Good story/bad writer: (Was: What a snob!)

[justcarol67]

Alla wrote:
> > I think Stephenie Meyer tells a good romance story, but I think 
> > she is a pretty bad writer.
<snip>
> 
zanooda responded:
> 
> I finally got to this thread today and realized that I'm not sure what exactly "bad writing" means :-). Is it *just* about the language, like poor vocabulary, for example? Or is there more? I remember how Steven King said that Stephenie Meyer can't write, and how she said that she is not a writer but a storyteller. I'm not sure though that I know the difference. I mean, if someone came up with a fascinating story but then wrote it down sooo badly that no one can get through it, would it still be a good story :-)?

Carol responds:

I'm coming to this thread late and since I have nothing to say about the article that spawned it, I'll just add my two cents in response to zanooda's question.

First, setting aside the distinction between writing and storytelling for a moment, it's possible to have a good *story* and a bad story*teller* (or, at least, a storyteller whose voice or style or approach to the story doesn't appeal to a particular listener or reader). Think how many versions of "Cinderella" you've read or watched or heard in your life, all essentially the same story (a little girl's mother dies, her father remarries, her father dies, the stepmother and stepsisters make the girl do all the housework and sleep by the fireplace, the girl's fairy godmother gives her a gown, glass slippers, and a coach made from a pumpkin, the prince falls in love and finds her through the glass slipper that she leaves behind)--always the same story with most or all of those elements but perhaps told with a new spin or told badly. (I hate the Grimm's fairy tale version where the stepsisters bite off heels and toes trying to fit their feet into the tiny glass slipper.)Or take a good joke that ought to be funny but is badly told. The joke is still good but the teller isn't. (Of course, even the best storyteller or joke teller needs a good story to work with.)

So maybe the writer in question (Stephenie Meyer, whose name I always feel that I'm misspelling) knows how to invent a good love story, with events and characters that would work well in more skillful hands but just can't tell the story in a compelling way. (I haven't read her books, so I don't know.

As for writing and storytelling, I'd say that storytelling is the voice of the narrator (think Uncle Remus or Huckleberry Finn or the avuncular narrator of "The Hobbit" who seems to be speaking directly to children (in contrast to the narrator of LOTR, who disappears as a separate entity and tells the story mostly from the PoV of the Hobbits). The story is what happens to the characters (somebody, I forget who, described it as "and then... and then..."). All that an oral storyteller (or joke teller or bard) has to do is to hold the attention of his audience--a complex skill, of course, but different from that of a writer, who needs not just a sequence of events but a plot that builds to a climax or series of climaxes, with one event leading to another; memorable characters who are distinct individuals, not stereotypes; a clear, concise style that may not be as folksy or poetic as a storyteller's (or matches the voice of the storyteller or narrator if the narrator is a character in the story); and, theoretically, no mechanical errors unless they're part of a speaker's style (though, of course, it's usually the copyeditor's style to clean those up and fix stylistic infelicities like unnecessary passive voice and dangling modifiers, as well.)

Anyway, my guess is that someone like Stephenie Meyer (whose books, again, I haven't read) can come up with the elements or makings of a good story (what happens to whom) but can't put them together in a readable, compelling way. And I would guess that it's her style that gets in the way, just as it's apparently style that makes books from, say, the nineteenth century boring to modern readers who expect them to get to the point--or rather, the action--without so much exposition and (despite the impossibility of their doing so) to speak modern English without all of Jane Austen's polite conversation or Charles Dickens's criminal slang ("Oliver Twist") or dialects and without expressing any moral judgments (or without essays on whaling and other topics interrupting the story like those in "Moby Dick").

Imagine a love story (not necessarily Meyer's) that leaves out key elements (such as how the lovers keep their trysts secret from their friends and families), that passes moral judgments on the characters instead of letting the reader make or withhold her own judgments, and has no plot to speak of--things happen, such as midnight trysts and walks on the beach, but one event does not lead to another. The story ("and then... and then...") is there; but the plot isn't. The characters are not compelling; the events are not believable. A copyeditor could, in theory, make the style more readable and natural and correct the mechanical errors, but nothing except a complete rewrite can make this hypothetical manuscript into a good book.

Carol, feeling that she's added to the confusion rather than clearing it up