Shreya Gandharkar asked Maggie Stiefvater:

What do you think makes an author good? Or rather a story good?

Maggie Stiefvater Twenty years ago I would have had a different answer to this question, and probably in another twenty I'll have a still different one.

But for now, having read hundreds of authors and thousands of books, I find that what makes a book good to me is originality and specificity. I want to hear a story told in a way I haven't before, or be taken to a place I haven't seen before, or shown a corner of a culture that I haven't ever noticed. I want to see characters or places or situations drawn with such specificity and accuracy, even when turned into metaphor, that I can tell the author is working from real life and real truth, not making a copy of other things they have read or seen.

I want to read a thing I haven't read before, and as most big readers will know, that gets harder and harder the more you consume.

It means every year I become both a more adventurous reader and a more choosy one, paddling off into further genres to fish for books I might not have tried years before. It also means I am far more merciless at throwing them back.

Does that make an author or story good? It makes it good for me. For now. And as a writer, I firmly believe you are what you eat, or rather, you are what you read, and so I like to think my adventures serve to keep my own stories fresh, too.

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