Two kinds of good writer
Confusingly (yet perhaps correctly), we use the phrase "good writer" to mean two different things. More than two, actually, but I will here enumerate two.
The first is skill at putting words together to make prose. That kind of good writer writes sentences which: are easy to read, use beautiful words, have excellent rhythm, or whatever. This kind of good writer includes people who are great at explaining complicated scientific things, and people who write beautiful poems about nice orchards. (Probably it also includes people who are very good at writing persuasively.) Regardless of how good or accurate you think their books are overall, this category includes writers like Sam Harris, CS Lewis, Richard Feynman, and Vladimir Nabokov. This is often referred to as being a good stylist. (It is also often referred to as being a good prose stylist, but I think that this distinction is the same with poetry as with prose.)
The second is skill at coming up with fictional stories. That kind of good writer produces: rich characterization, incredibly original settings, narratives that make us look at our world differently, or whatever. (Probably it also includes people who are very good at investigative journalism, or at ordinary journalism, since that involves sculpting a coherent narrative – even though the narrative happens to be true; so maybe this skill is just skill at coming up with stories, whether or not they be fictional.) Regardless of how good you think they are at being a good stylist, this category includes writers like JRR Tolkien, Harper Lee, and Bram Stoker.
Shakespeare is generally regarded as being both of the two.
The weird thing is, those two categories are pretty different! Isaac Asimov is a great writer, but nobody on God's green Earth thinks he's a great stylist. Most people think that Emily Brontë is good at words, but the plot in Wuthering Heights leaves something to be desired. Yet few people would say that Isaac Asimov or Emily Brontë aren't good writers.
Indeed, the confusion can be darned dangerous: we all know that great writers can make false things sound awfully true. John Locke, Ted Kaczynski, and Lord Denning are all excellent prose stylists (and at least two of them I would call downright stupendous).
And even within the same categories, there is lots of division. You know how I mentioned Bram Stoker earlier? He wrote a heck of a compelling story, but it has all kinds of weird internal contradictions and inconsistencies that he didn't intend, including swapping out the cowboy for the protagonist in the final scene and forgetting to change their signature weapon! Paradise Lost is better at having compelling characterization than it is at having a compellingly linear plot. Nate Stevenson is fantastic at writing characters whom the audience emotionally cares about, but he might have no idea how to write a murder mystery. Some writers are fantastic at metre and terrible at rhyme. Some writers are great at describing settings and terrible at describing persons, or vice versa, no matter how brilliantly or terribly those settings or persons were invented.
Lots of religious sages are fantastic at analyzing a body of precepts, reducing them to their constituent principles, synthesizing it into a unified theory, and explaining it in understandable and convincing terms – it just so happens that they're terrible reporters, because they're completely incorrect, because their religion is plain false – so they are highly skilled reporters and also completely incompetent reporters, and we still call them good at reporting.
Now, this elision – stuffing all these different skills into the single phrase of 'good writer' – isn't necessarily entirely factually incorrect, technically. If somebody created a novel, we say he wrote a novel; if the novel is overall a good novel, we say it is a good novel; thus, if someone created an overall good novel, we say he is a good writer. Even if his ability to put words together is crapo.
So it's not inherently bad to say that somebody is a good writer even if their writing isn't good in every single aspect and way. But we have to remember the differences here. It's fine to say "Ted Kazcynski is an excellent writer", only so long as we're darned sure that everyone understands that we don't necessarily mean that his writing is excellent in every way including accuracy. It's fine to say "Isaac Asimov is an excellent writer" provided that it doesn't matter to your audience whether or not his actual prose style is excellent.
(For the record, there's a lot to be said for the stripped-down, minimalistic prose style of Isaac Asimov's average short story; one could argue that it's the most appropriate style for the story he's trying to tell, since it allows the audience to focus entirely on the story without getting distracted by the words used to tell it; just as Beatrice Warde said that the best typography is unnoticed typography, perhaps the best word choice is the unremarkable. If you believe that: whatever, think of some other writer who writes great stories with terrible prose.)
So...does this mean that Stephanie Meyer is a good writer? Well, she successfully attempted to write something that engaged her readers; many skilled writers attempt that, and many fail. So she is extremely good at at least one aspect of good writing. Maybe she averages out to being a good writer.
(Bryan Garner says that good writing requires both good ideas and good expression.)
