What does it mean to say something is "well written"?

I've been thinking a lot lately about what it means to say something is well written. This is actually a topic that has been on my mind for years. When I was an editor in science fiction and fantasy publishing, I grimaced as my profession was constantly denigrated by people in the literary genre who thought that genre publishing was all explosions and rocket ships and an absence of character. But even within the genre, there was a percentage of award-winning authors who turned their nose up at a set of bestselling writers who they thought were hacks. Back then I would always point out that one of the functions of fiction—arguable the premiere function—was to engage a reader, so if a book could enthrall a million fans, then it was doing what books were suppose to do and ergo, it was "well written."

These days, I generally encounter disagreements over television media. Something that I think is absolutely quality is denigrated by someone else. Sometimes, it's just a loud mouth hater on the internet, whose argument is nothing more than, "Dude, it totally sucks." But other times it's colleagues whose opinion I respect and value. Of course we all know that taste is subjective, but what exactly is subjective about it?

I've come to think that "well written" isn't a single metric, but a combination of factors, each of which is weighed differently by different people. In other words, people are looking for different things in their narratives. These are:

1. Visceral Reaction. Is the material engaging and exciting? Some people don't want to think about their entertainment. They want, in the crudest terms, "tits and explosions." There was a period about ten years ago when I began to notice a phenomenon in movie theaters. A percentage of the audience would get up and leave about five minutes before the end of the film. They weren't walking out on a bad piece of cinema. If that had been the case, they would have left much sooner, in the first five minutes not the last. They were simply satisfied with the experience. They'd seen enough laughs and car chases and space battles and pretty people, and they were heading to their car before the rush, like people sometimes do at sports events. Watching them depart, I realized they were fundamentally engaging with film in a different way than me. But... that's the extreme example. Engagement with the media emotionally is, in my opinion, still the most important criteria as to whether something is well written. If it doesn't connect, than nothing else it might be doing is being carried through to an audience.
2. Idealogical Confirmation. Some people are looking for examination or confirmation of certain ideological values. Conversely, some folks object to the same thing. To some people, a story is well written if it deals with important matters that overlap with their own beliefs. This story lets you know that X is good and Y is bad. Therefore, it is well written. Now, I'm not denigrating this at all. I love Star Trek Discovery, and one of the reasons I do is that it presents the most diverse cast in Star Trek history. In my mind, it fulfills the promise of equality that Star Trek has always expressed better than any previous iteration of the franchise. And there are definitely people among the fan base who disliked it for the same reason. So I would put this down as an important criteria, but not the only one. I wouldn't personally think something was well written only because it engaged with big ideas. Nor does something have to overlap completely with my own beliefs to be of value. At the same time, I'm not going to engage with something like Birth of a Nation at all, because its far, far too afield of the things I value and what it espouses I find repugnant.
3. Artistic Skill or Innovation. Some people are looking for a literary quality, reading or viewing for the flow of language, the choice of words, the framing of the camera, the montage of scenes, the beauty of the art for art's sake. This is what most people think of when they think of "well written." But I think it's not the whole of it. I would say a better term would be "crafted with expertise and skill" or "executed with innovation and imagination." A quick aside: back on the denigration of genre publishing by the literary crowd. When a science fiction novel that I'd edited was up for the Hugo awards, I was emailed by two separate Pulitzer Prize winning novelists who wanted to tell me how wonderful the novel was. One praised the writer as "the finest living writer in the English language" while the other said it was the "best novel that year in any genre." Take that, Margaret Atwood. (The book in question was The Dervish House by Ian McDonald.)
4. Adherence to Canon Expectations. Finally, in genre narratives in general, and those in long-running series in particular, there are those who judge it based on how well it adheres to established canon. You often hear it said that properties like Star Trek and Star Wars aren't just judged as to whether or not they are good or bad television or cinema, but as to whether they are good or bad Star Trek, good or bad Star Wars. This is almost a subset of the second criteria, ideological values. Something is good if it follows canon, contains a number of easter eggs, delivers what the narrative is expected to deliver. Something is bad if it veers too far afield of what the audience is accustomed to, contradicts canon too severely, or breaks rules of the milieu established in early works. At the same time, carbon copies of earlier successes are rarely well received. The difficult needle to threat here is to be different enough from what has come before without being too different. To return to sports metaphors, the football needs to be carried the next five yards, but not out of the stadium and into a baseball field. Andor can push the envelope of what Star Wars can be, but The Eternals may be too far off from what the majority of people come to the MCU for.

I tend to look for a mix of these criteria in my narratives. I like genre fiction, and certainly when dealing with a property like Star Trek, I want to see it uphold the values that that fictional world espouses. I want to see what I've come to see broadly, but I also want stories that challenge the format and the expectations and push things further than they've been pushed before. I admire skillful writing, whether dialogue or structure. And I want to be engaged on a purely visceral level.

I think instead of denigrating any narrative with a quick "Dude, it totally sucks," it would be good to remember that not everyone views the same stories the same way, or even looks for the same things from stories. Some people prioritize one of these criteria over others, and some people only value one of these criteria at the exclusion of the others. Prefacing things with "in my opinion" goes a long way to embodying the wisdom that the same story can mean many different things to many different people.

And maybe "well written" has more than one definition.