Fair Thee Well Then, ‘Good Writing’, I Hardly Knew Ye

Uber-agent Darley Anderson was profiled in The Bookseller last week, with this snippet appearing near the end of the piece:

What authors need
For fiction, he wants his agency to look for character first and plot second among the over 1,300 submissions it gets monthly. “Good writing is the last thing, and we can work with authors on that.”

  The first thing to say about that is Darley Anderson’s clients sell. Lee Child, Martina Cole, John Connolly … these are writers that any agent would be delighted to have on their books. The second thing is that, if Darley Anderson’s position in publishing’s pyramid is somewhere near the apex, yours truly is pretty much buried away in the rubble of said pyramid’s foundation. But a cat, as they say, can look at a king, and I hope you’ll pardon me if this cat looks askance at his particular king.
  When I read a novel by choice (as opposed to reading it for review, or as prep for an interview, say), I read it first and foremost for the quality of its writing. Two of Darley Anderson’s clients, John Connolly and Tana French, make a good case in point. Now, it’s worth say that ‘good writing’ takes many forms, whether that’s the prose poetry of Lawrence Durrell or the hardboiled staccato of James M Cain, the brutalised rhythms of James Ellroy’s recent work, the refined elegance of John Banville, or the heightened formality of Mary Renault. ‘Good writing’, for me, is writing that is persuasively authentic to the story it is telling. To paraphrase @allanguthrie’s tweet yesterday, plot and character are bound up in ‘good writing’.
  This notion that ‘good writing’ is somehow a decadent luxury, or an anachronistic optional extra, is an insidious one, and the phenomenal success of the likes of Dan Brown, John Grisham and (particularly) James Patterson suggests that it’s already too late to stamp it out. Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M Cain weren’t just ‘good writers’, they were great writers for whom the medium was very much the message. When they employed a pared-back, direct style it wasn’t for fear that some feeble-minded reader might be jolted from his or her feverish page-turning, it was because the style created a mood and atmosphere vital to their stories.
  Anyone who has read either of my books (hi, Mum) will know that I’m unlikely to ever win a literary prize for the quality of my prose. So this isn’t me railing against market forces on behalf of my fragile, sensitive, elegant wordsmithery. What I’m railing against is the absurdly reductionist attitude that novels can be reduced to character and plot, (mangled metaphor ahoy) with ‘good writing’ finessed onto a framework once the meat and bones have been tossed into the pot. I mean no offence to screenwriters or graphic artists, or computer game programmers for that matter, when I say that a novel is not simply another mode of storytelling. The reductionism is the equivalent of eating a stew by picking out only the pieces of meat. It may be tasty, but it won’t be very satisfying in the long run. It won’t be very healthy, either.
  I’m offended, too, by the idea that the Darley Anderson agency ‘can work with authors on that’ when it comes to ‘good writing’. A good agent is a good editor, and I’ve been lucky enough to work with two good agent-editors to date. But editing is not writing. For that matter, plot and character (if I may belabour the ‘stew’ analogy one more time) have more to do with the preparation of ingredients than they have with actual writing. Good writing, for writers and readers alike, is an ineffable magic, or should be. A good writer is not simply a flesh-and-blood computer into which we feed ‘plot’ and ‘character’ and then print off the results.
  The Darley Anderson quote above was/is the single most depressing thing I’ve read in the two and a half years since I started this blog, and I include in that the email I received telling me that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt weren’t picking up the second book of the two-book deal they’d agreed on signing THE BIG O. A knock-back is one thing, and small enough beer in the grand scheme of things, and as often as not a matter of the opinion and taste of one person. On the other hand, the idea that Darley Anderson is making pots of money (for his agency and his writers, it must be said) according to a philosophy that explicitly states that ‘good writing’ is the least of his or his writers concerns, suggests that the race to the bottom just hit Mach speed.
  I love crime writing. It’s why I write crime novels, it’s why I run this blog. But no kind of writing can be reduced to plot and character without losing the unquantifiable essence of why we read.
  A couple of months ago, John Banville was pilloried at length by crime writers and readers for suggesting that he writes his Benjamin Black novels faster than he writes his John Banville novels. Banville’s slur, or so some suggested, was that crime novels didn’t require the same level of craft as his literary novels. Will those who pointed the finger at John Banville for denigrating crime writing now point the finger at Darley Anderson? Somehow I doubt it.