns out that it's gay lighthearted Jack Almond, who disappeared and no-one knew what had become of [him] and he went right under, poor chap, because a woman in England had let him down."

https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2004/05/hitchens.htm

Orwell made some real clangers in the field of literary criticism, another is not recognising the greatness of Dickens.

[Emil Miller]

Hitchens, Wodehouse and Burgess do not agree with this estimation:

"How about old S. Maugham, do you think?" P. G. Wodehouse wrote to Evelyn Waugh. "I've been re-reading a lot of his stuff, and I'm wondering a bit about him. I mean, surely one simply can't do that stuff about the district officer hearing there's a white man dying in a Chinese slum and it turns out that it's gay lighthearted Jack Almond, who disappeared and no-one knew what had become of [him] and he went right under, poor chap, because a woman in England had let him down."

https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2004/05/hitchens.htm

Orwell made some real clangers in the field of literary criticism, another is not recognising the greatness of Dickens.

This would depend on one's evaluation of Wodehouse's opinion as opposed to Orwell's. I notice that Wodehouse say's 're-reading' which, given his longevity, could have been many years after that story was originally published. It's also worth remembering that both Maugham and Orwell spent some time in the far East as adults whereas Wodehouse left Hong Kong during infancy and probably had only a hazy recollection of life there. Orwell was one of Wodehouse's defenders against the malicious post-WWII charge of treason by the class that he'd lampooned so hilariously in his novels. Whatever shortcomings Orwell may have found in Dickens, Maugham ranked David Copperfield among the ten greatest novels ever written. Wodehouse may lay just claim as the greatest ever comic novelist but it's doubtful that he was as widely-read as Orwell or Maugham, whose Ten Novels and Their Authors is about as authoritative as it gets. Having read all three extensively, I don't think that the quotation from Wodehouse holds up.

[JanVanHogspeuw]

Orwell made some real clangers in the field of literary criticism, another is not recognising the greatness of Dickens.

Orwell certainly recognised the greatness of Dickens, if I put some more context to his Somerset Maugham quote - "The writers I care about most and never grow tired of are: Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding, Dickens, Charles Reade, Flaubert... but I believe the modern writer who has influenced me most is Somerset Maugham, whom I admire immensely for his power of telling a story straightforwardly and without frills."

Orwell's essay on Dickens is quite critical, but then that's because he's already assuming his greatness, that his considerable flaws are far outweighed by his superlative strengths. One only needs to read the very end of the essay to see what he thought of him:

"in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens's photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls."


As far as simple lucid writing styles go I'll add Raymond Chandler to the list, a writer who was, to borrow his own quote about his most famous character, "As honest as you can expect a man to be in a world where its going out of style."