Mr Men's Brother

It was at a weekend course on creative writing that the creator of Mr Men's brother turned up as a student. Everyone knew him immediately, not because they knew him as Roger Hargreaves' brother but because he was a well known ITV newsreader. I can't recall his first name. He was a friendly person who genuinely wanted advice on the writing of a novel. That there was no one there in tutorial capacity who had written a published novel did not unduly upset him; there was however a very successful crime novelist, one Roger Ormerod, author of about fifty novels, to help him.
I had a couple of chats with him. He did not mention his brother, neither did I, but he did mention a former colleague of his who had become a successful novelist of I believe (I've not read his works) spy fiction - Gerald Seymore.
He said that no one at ITV had imagines that Seymour would be a success in the genre he had chosen. The reason? No one thought he was that good a writer.
So I told him that I had read somewhere that Leo Tolstoy had a fairly close relative who fancied his chances as a novelist but had been told by a publisher that "he wrote too well".
I believe that. You can write too well to be a good story teller. You can be too conscious of style and not conscius enough of the pace of a story to make it readable.
Whether or not Roger Hargreaves' brother took my advice I don't know but I did have the impression at that time that he was rather too good a stylist to be as successful as his colleague Gerald Seymore.