Strange Horizons Discussion Forum: My Window Is Your Mirror, My Mirror Is Your Wall, My Wall Is Your Window, by Matthew Cheney

First to Ben -- I entirely avoided the issue of bad writing, because then I would have ended up with a 10,000-word column full of waffling. Part of the reason I structured it as I did was to cut out transitions where I kept saying things like "on the other hand". There needed to be more of a sense of tentativeness to it all, even when I was making uncautiously (even pretentiously) grand statements.

In his new book About Writing, Delany makes an interesting distinction between "good writing" and "talented writing", saying that "good writing" is writing that is clear and yet pretty much the same as most other writing, whereas he lays out a number of qualities of "talented writing", for instance "rhetorically interesting, musical, or lyrical phrases that are briefer than the pedestrian way of saying 'the same thing'." Etc.

Whether we agree with Delany's specifics or not, it's useful to have them, because he's someone who happily reads all sorts of different things, including vastly more innovative fiction than I'm personally interested in, and he lays out the specific criteria for how he evaluates what he reads. He also questions his own criteria, and that's important. He seems pretty aware of the assumptions he works from. Rather than coming up with some essentialist definition of "bad writing" vs. some other type, I'd rather encourage people to consider what they consider to be "bad" and why, and to see how deeply they hold onto those ideas. But I'm an inveterate postmodernist, so I am allergic to any definition of anything, including "bad", that isn't supported with lots of rationales. This column is me trying to work through, and even challenge, my own rationales for liking some stuff that other people don't.

As for the charge of overvaluing "difficulty", that may be to some extent true, but I hope a careful reading of the whole column reveals at least a bit more nuance than that. "Easy" and "difficult" are such relative terms that I'm not sure how to even address them. I will say, though, that the reading experiences I ultimately value the most are the ones that cause me to think, and that make me feel like I need to reread what I read so that I can think even more. There's so much to read out there, and so little time, that the older I get the less time I want to spend with any sort of reading that doesn't engage every bit of my mind as fully as possible.