I have moments when books by authors I like suddenly start reading like crap, and I have to find someone else who doesn't read like crap, until the turbo-critical period passes.
I also have moments in which
every book I read is written "wrongly". This means I should take a break from both reading
and writing, because my writerly compass is temporarily out of whack.
Sometimes I manage to shift the inner editor into "correctly done" mode--paying attention to the stuff that obviously works in the book I'm reading.
Of course, there are whole genres and categories, where no matter how talented the writer, I hate it by default. I tend to not venture there.
*AFTERTHOUGHT* Stephen King writes sloppy schlock when judged by Raymond Carver standards, and Carver writes pretentious mind-numbing crap when judged by Stephen King standards. H.P. Lovecraft writes degenerate mystic pulp by Asimov standards, and Asimov writes boring moralistic sci-fi lectures by Lovecraft standards. Hemingway is a second-rate primitive Fitzgerald, and Fitzgerald is a pompous and overwritten Hemingway.
All of these writers are brilliant in their own way, and one of the skills writers should develop as
readers, IMO, is the ability:
a) to first judge any book they read
by its own standards, and not by comparing pencils to oranges;
b) to secondly judge the book by the overall standard of its author;
c) to thirdly judge it by the standards of its subgenre and genre;
and only
then, to maybe try to qualify it in some grander scheme of things.
There are genres which I ignore completely, and genres in which only a small minority of writers does something for me, but every time I try a new book, I do my best to judge it by its own standard. For what it's worth, by King's own authorly standard, IT is a solid 10 out of 10, unlike, for example, Firestarter, which is a 7.5
