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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3521020" data-attributes="member: 4937">I have no desire to get dragged back into beating the dead horse, but this seems like the first really fresh comment in this thread in a very long while and its important enough I feel compelled to highlight it and comment on it.Yes, different writers have very different strengths, and yet they can still be fantastic writers.To take a few examples, a writer like Gene Wolfe is the sort I refer to as a 'wordsmith'.  His prose is beautiful, rich with meaning, and a pleasure to read even as isolated sentences.  But his story telling leaves quite a bit to be desired.  Its not that he can't tell a story, its just that his strengths profoundly lean in one direction.  Other writers in this group include people like Edgar Allen Poe and Kurt Vonnegut.  At the opposite extreme you have writers like JK Rawlings, Roger Zelazny, and Lois McMaster Bujold, whose story telling ability shines in comparison to thier writing ability.  Only a few authors are actually good at both, and if they are even moderately good at both they tend to get very famous.Other writers rely heavily on thier imagination, originality, thoughtfulness, or creativity to sell thier works, and the settings that they create outshine thier gifts as either storyteller or wordsmith.  In this group I'd put writers like Peter Hamilton, China Mieville, and even Robert Heinlien.  Now, that's not to say that those writers are necessarily sub-par story tellers or wordsmiths, its just that they are better at one thing than another.Another contrast for me would be a writer like Agatha Christy, a mystery writer known for her cunningly devised plot twists but who generally doesn't explore anything in the setting beyond what is necessary for the mystery, and a writer like Laurie R. King, who is terrible at plot twists but instead treats the setting almost as a plot to itself (read for example 'The Moor') and lavishes detail and intricacy not on the mystery but on the place where the mystery occurs and the people involved in it.  Two writers in the same supposedly narrow genera, but they have totally different styles.</blockquote>

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