Maybe I'm just an arse, or perhaps I just don't get it, but all the examples of 'good prose' (except the 'fuck 'em and flee' gag, which I liked) quoted in this thread make me want to throw up.

That Kotzwinkle quote was the worst of the lot. I hate the self-conscious stylisation of the repetition of 'my pad, man' (like yeah man, get a load of this man...) and the meaningless adjectival dump of 'unnameable flecks of putrified wretchedness in grease' (so what is that exactly? Bacon fat?).

It strikes me as very 'writerly'. Kind of 'stand back, folks, I'm going to hit you with some really good prose now (man)'.

I'm aware such sweeping criticism sounds annoying and facile, so I'll get down off my soapbox and give an example of the kind of prose that does it for me. Here's an excerpt from Julian Maclaren-Ross's Of Love and Hunger:

The sky was clearing outside. I went to the door and had a look out. Rain'd almost stopped. Sun made a white rim on the edge of a cloud. Thunder rumbled faintly over to the west. Some other town'd catch it now.

What I like about this is the laconic voice, the colloquial tone, the precision of observation & the unselfconscious incidental poetry of the rim on the edge of the cloud. It sounds like the writer is talking quite naturally to the reader, not preparing some artful contrivance.

It's a matter of personal taste, obviously.

I agree, which is why I think this issue is so subjective. None of the quotes so far, apart from yours RHJ, would induce me to read further. But, as you say, it’s personal taste. Here’s one I really like – it’s from The Needle In The Blood by Sarah Bower:

The voice doesn’t sound like his, though he can feel its vibrations in his throat. It sobs and growls, bellows and screeches like a cacophony of demons. My name is Legion for we are many. Odo is afraid he’s lost his reason, but if the rumours are true, and William is dead, it might be better to be out of his mind. If Godwinson finds him. “You said this couldn’t happen,” he yells, in this voice like a cracked bell. The air is thick with smoke where fire tipped arrows have set the grass smouldering. “You were the Wrath of God. How could you die?”

Dee

Makes you want to throw up? That's a bit dramatic.

I agree with Dee that it's all subjective and as Sarah pointed out, so much depends on the story the prose is relating.

JB

Well, this is good, I think, because it's pushing us all about what is or isn't good prose. In this spirit, I take back the Kotzwinkle quote, although I think I'd have to take back just about everyone else's quotes, too, to be honest! These all read like competent, solid, writing, but nothing really has that transcendent kick, and I suspect most of us are guilty here of finding examples in our favourites.

But I think it's good if we keep trying to find examples; here's another, from one of the writers at the Milford workshop (book coming out next year, I think):

She stood on the steps up to the house and it was spring. Beyond the enclosure on all sides rice plants marched away, shocking green against the rich dark mud. She walked amongst them, barefoot. The mud kissed her soles, slid lover’s fingers between her toes. Water shimmered thick and brown about the plants, murmured down the irrigation channels. She brushed a hand over the rice plants and felt their freshness rising.

This is an extract from a longer description of the paddy fields. You aren't sure at first if 'she' is visiting them actually or in her spirit: the first sentence implying the latter perhaps. What I like is that she covers all the senses (in the whole passage), and the imagery forms a sensory link between the character and the inorganic world, bringing everything to life.

Is it all subjective in the end? Well, I believe that the majority of art is subjective, but that there is a level above that where it can have universal resonance. So, I'd say Tracy Emin's work is definitely subjective, while Turner's (often) contains an emotional response to nature which is not. And that Harrison Birtwistle's music is subjective but Sibelius' largely isn't.

But to get back to prose . . . Dee, I'm not suggesting that good prose takes the reader out of the story, or has them admiring it objectively. I meant more that the quality of its construction, intent and execution produces a deep, probably unconscious, feeling of satisfaction in the reader, or an excitement that something truly unique is unfolding on the page and smacking into their reading mind. Or, to put it another way, I think it's only good prose that produces that feeling, genuinely. The best that bad prose can do is recruit the impatient skim-reader who's happy enough that the plot train pulls into the terminal on time.

