Personally I wouldn’t go so far as to say writing “trumps” story, just that they both have significant weight.
My justification for this is that it is really easy to come up with a good story and really hard to write well.
My justification is simply that good writing should be good through its entire power spectrum, from individual word choice, to a well-crafted sentence, to an engaging scene, to a meaningful overarching plot. Having one component that’s excellent doesn’t justify poor performance in others; everything weighs in together. (Of course, there are some authors (Dan Brown springs to mind) whose prose style is just so awful that I can’t make it through even a single page, so I have no chance of appreciating the plot.)
Personally I wouldn’t go so far as to say writing “trumps” story, just that they both have significant weight.
My justification is simply that good writing should be good through its entire power spectrum, from individual word choice, to a well-crafted sentence, to an engaging scene, to a meaningful overarching plot. Having one component that’s excellent doesn’t justify poor performance in others; everything weighs in together. (Of course, there are some authors (Dan Brown springs to mind) whose prose style is just so awful that I can’t make it through even a single page, so I have no chance of appreciating the plot.)