I’m not sure I agree with everything that Micheal Mohammed Ahmad has to say about what makes someone a good writer or a bad writer, but I can definitely see where he’s coming from. As someone who is trying to help people learn to be better writers, it makes sense that he would need to define some idea of what it means to be a good writer in the first place. It feels like his definition of a good writer is just someone with a unique voice and style. I agree that having a unique voice is a good idea, but I don’t think that it can carry a piece on its own. In the context of bending the rules of grammar, Ahmad says that ‘the stronger one’s grasp of a language, the more one can bend the language.’ To me this applies just as well to the idea of cliché. Where Ahmad implies that being cliché is about the worst thing a writer can do, I’d say that understanding clichés is a lot like understanding the rules of a language. Once you understand the medium in which you are working and what your audience is expecting, you can start the subvert those expectations, in the same way that you can start to subvert the structure of a language once you understand that structure. However, if you don’t follow any of the rules, readers will just get lost.
Overall he comes off as very defensive. He brings up a lot of stories about times that arrogant novice writers believed themselves to be better than they were, and revels in his ability to tear them down, at one point by just repeatedly insulting them. I got the feeling that he has spent so long dealing with people who think they know what they doing (but really don’t) that he has to convince himself that he’s not just another victim of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
That said, I agree with most of the actual advice he gives. It’s hard to disagree with the idea that practice and humility are the best ways to get better at anything. It’s also hard to overstate the importance of being able to work with an editor (and to be able to take criticism in general). I’m not sure I agree with the idea that people should exclusively write stories about people with similar backgrounds to themselves, as I value diversity of backgrounds in fiction, but that’s literally just an opinion.