And I do think the reader should work--not as in sweating, grunting, back-breaking, boring work, but in terms of being made to reach for a different, rewarding, view of the world or a character or an event. We all can quote dozens of example of the premasticated prose that sells so well these days--where everything is obvious and predictable and doesn't trouble the reader's imagination one little bit.

Terry

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Rupert--I agree with JB; not sure why you're throwing up at a few quotes, or why you feel the need to tear them to pieces (just for the record: the fact the flecks in the grease are 'unnameable' is the point). As I said, this is a subject to struggle with, if we're going to get anywhere with it. So, feel free to offer up some examples yourself, and I for one guarantee I'll keep my veggie sausages down.

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Apologies--you did offer an example; a good one, too! Must do something about my short-term memory.

Azel, my understanding is that prose is the form, rather than a style. So business letters are written in prose. It just means it's not poetry, play, screenplay etc.

So when people talk about good prose they are just talking about writing they personally admire - which is of course why it's so subjective. I think more of us could agree on what is poor prose than on what is brilliant prose.

But the wider point that Terry was raising, apart from the subjective aspects, is that many novels these days do not contain prose which astounds you in itself. You may love the story or the characterisation etc, but does the prose itself impress you?

A first person novel character would not talk in a prose manner

I think you are equating the term 'prose' with either formal or pretentious prose, whereas prose can be in many different styles, including a character talking or thinking in colloquial language.

Deb

Azel, thanks for the devilish questions. Here's my stab at answering them:

1.) Are we talking about using prose for second person or first person view novels? It seems to me that prose is a lot easier to write for a second person novel. A first person novel character would not talk in a prose manner.

I'm talking about prose for any kind of novel.

2.) Out of a hundred readers, how many would enjoy a novel that had good prose? Perhaps most readers just want good junk-food-reading for entertainment. What I mean is, if an author went to the trouble to write his/her book with good prose, how many readers would even notice? Perhaps most readers don’t care, and its just an added time-waster for a writer. What if a writer doubles the time spent to finish a book by adding good prose, but only one reader in a hundred appreciates the prose.

I don't really understand how a writer can ask this kind of question. No, most readers won't notice if the prose is good or just functional, although I believe they still benefit from the greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts effect of great prose. To use a perhaps mundane analogy, I was an assistant school caretaker once, and the head caretaker happened to be someone who just loved to do a good job. In the school holidays, for instance, we'd put down more than a dozen coats of varnish on the wooden floors. We were only obliged to do one or two, and in any case, the kids kicked the finish to pieces within a couple of days. But it had a depth and shimmer to it that a couple of coats just couldn't achieve. The fact was, we noticed and were proud of the result.

If you want to write junk food prose, fine; there's no point in thinking about this question any further. Of course writing good prose will just be a time-waster. But, I don't know, I can't help feeling that J D Salinger's very small published output is going to be around a lot longer than--well, paste in any junk food author here.

3.) If good prose is not ‘part’ of a writer’s natural way of writing, is it a pretense? I could go back rewrite my book in a literately prose manner. I could take it sentence by sentence and ‘prose away’ . . . but would I be a fake?

As someone else has pointed out, good prose does not mean it has to be literary. And as for a writer's 'natural way of writing'--well, yes, it's good to have one's own voice and style. But that doesn't mean you stop trying to improve. There are thousands of kids, for example, who have good natural football skills. But the ones who make it professionally are those who have the drive and courage to deconstruct their natural approach and learn how it's really done at a higher level, before then recovering, or creating new, their natural style. I really don't think the principle is different for writers.

Terry

Rupert--I agree with JB; not sure why you're throwing up at a few quotes, or why you feel the need to tear them to pieces (just for the record: the fact the flecks in the grease are 'unnameable' is the point).

OK, 'throw up' might have been a bit strong, though I had just eaten a slightly overripe banana(!) Let's just say I 'experienced a strong adverse reaction' to those quotes.

