Sure, there is. It just isn't as straightforward as you probably think it is.
Full disclosure: my dissertation is about a cognitive-rhetorical approach to understanding literature. Rhetoric isn't always an easy fit with art, so in order to make the case that the two really have something to offer each other, I had to provide a definition of art, specifically literary art. That was chapter 1 of the dissertation. Maybe I'll lay out that argument in the Oratoria someday, but that day ain't today!
So I've spent lots of quality time considering academic arguments about what constitutes capital-A Art and capital-L Literature. I'm still perplexed whenever I come across literary critics who breezily make aesthetic claims as if they're based on premises so foundational as to be universal. Examples abound, but you need only find one of the book reviews in The New Yorker for a fistful of examples.
But today I came across a new post on the Lingua Franca blog at The Chronicle of Higher Education's website, titled "An Exercise in Bad Writing." TL;DR: the author explains an exercise used in a creative writing class in which students are asked to take a short story and write it so that, essentially, the story is told, not shown. Alternatively, students are asked to take a short story and rewrite it so that it's a bad news story.
The genre-switching there could provide students with some real challenges, in a good way, but it requires two jumps: first, students need to be able to discover and articulate what convention dictates constitutes "good" writing in both short stories and in news articles/broadcasts; second, students need to be able to deviate from those conventions purposefully and explain the writerly choices they made. If they can do that, then their writing-fu is truly strong. I used to ask students in a freshman first-year writing course to do something like this exercise, and they did so to varying degrees of success. Advanced Composition students usually had better luck with the theory and execution of that kind of prompt. But I digress.
What the author of the post in Lingua Franca doesn't explain is why front-loading a story with details constitutes "bad" writing. This excerpt begins with what the post's author thinks is an example of bad writing:
And so when I began to go on evening walks last fall, I found Morningside Heights an easy place from which to set out into the city. The path that drops down from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and crosses Morningside Park is only fifteen minutes from Central Park …
[Teju] Cole said, “To me, the wrong way to begin it, knowing what the book is about, would be: ‘As a Nigerian-German psychiatrist, living in New York City in my mid-thirties, I found myself quite melancholic to be in the shadow of the Twin Towers five years after they went down. In order to sort through my feelings both about the historic past of the city of New York and my own unsorted neuroses regarding my mother and my grandmother and my dead father I decided to wander around the city.’”
But a first paragraph like that sounds like something some of my favorite writers -- Saul Bellow, John Updike, China Mieville -- might start a book with. How can I know that what I'm looking at is "bad"?
Perhaps -- and this is my modest proposal -- it's more important to ask students to think about how to define "good" or "art" or "literature" before asking them to start thinking about "bad" writing versus "good" writing. If we did that, though, I'd probably be out of a job, as would a few psychologists, because we torture students when we lead them to believe that there's an objective standard of excellence in literary art that transcends definition or foundation. They end up thinking "I'll never be a good writer" because they don't know what "good" means, and yet the implication is that there is a "good" that all "good" writers have an ear for. That's not the case.
At the same time, we need to be able to evaluate literature. Let's be clear: I'm not saying that all writing is born equal. What I am saying, though, is that we have to have nuance -- that long-dead virtue -- when discussing the quality and trajectory of literature or any writing. Sometimes, my clients want to know whether their manuscripts are "good," and I often tell them that that's not the right question. The better questions are ones like, "Will it be easy to market this book to its intended audience?", "What is the likelihood that a publisher will be interested in picking this up?", "Does this article achieve my stated purpose?", and "What do you think would improve this manuscript?" The answer to each of those questions entails some discussion of the quality of the story, information, research, etc., contained in the work, but it requires that I define "goodness" in terms of other objectives rather than on my secret-handshake knowledge of what the literati and I think counts as "good." When I write for clients, I write for them, not for literary critics, literary agents, editors, or publishers whom I've never met. I can only do so much to encourage a writer I'm working with to go in a certain direction. At the end of the day, if a client tells me that she likes what I've written for her, I'm obligated to keep writing in that manner and style until she tells me (in detail) how else I should write for her. "Good" only matters in that case if I think that what I'm writing will be in no way useful to the writer (e.g., she's contracted with me to write a website for her accounting business, but she wants the copy to be written as a poem; even in that case, I need to give her what she's asked for while carefully suggesting that this approach is highly unusual and may not be effective), but it's not something that's universal or even definable outside of a specific context with very clearly articulated terms.
So, it's not necessarily that writing can't be described as "good" or "bad." The point here is that anytime you hear writing described that way, stop to ask yourself whether the person making that evaluation has made clear on what basis that evaluation has been made and whether you accept that person's premise. Make sure you're also asking yourself why the question is "Is this good?" and if another question might be more relevant or useful.
