Jaye Marie and Anita Dawes

Here’s a question for you. What makes writers and their writing great? Let’s discuss.

Summer sun on New Year 2015.

To me, great writing isn’t just about whether the stuff engages with me personally or not. There are books where the content, the subject, whatever, makes me go ‘meh’. And that’s fine. Everybody’s tastes are valid and there’s no absolute ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. But, equally, that doesn’t mean it’s a bad book or the author’s useless. The quality of the work is usually clear enough to me – it’s simply that I don’t happen to connect to the material. This is normal (I hope).

So what I’m getting at is that great books are going to have an obvious quality. And it isn’t too hard to spot, I suspect. Some authors are also able to produce those great books, one after the other. And – on the basis of my…