I felt justified in criticising that first quote, however, since I reckon it would have been a bit lame simply to have abused it without making a stab at explaining why (which was that I found it too self-conscious, stylised and adjectival). Don't think I was tearing it to pieces, since my reference to throwing up should have made it clear I was expressing a subjective personal opinion.

I liked the paddy field quote much more. Still a bit adjectival for my tastes, and I'm not sold on the 'lover's fingers' (at least, I'd need more context to get into that aspect of the writing), but it did convey a strong visual image and an emotional attitude towards that image without making the reader struggle too much. It worked.

Rupert, you've made me think about the subjective angle more. Kotzwinkle's style changes greatly, according to the kind of book he's writing. I thought that he'd objectively achieved a realistic, but also very funny (especially as the book goes on), hippy voice for Horse with this one. But it may well be that my inner hippy simply relates to it.

Trying to dig a bit deeper into what prose actually is, I'm thinking now that it in many ways it's the interface between what the writer is trying to say and what the reader receives.

A book that contains many kinds of rich prose, for me, is The Once and Future King by T H white. What's interesting is just how differently this book was written to the way fantasy novels tend to be written today. For a start, White was paid a salary by his publishers just to go away and write a book. And the book he wrote was based around 'the matter of Britain', something he'd pondered and studied his entire life. He wrote much of it during the war, exiled in Ireland. He was steeped in history, falconry, heraldry and many other subjects that provide the novel with rich and telling details. He also used the subject matter--Arthur's life's journey through early child-like wonder at the natural worlds to final misery and failure to solve the 'might is right' problem--to explore his own feelings about power and love and duty. He also knew how to write well technically. All of which adds up to a book in which the prose--that interface between White and his readers--sings with authenticity, magic and wisdom. It's really another character in the book, verging at times on the author's voice. But you don't mind because you trust its overview.

Compare that with, say, the majority of fantasy written today--huge series of generic characters on generic quests informed by generic details. The writers are contracted, basically, to produce more of the same. It's probable that they live fairly comfortable, modern, lives and not certain that they will have, for one reason or another, learned as much about the craft of writing as they could. What kind of prose results from this? Well, mostly the kind you have to hop scotch across with your eyes shut, hoping the end will come sooner rather than later.

Terry

sometimes a piece of excellent prose can steal my breath away

Agree absolutely and I think that's when you fall in love with a book?

If something in the writing doesn't prompt that smile or flicker of recognition or create the 'gasp' factor then it's never going to linger in the mind or heart?

But of course it's subjective which is why I've carefully avoided examples

That said, I discovered Terry Pratchett when I was browsing for a birthday gift and picked up 'Lords and Ladies' which has this memorable blurb -

'Lots of hey nonny no and blood all over the place' - I mean, who could resist?

Sarah

This discussion reminds me of an old Barbra Streisand film - I forget which one - which concerns an ordinary girl who hooks up with an aspiring writer.

She reads part of his novel and picks up on the phrase 'The sun spit light onto the earth' or somesuch ('spit' was definately the verb he used).

She spends the rest of the scene heatedly trying to tell him that 'The sun does not spit!' And I think she was right.

Call me old-fashioned, but I think a lot of modern prose is clumsy and pretentious, calling attention to itself in an effort to be praised as 'intelligent'.

For me, the beauty of 'beautiful prose' comes from the combination of ordinary words in beautiful ways, not using ordinary words inappropriately or unusual words when something simpler would not just suffice, but be a better choice. Or, indeed, pretentious descriptions when something simpler would be more effective.

I'm not talking 'cat sat on the mat' here. I'm a great fan of Muriel Spark whose style has been described as 'elegant' and who rarely uses florid language and is never pretentious. I recently re-read 'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie' and was struck by the following line:

"There was a wonderful sunset across the distant sky, reflected in the sea, streaked with blood and puffed with avenging purple and gold as if the end of the world had come without intruding on every-day life."

