The 41 Million Dollar Man
Brandon Sanderson and What Exactly is Bad Writing?
“Biggest” News in Books: An Unflattering Profile
A Wired profile of Brandon Sanderson, one of the bestselling fantasy authors writing today, made the rounds on book Twitter last week. It’s not a particularly kind one. You can read the full profile here, but the two things the writer says over and over again is that point blank “Sanderson is a bad writer” and also that “Sanderson talks a lot, but almost none of it is usable” (to underline the point, the writer says Sanderson isn’t quotable three separate times). He also tells Sanderson to his face that he is a bad writer in the guise of asking a question, which is sort of rude.
Brandon Sanderson is not a household name like Stephen King or James Patterson despite being in the conversation with them financially. He broke through a little more in the public sphere when he raised an astonishing $41 million dollars on Kickstarter last year. I work in books and that was the first I really heard of him, watching his 60 Minutes profile alongside everybody else after the record-breaking Kickstarter. He says he’s sold about 20 million books worldwide (with a much smaller catalog than King and Patterson).
Sanderson writes world-building fantasy novels about his magic world, the Cosmere, a Marvel-cinematic-universe style lore that has multiple series and spinoffs. From what I gather the novels are the pretty standard hero’s journey kind of thing. The profiler, for all of his unkindness, does draw the important connection between Sanderson’s Mormonism and his mythology of an all-powerful, unified, one-God kind of magic—which Sanderson himself confirms is the case. Once learning this, it’s not so that surprising that Sanderson isn’t a very interesting interview subject—Mormons have a reputation for maintaining a bland, pleasant, and clean-cut demeanor as part of their efforts to spread the good word.
Religious overtones of his work aside, it’s interesting to engage with the other criticism levied at Sanderson, which is that he is not a good writer. This is not a particular fresh assertion when it comes to popular novels. Or, for that matter, any other entertainment from music, tv, or film that becomes incredibly popular. But what are we talking about when we talk about “good writing”? Good writing is usually synonymous in the popular imagination with good sentence writing. And that is certainly one piece of it and an obvious place to start. And the profiler does:
At the sentence level, he is no great gift to English prose.
The early books especially. My god. Here’s a sample sentence: “It was going to be very bad this time.” Another one: “She felt a feeling of dread.” There’s a penchant for redundant description: A city is “tranquil, quiet, peaceful.” Many things, from buildings to beasts, are “enormous.” Dark places, more thesaurically, are “caliginous.”
However, there is a serious issue with just looking at the sentence level to determine if a novelist is a good writer or not. If we were examining a poem or a lyric, for instance, this might be a more valid way to judge a good writer. But while novels can be poetic or lyrical, they are not strictly that. The beauty of a novel is that it isn’t about each and every line. I’ve read many writers who are clearly attempting to be profound and original in every sentence, and often the result isn’t pretty. Sometimes, a simple “glue” sentence is more than adequate. Now, the best of the best writers know how to make glue sentences interesting, too, but it’s not a prerequisite that every sentence be pristine and unique in order to be a good writer.
For a novel, especially, the connective effect of the sentences is almost as important as each individual sentence: what feeling, idea, or imagery do they evoke together? How does one cluster of sentences—an event—effect your reading of a separate cluster of sentences thirty pages after it? That’s the magic of a story or a novel. Maybe “it was going to be very bad this time” isn’t a sparkling sentence, but it could be the connective tissue to a much more original passage or idea. “It was going to be a very bad this time” could be a funny droll statement, depending on what came before it. We simply don’t have the context. Of course, this isn’t always true. Sometimes bad sentences are indicative of a bad writer in other senses—cliché, dull stories, flat characters—but a few sentences cherry-picked out of hundreds of pages of fiction is not sufficient to give you the answer to whether or not someone is a good writer.
This kind of sentence level criticism happens with many other popular and successful writers. Even Stephen King is not immune. I recall reading a review of The Institute a few years ago that took him to task for his sentence level writing. Stephen King is as popular a novelist as there is, but he is not a writer that is careless with his use of language. He’s actually quite a sneakily literary writer, but it’s perhaps because of his status as the king of entertainment that he’s not often considered as a literary writer (I’m sure he wouldn’t want it the other way around). Still, it’s a little irksome to see his book get taken to task for a few cliches in 500-plus pages. Not that King should be immune to a critical eye, but here is one of our most treasured authors still cranking out original, non-series novels into his 70s, so perhaps there’s something to appreciate and consider beyond a few sentences that are clunkers. What King is good at, which is often not praised by critics, particularly when it’s popular, is storytelling.
Writing and storytelling are equally important in novels. Ideally, for me at least as a reader, you can have both—and there’s no reason you can’t other than that it is rare for someone to be great at both simultaneously. If you’re great at either one on these elements you can still be a good fiction writer. But the fact remains that the road to critical acclaim and greatness as a writer is more easily paved word by word than chapter by chapter.
Back to Sanderson: the profile writer gets halfway to acknowledging storytelling as the other half of good writing, paying it some notice near the end of the article:
A good writer? Who knows. What I do know, now, is this: So many of us mistake sentences for story, but story is the thing. Things happening. Characters changing. Surprise endings.
The writer also mentions earlier in the article that he’s read at least 17 of Sanderson’s books. And this is the point: storytelling is a skill, and one that should be considered more when deciding whether or not an author is a “good writer.” Every reader has read books where the sentences are beautiful that they couldn’t finish. Conversely, I find myself finishing books where the writing is fairly rudimentary. Even if it was this profiler’s job to read Sanderson’s books—and I can relate because it is also my job to read many books out of obligation—it’s hard to imagine actually making it through 17 of one author’s books and then dismissing them so roundly and decisively.
Several years ago, I first read the pulp classic Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews. The sentences are not good by any decent standard—there are a comic amount of exclamation points, and that’s just for starters. And even though the story is fairly melodramatic and pretty silly at points, it is a novel you cannot stop reading. That is the skill of storytelling and it is one that can sneak up on you. If you find the writing subpar but keep reading anyway, it’s worth asking yourself: why do I keep reading? A strictly bad writer couldn’t make you do that.