If you want to write a book, it’s useful to be able to write well. Useful… but not essential.
Thousands of books get published every year that aren’t particularly well written. Quite a few authors get published despite not having much in the way of literary chops.
Before you ask, no: I don’t just mean things published via Amazon or other DIY publication venues. It is true that DIY publication means a lack of institutional editorial process, and it’s also true that this in turn means lackluster writing is more likely to make it onto the shelves.
But at the same time, plenty of traditionally published books also aren’t very well written. This isn’t because they didn’t have editors. It’s because sometimes, “good writing” isn’t necessarily the most important thing a book can have going on.
Believe it or not, that’s both normal and okay. Not every book needs to dazzle readers with the caliber of its writing. For some kinds of books, in fact, technically sophisticated writing — what many people mean when they say “good writing” — can be a liability. There are entire genres of books (travel guides, cookbooks, and self-help being three that spring to mind) where good writing is very much the exception and not the rule for exactly that reason.
How is this possible? Simple: “good writing” doesn’t mean what a lot of people think it does. We are generally taught in school that “good writing” means a certain level of sophistication and linguistic technique. We’re taught lots of examples of what “good writing” looks like when we’re assigned to read and write about the “great books” that have been folded into the literary canon.
we aren’t always taught that “great” is not the only thing it’s worthwhile for a book to be
What we aren’t always taught is that “great” is not the only thing it’s worthwhile for a book to be. All books must be written competently enough that they can move ideas and information from one place to another, but that might be all they need to do. This means that books must have correct and accurate spelling, word usage, grammar, sentence structure, punctuation, and all the other things that make written words meaningful.
But “good writing,” in the sense of skilled or sophisticated writing method and technique, is simply not always required.
Travel guides are my favorite example of this principle at work. A travel guide is a variety of reference book, though they usually show a little more personality than most things we think of as “reference books.” In a travel guide, the most important factor is what gets written, the actual content of ideas and information on the page. How it gets said is the second most important thing. Because the what is so important, the how must be as simple as possible. The writing itself not only doesn’t need to be particularly good, it can be distracting or confusing if it is. When you need to know what Underground line to take to get to the Tower of London, the last thing you need is some kind of highfalutin’ metaphor.
What makes a book good isn’t that a writer shows off their technical chops for the sake of proving that they’ve got some. What makes a book good is a writer who creates a strong, synergistic combination of their book’s what — the things they have to say — and their authorial how, or the techniques and skills they use to say it.
Having something worthwhile to say beats being “writing well” every time. If a writer doesn’t have ideas and information worth communicating, all the fancy literary footwork in the world won’t keep a reader turning the pages.
Having something worthwhile to say beats being “writing well” every time.
If the what of a book’s content and the how of the writing itself aren’t symbiotic, each enhancing the other, one of them ends up getting in the other one’s way. Too much content, handled without enough skill, turns into a sloggy, boggy mess. Too little content, no matter how skillfully and sophisticatedly written, is a watery, pointless cocktail whose entire identity is a twist of lemon zest.
This fact highlights the final reason that good writing is not enough: even very good and sophisticated writers cannot always tell whether they’ve gotten the balance right. Writing well cannot save you from being in the weeds of your own writing. You’re simply too damn close to see.
Writing well cannot save you from being in the weeds of your own writing.
You’re simply too damn close to see.
A cook can taste the soup she’s making and be a pretty good judge of whether it needs more garlic, wine, or salt because the soup is external to her. But because books are above all about communication, and the communication originates from the writer’s mind, it’s devilishly difficult for the writer to get a sense of what that looks like from the outside. You may write well, and if so, fabulous. But writing well does not automatically confer the ability to have any kind of functional perspective on whether or not what you’ve written actually works.
What gives you that is editing. Getting enough distance on your own writing to edit it effectively is difficult. It is a skill, and it can be learned, but it’s much harder to edit your own writing than other people’s. Many gifted writers never really acquire the ability to self-edit very well.
Professional editors, on the other hand, have two advantages: skill and distance. We learn to be careful observers, keeping meticulous track of what a writer is trying to communicate versus what has actually made it to the page, then figuring out how best to bring the two together. Because we didn’t write it, we can see what needs to be done. Because we didn’t write it, we also have the advantage of being able to see it at arm’s length.
If you want to write a book—or anything else—writing well is not enough. Without something to say, writing well is insufficient. Writing well, all by itself, doesn’t grant a writer the ability to balance the what of a book and the how of its writing. It’s wonderful to be able to write well. But you don’t have to buy the lie that you have no business writing anything if you don’t already know how to write well, and you also don’t have to buy the lie that if you do already know how to write well, that’s all you’ll ever need.
As any editor can tell you, neither one is true.
— Hanne Blank Boyd
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