It's teetering on too much, but the part of the sentence that I find really effective is not so much the description of the sky but the idea that 'the end of the world had come without intruding on every-day life'. We've all, I'm sure, seen skies like this and it is the idea, expressed in very simple but effective language, that makes the prose beautiful to me. But we need the first part of the sentence, perhaps especially the 'avenging purple and gold' (I find the blood reference a bit much!) to set up the effectiveness of the simple pay-off.

Some might say it doesn't earn it's place in the narrative being just a description of a sunset but the portent in it suggests the drama yet to come; and that subtle use of imagery is cleverer than the verbal diarrhoea we're often subjected to in modern, 'literary' novels. In my opinion, at any rate.

What's so interesting is that I do find that quote 'too much', and wonder about you comparing literary novels t verbal diarrhoea when you like that!

I say that not to have a pop at you, la, but because, of all the examples given here, I have enjoyed some and disliked others. It is just really fascinating to see what different styles of writing different people are drawn to, and how some of those examples are horrid to other people.

If I posted an example of some writing that I love, you may well think that is ugly.

Deb

Lastubbs, that's a great example of good prose, and I like your notion of 'the combination of ordinary words in beautiful ways'. This says that Spark had the ability to see how the big world often portends into the small world, even if not always immediate apparent. It's not an image that would have come with intellectual pretentiousness, only with a felt reaction.

It reminded me of a scene in one of Kurt Vonnegut's novels (maybe 'God Bless You, Mr Rosewater' where a rich man has asked his maid to push him in his wheelchair to a cliff on his property where they can watch a magnificent setting sun. After a while, the maid is aware he's expecting something from her and she says, 'Thank you, sir.'

Terry

Rupert, I love Clive Barker, so my reaction to your reaction is probably only based on that. You don't have to like something and of course are allowed to say so.

I find some of the 'sharply controlled' prose presented here wilful and affected to the point of being pretentious, but it all comes down to personal taste, so I guess no one can say what good prose or bad prose is in any absolutist sense.

JB

Okay, maybe examples wasn't such a good idea, since it's mostly taken us into the realms of the subjective, which I wanted to avoid.

I think what I've been trying to say is that good prose is a result of a writer first having something interesting to say and second of him or her working effectively to say it well. For instance, I edit/coach writers who mainly work on novels. They all have to re-write, of course, but I've noticed that there are two general approaches taken to this task. One is to cut, add, move the pieces around, change a character's name, etc, the other is to deepen the effect of the book. Neither is right or wrong--the former is fine, for example, for more commercially-minded books, on the whole. However, I sometimes get the distinct feeling that the writer is actually avoiding digging deeper. Recently, by contrast, I worked with a writer who'd spent a year or so re-writing her novel. The new version was not substantially different--same characters, same story--but now it really gripped. What she'd done, I feel, was to go deeper into what the book was fundamentally about, then tighten or expand the prose to better illuminate that. The result is prose that carries a tautness to it: the reader senses that everything counts and therefore is keen to pick up on any nuance or suggestion or hint. When a character says something, he says something else, too; and when one character is apparently abusing another, their relationship is not quite as black and white as lesser prose would probably imply. I should stress that this is not a literary novel; it's probably closest to women's fiction (i.e. not chick lit but not literary either). But it doesn't matter: the effort put in to deepening the prose makes has paid off.

I thnik most writers find it difficult to take-on this deepening work, partly perhaps because it involves quite a bit of self-challenge: come on, you can do better than that.

Terry

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I should say I'm an avoider of this kind of work too, by nature, and have to find all kinds of ways to push myself away from just shuffling the pieces around the board.

I'd go along with that. I think I've recently had the same question posed to me - tell the story as quickly as possible, or take a breath, enjoy the journey and smell the flowers? I chose to dig a little deeper to the heart of my story by opting for a 90% rewrite. Characters are explored more fully, dialogue examined and descriptions carefully painted. I don't know what the end result will be but it seems to be working so far, even if I have just hit 70,000 words and am not even halfway through!

JB