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

[justcarol67]

Alla:
> 
> Could you give an example of the book which you would apply the expression "bad writer, good storyteller" to?
>
Carol responds:

Well, the one I described is a manuscript I edited that had the *potential* to be a good book in the hands of a better writer, but I couldn't fix the organizational and content flaws, only the style and mechanics.

But to bring in writers familiar to people on this list, I would probably call Dickens a good storyteller (great characters, sometimes memorable dialogue) but a bad writer--in part because he was writing in monthly or weekly installments at high speed with no time to revise (and, in contrast to, say, Tolkien, no interest in revision). In consequence, some of his stories are rambling. The Pickwick Papers, of course, have no plot at all and aren't meant to, and some of his other books, especially the long ones, are weak on plot--lots of digressions and some occasionally sarcastic moralizing. Part of that is the era he was born into, of course. Tastes change and we modern people have grown impatient with exposition thanks to TV and movies. We (I'm speaking in general, not specifically of you and me) want action and to a lesser degree, character development, without any commentary, especially moralizing, by the narrator.

I love "Moby Dick," to switch to another nineteenth-century author, but it's impossible to teach because of all the interruptions (essays) and the altered point of view (aCarollmost a loss of Ishmael's perspective) about a third of the way through) and all those weird experiments with soliloquies as if Melville is trying to be Shakespeare but sounding more like Colley Cibber (an eighteenth-century actor/playwright who tried to "improve" Shakespeare's plays). And look at the paragraph-long sentences in "Moby Dick." (As for punctuation, Melville asked his editor to "sprinkle in a lot of commas" because he didn't know where to put them!) So I suppose I would call Melville, at least in MD, a good storyteller but a bad writer and "Moby Dick" a seriously flawed masterpiece or a "great, bad book."

Just some thoughts. I still think it's usually a matter of a good or potentially good story badly written. I'm not talking about Stephenie Meyer since I haven't read her books.

Carol, who meant to mention Henry James, who has changed our ideas of what constitutes good writing, especially point of view, and yet his own works are dull as dust