What makes good writing?

July 13th, 2010 | 1 min read

I just finished reading Diablo Cody's Candy Girl, a memoir of the year she worked in the sex industry. When I first put the book down one of my main critiques is that it felt formulaic: Cody writes a breezy, easy-to-read prose peppered with hipster-sounding one-liners. And after awhile it gets tedious. But as I thought about it I realized that it's possible that all writing is formulaic.

Take Chesterton, for instance. Begin with an amusing but also illustrative anecdote, followed by an intriguing argument and buttressed by memorable, paradoxical one-liners that may or may not follow, logically speaking. Of course, I love Chesterton, but isn't his writing just as formulaic as Cody's?

My intuitive guess here is that I'm missing an important but subtle distinction (not unlike Christopher's distinction between "complex" art and "complicated" art). The problem amounts to this: All writing is formulaic, but some seems to work while others fail miserably. However, the problem can't be simply that bad writing follows a formula. Rather, the problem isn't that a formula exists but that the one being used is poor. This begs a further question: In writing, what is a good formula? What makes a bad formula bad?

Jake Meador

Jake Meador is the editor-in-chief of Mere Orthodoxy. He is a 2010 graduate of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where he studied English and History. He lives in Lincoln, NE with his wife Joie, their daughter Davy Joy, and sons Wendell, Austin, and Ambrose. Jake's writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Commonweal, Christianity Today, Fare Forward, the University Bookman, Books & Culture, First Things, National Review, Front Porch Republic, and The Run of Play and he has written or contributed to several books, including "In Search of the Common Good," "What Are Christians For?" (both with InterVarsity Press), "A Protestant Christendom?" (with Davenant Press), and "Telling the Stories Right" (with the Front Porch Republic Press).

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What makes good writing?

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