George Orwell thought there was such a thing as good writing. Objectively good writing. I happen to agree. I have always regretted that I’m not a good writer myself. But I have always prided myself on recognising if something is good. It’s the same with music. I can’t play an instrument to save my life, but I have always been able to pick up the unknown gems before they break to the public. If it’s possible to listen to or read something and recognise it as good before it has been more widely recognised as such, perhaps there really are qualities to music–and writing–that are objectively good or bad.
However, and here comes the crux of the matter, there seems to be a somewhat of a paradox involved when we attempt to find out exactly what good writing is. In fact, mutatis mutandis (I couldn’t help myself), there seems to be a somewhat paradoxical solution to any question regarding taste. We have no codified record of objective standards for art, and thus the only scale we have to measure taste against is other people’s tastes. It doesn’t really seem possible for us to point to things such as ‘clarity of thought and expression’ as examples of good writing, because someone who happens to disagree can always ask: –Why? –Why is that good writing? –I like Dan Brown. And no matter how much we recoil at the thought of actually picking up a book by Dan Brown, and maybe even reading it, we cannot point to any criteria that make that book worse than any others except that people with good taste–like me–happen not to like it!
What then, is good writing? Any answer will probably sound presumptuous. However, we could probably narrow down a sort of answer by just thinking about how one might proceed in answering such a question. For example, is one’s valuation of writing always subjective, or is there such a thing as objectively good writing? In other words; is good writing merely a matter of taste? To say it’s not is the presumptuous answer. Let us be presumptuous. There is definitely good writing, and it is most certainly not defined solely by taste. You show good taste, however, by recognising good writing. How could there be such a thing as good taste in anything, if nothing was objectively better or worse?
On the train up to York from Kings Cross I read Camus’s L’Étranger (The Outsider or The Stranger) for the first time. Two things struck me about this book. The first was that I finally understood what the Cure’s “Killing an Arab” is all about. The second was how well the lyrics of that song encapsulate not only the story and feeling of the book, but also Camus’s own style of writing. In a few well-phrased sentences the essence of the book is laid out:

Standing on the beach / with a gun in my hand / staring at the sky / staring at the sand / staring down the barrel / at the Arab on the ground / see his open mouth / but I hear no sound / I’m alive / I’m dead / I’m a stranger / Killing an Arab

I find this to be marvellously good writing. For some reason good writing, to some people, consists in finding the word that the smallest possible fraction of those reading will understand. Preferably, some words will be so obscure that only the writer will understand what he meant. And to add insult to injury, the words are strewn over ridiculously long sentences, peppered with commas to such a degree that you begin to wonder if Locke wasn’t a good writer after all. In one of many bright moments, George Orwell made the same complaints, and offered a solution. His six short rules for good writing, from the essay Politics and the English Language, ought to be repeated to every writer–and especially to journalists and philosophers–every day. Like a morning prayer.

(i.) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii.) Never use a long word where a short one will do.

(iii.) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv.) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v.) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an English equivalent.

(vi.) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Good writing does not lie in the showing off of language, or knowledge of words, or forced puns; good writing lies in clarity and simplicity. In the preface to the seminal Tractatus Logicus-Philosophicus the young Wittgenstein noted, “What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent”. This is by far the most well known passage of the book, and also the only passage I found intelligible upon my first reading. The correlation could not be more telling.
An entire institution that rewards the kind of writing with which I have been concerned does exist. It is the Swedish Academy. The list of winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature is, for the most part, a list of writers who write powerfully and to the point. Surroundings are sparsely sketched, characters appear before us with a minimum of words, ideas are cut into the paper. Camus, Hemingway, Russell, Lagerlöf, Pinter. That’s good writing.