Only compare your writing to your own writing, otherwise your aim is to be someone else, but you should, as an individual artist, focus on speaking (or writing) your stories in your own voice, in your own way, however that is.
As others have already pointed out, calling anything in the world "good" is subjective, because that realization is based on an individual perspective. In my own opinion, "good" writing involves being honest with your storytelling and doing so with purpose.
As a writer, you should want to write a story that means something. This isn’t to say that it has to be “important” or deal with “serious” issues, because there are great works of literature that are breezy affairs that genuinely entertain us and warm our insides. A book, to mean something, must make the reader give a damn. Whether they care enough to laugh or swoon or cry or get pissed off, the story and the characters need to matter. This involves, I believe, dealing with the subject of life and death. Once again, this doesn’t mean people have to talk about life and death in the story, or anything of that nature, but here, in the real world, every action we take is tied to our life and our eventual death. Because we’re aware of our mortality, what we do here in this world matters that much more--if we were immortal, would it be as important that I spent five years working on a single book, or would it simply be another thing I did in the endless passing of time? Our memories feel so much more meaningful because we know there was a time and place we experienced them, and it’s gone now, and soon enough we’ll join it. To do this with our story, we must write it in such a way that the actions and choices the characters make feel like they matter to the themselves and the other characters around them, to make it feel just as real as this world is. That’s life and death. Not being born and growing old and withering away. It’s being here and now, and feeling the sensation of the wind on your skin, the taste of another’s lips, the smell of a flower, the sound of the ocean waves, the orange horizon as the sun sets. If we can create this with our words, then maybe we’ve done the bare minimum of creating something worth our time, worth your time, worth being created.
As well, writing a story that matters goes toward that honesty I mentioned before--honesty with the characters, honesty with their lives, honesty with the reader who’s capable of knowing when a character and story is lying to them, and if a character is lying, then the writer is lying. This honesty comes not from the goodness or nobility of any person in the story, but the truthfulness in which these fictional lives are constructed and presented. Many characters may lie, blatantly in fact, but this is always for a reason. Do they have something to gain? Do they not trust who they’re speaking with? Are they a pathological liar? A character who would lie in a given circumstance should lie. This is honesty. To make this character do what they would never actually do themselves is dishonesty--they’re lying to me, and in turn, you, the writer, are lying, and the trust you’ve built up is gone. People are internally conflicted, always struggling against their elements, each other, themselves, but they are always undeniably unique. To be honest is to allow your characters to breathe on their own while you help guide them along their path, not yours. The writer’s agenda is not always the character’s agenda, and vice-versa. We like to think of ourselves as heroic, compassionate beings, but how many of us are without flaws? Even heroes make mistakes. Big ones. Horrible ones. So too do our characters. Unless, of course, there’s a definite--and good--reason to make the character flawless. Anything else would be a lie.
Anyway, that's what I consider good. And, despite what I’ve just finished saying, I don't believe there are true rules to writing. You create out of nothing. I suppose that's good enough of an achievement.
