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.

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Jake Meador

Jake Meador is the editor-in-chief of Mere Orthodoxy. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Commonweal, First Things, Books & Culture, National Review, Comment, Books & Culture, and Christianity Today. He is a contributing editor with Plough and a contributing writer at the Dispatch. He lives in his hometown of Lincoln, NE with his wife and four children.

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What makes good writing?

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