For a while now I have observed that a lot of people, even people who read a lot, struggle to talk about what they read on anything except the content level. This includes students in my undergraduate lit studies classes! They can tell me what happens in a story and maybe how it made them feel, but if I ask them why they feel a certain way, they can't point to it. It blows their minds when I go through a couple of examples of how words make you feel things (like the difference between "red drops" and "crimson spatters"). They are not paying attention to conventions or formats or narrative techniques and they struggle to comprehend the function of those things.

The extension of this is that most people don't know what "good writing" is. They just don't. This has always been the case to some degree because most people only care about whether or not they like a book they're reading, although of course "good writing" usually makes a book more enjoyable to read. But it also appears that a lot of people "read" without really taking in or paying attention to the actual words on the page beyond what they need to imagine the scenes. This is why some of the most popular/successful published writers out there have incredibly dull prose: people prefer straightforward writing that doesn't distract or confuse you with complexity of language.

The unfortunate consequence of the increasing literacy crisis is that the standards for what is considered "enjoyable" keeps dropping. Readers have lower standards for what they will rate 5 stars on Goodreads and that's all publishers care about, so they can get away with putting less effort into their output, so the overall quality keeps dropping too.

There's this idea in literary studies called "the affect" which bluntly put just refers to the physical and emotional reaction like when you watch a scary movie and your body reacts as if you really are being hunted by an axe murderer. The affect is a huge factor for why most people engage with media: they want to feel something and the more intense the feeling, the better. The thing is that the human mind and body are not that complicated and the buttons to make you feel Sad or Happy or Horny are very big and easily pushed, which is why there are cute puppies in commercials and why some writers try to make every single sentence some kind of climax. Increasingly, people appear to mean "it made me feel things" when they say "it's so well-written."

So the best way to make people respond positively to your writing is to make them Feel Things and you don't need to be subtle or clever about it. In fact, it's better if you aren't. If you can make them Feel Things strongly and also repeatedly, even better. In a fanfiction context, that means readers as a demographic prefer frequent updates with a high density of humour, sex, or intense emotional scenes and they don't really know whether it's well-written or not.

when he says he went for a "more domestic, more intimate" tone and language in the odyssey than in the iliad except for a few key moments of great heroic action that harkened back to the iliad, i'm like yesss i felt that! the moment odysseus notched that arrow and killed the first suitor i was instantly transported back to the war of troy, and that made me think how odysseus probably felt that way too as he did it (how could he not! unlike nestor and menelaus he hasn't had ten years of peace and domesticity to process the war)

and what also strikes me about that moment is that up until then the violence in the odyssey has been so... clean and indirect. the actual deaths have been mostly stuff like... men swallowed by monsters in one big gulp or "and then they drowned" (or the one dolt who got drunk and fell of a roof). but when odysseus' anger and humiliation finally comes to a head, i mean -- christ:

[...] Odysseus aimed and shot Antinous square in the throat and the point went stabbing clean through the soft neck and out [...] The shaft sank home, and the man's life-blood came spurting from his nostrils -- thick red jets -- a sudden thrust of his foot --