Who's the better writer, Agatha Christie or James Joyce?
It's an odd comparison on the face of it. Both are gifted, but in completely different ways. Joyce couldn't make you race through chapters desperate to find out who did it. Christie couldn't write prose so lyrically dense that English professors are still unpacking it decades later. They're both brilliant — but at different things.
That's what makes comparing good writers so difficult. And it's worth understanding why, because the way we answer this question has real consequences for which writing gets published, which gets ignored, and whether quality continues to matter at all.
Two Kinds of Good
Christie's gift is invisible technique. Consider the opening of And Then There Were None:
"In the corner of a first-class smoking carriage, Mr. Justice Wargrave, lately retired from the bench, puffed at a cigar and ran an interested eye through the political news in the Times."
Nothing ornamental. But in a single sentence she establishes character, status, setting, and a man who is used to passing judgement — which, as you later discover, is exactly the point. The simplicity isn't laziness. It's misdirection. You're reading so smoothly that you don't notice you've already been given the key to the whole plot. Three billion copies sold suggests she knew exactly what she was doing.
Joyce's gift is the opposite. Take the final lines of Molly Bloom's soliloquy in Ulysses:
"…and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."
No punctuation. No paragraph breaks. The grammar dissolves into consciousness itself. It's not trying to be easy to read — it's trying to capture something that conventional prose can't: the raw, unstructured movement of thought and memory and desire. You can't skim it. You have to surrender to its rhythm. Most people won't. But those who do encounter something that a conventional novel just doesn't give you.
So who's better? Christie, who can hold millions of readers in her grip without them ever noticing her technique? Or Joyce, who bends language into shapes that nobody before him had imagined?
It's genuinely hard to say. They're operating on different axes entirely.
Enter Dan Brown
But here's the thing: while it's hard to compare two good writers, it's surprisingly easy to spot a weaker one.
Pitch Dan Brown against Agatha Christie — his hacky plots, his stilted dialogue, his kit-assembled sentences — and most readers would land with Christie. Ask the same question to people who've read both Ulysses and The Da Vinci Code, and the comfortable majority would again likely land against Brown's favour and land with Joyce.
So we can't easily say who the better writer is when two good writers are compared. But we can say who the weaker writer is when one enters the picture. Quality is hard to rank at the top, but it's not hard to recognise. Most readers know good writing when they encounter it, even if they can't articulate exactly why — and they can certainly tell when it's absent.
This matters because readers are often better judges of quality than we give them credit for. If enough people read two pieces of writing and tell you which one is better, they're usually not wrong.
Why This Matters
So why do we need to compare writers at all? Who cares?
A writer friend told me recently about her experience trying to get a novel published. Among the things the publisher checked for was how many social media followers she had. A pre-existing audience — regardless of what content you're peddling — can be a compelling factor when a publishing deal is decided on.
This isn't cynical. It's simply how for-profit companies work. But it means that the quality of the writing and a writer's actual abilities are taking a back seat to their ability to self-promote. No offence to them, but I doubt the publishing agent who signed Kendall and Kylie Jenner's sci-fi novel was thinking "wow, what literary talents."
When follower counts start to outweigh prose quality in publishing decisions, something important is being lost. Not because commercial thinking is inherently bad, but because it shifts the incentive away from getting better at writing and towards getting better at marketing yourself. And those are very different skills.
The Risk
If writing quality stops being the primary factor in what gets published and celebrated, the long-term health of the industry suffers. Not overnight — there will always be brilliant writers and brilliant books — but gradually, as the path from talented writer to published author becomes less about the work and more about the platform.
The writers who would have emerged because they needed to write to earn their bread — the ones who got better through necessity and repetition — have fewer reasons to persist if the route to publication runs through Instagram rather than through craft. Hobbyist writers will always exist. But many of the best writers in history were vocational ones, and the opportunities for vocational writing are narrowing.
The more people understand what good writing actually looks like — and the more systems exist for recognising it — the harder it is for quality to disappear from the conversation.
Democracy for Writing
So how do you actually compare two writers? How do you judge quality in a way that's fairer than three people on a panel and more meaningful than a follower count?
The fastest answer I can think of is simply to ask the people who've read both. Survey a thousand readers who have read both Ulysses and And Then There Were None and let them weigh the merits of each work on their own terms — be it a favouring of dreamlike flow or jaw-dropping twists. In essence, this is democracy for literary talent.
Most traditional writing competitions don't work this way. They rely on small judging panels — three to five people — whose tastes inevitably shape what wins. That model has credibility and history behind it, but it also means a story that would resonate with a thousand readers might not match the preferences of the three people who happen to be judging that year. The panel doesn't just assess quality — it defines it.
At Fiction League, we wanted to try the alternative. Our tournaments are anonymous — no names, no profiles, just the writing. Stories compete head-to-head in blind pairings, and every match is judged by multiple readers: other writers, each bringing their own perspective. No single opinion decides the outcome. The result isn't one panel's definition of quality — it's a broader, distributed signal of how writing actually lands with people who care about it.
Writers who progress through the leagues and reach the top can enter publication competitions, where the community votes to select a winning story. That story is then printed and sold — with editing services available and the author receiving royalties. The whole point is that publication is earned on the strength of the writing, judged by the people who read it.
We can't definitively answer whether Christie or Joyce is the better writer. Nobody can. But we can build systems that take quality seriously — that let the writing speak for itself, judged by many readers rather than a few gatekeepers. That won't settle the debate. But it's probably a more honest way of having the debate.