Thanks for that post, Terry, which I find really interesting and will keep.

I haven't reached the end of my first draft of my first novel yet, but I recognise the 'deepening' you refer to from honing short stories I've written in the past. I think of it as 'making your clay and then shaping it' - you can only give the writing everything it needs when you already have some of it in place to see your way. That's how it is for me, anyway, but perhaps not for others..?

Deb

Are we all talking about the same thing? Can someone give me a definition of what prose is, and more importantly, what it is not?

When I hear the word ‘prose’, I visualize writing out a plain vanilla ice-cream sentence for my story, and then putting chocolate fudge, nuts and a cherry on top. Or perhaps my sentences could be compared to plain pound cake, where writing ‘good prose’ would be a heavy fruit cake.

I just want to make sure we are all talking about the same thing here, when we talk about prose. I don’t want to get it mixed up with something else. My sentences seems terribly ‘plain’ to me sometimes during re-write, and I want to liven them up with ‘prose’ (if we are talking about the same thing), but my character would never talk that way. To her, a forest is a forest, a sunset is a sunset.

Azel

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.

I've done cut and add and move - I've even gone deeper but where I'm struggling is the whole rip it up and tell the story better - it's slow and painful and I find it very hard - but no pain no gain?

Sarah

<Added>

Years ago I read a book about Renoir and it suggested that just as there were no London fogs before Turner so there were no rounded Renoir children - the art shapes the physical landscape argument?

Sometimes you read a description or a piece of prose and it's so vivid and right that it becomes part of the literary landscape - and you catch echoes of it in other works by later authors? Not because the author consciously thinks - oh I'll write something like x - but because the original becomes so powerful that it becomes a part of their internal landcape to draw upon - just as they might reference a painting or a real life view?

S

Funnily enough, I was just reading the website of a highly successful SF/fantasy writer--loads of tie-in books like Predator, Quantum Leap, Final Fantasy, Roswell, Star Trek, Smallville, Spiderman, etc, etc. He was talking about how to break into the short story market. Basically, he said you have to write a story a week, then keep them all circulating. He used to have 70 on the go at any one time. He said this means you can't afford to spend time re-writing: he takes four hours to write a 5,000 word story, then just gets it out there.

Which doesn't sound like deepening one's prose is too high on the list of priorities for getting published. On the other hand . . . maybe the really tough task is to try to do both: keep up a stream of stories, as he suggests (he gave a long list of top SF writers who did the same thing as him to get established), but also work on deepening the prose--feck!

Terry

Azel, I did already answer you but you don't refer to my answer.

Forgive me for putting this bluntly, but I think your definition of prose is completely wrong. The definition in my Oxford Concise says 'ordinary non-metrical form of written or spoken language'.

Hence, novels and short stories and business letters are written in prose. People speak in prose, however well or badly, and allowing for the half-finished sentences most of us speak in much of the time. The msgs we write in forums such as this one are prose. This is prose. Your msg that I am answering is prose.

Poetry is not prose ('metrical' refers to poetry). I don't believe plays or screenplays would be considered prose, although they contain prose.

I think what you are thinking of when you say 'prose' is something quite different, and I'm not sure what name you should be using. Perhaps you are thinking of literary prose? Perhaps you are thinking of overblown, purple prose? Perhaps you are thinking of fine, beautiful writing?

My sentences seems terribly ‘plain’ to me sometimes during re-write, and I want to liven them up with ‘prose’ (if we are talking about the same thing), but my character would never talk that way. To her, a forest is a forest, a sunset is a sunset.

How to handle that depends on whether you're writing in first person or third person. If in first person, then you should be representing the way she would talk or at least think, so if she would never use 'fancy language' then you shouldn't write it.

If in third person subjective then you still need to make sure her speech does not use 'fancy language', if you feel that's not her style, but you have a little more freedom in your narrative. Someone more qualified will hopefully come along and explain better how much the narrative should be influenced by the viewpoint character's personal style.

Deb

<Added>

If in first person, or if in third person subjective when writing your MC's speech, you don't have to leave it all as plain vanilla writing. You should strive to make the speech distinctive in a way appropriate to the character. So, for instance, she may use a lot of colloquial language, or swear a lot, or have idiosyncratic turns of phrase. All these can add colour to the writing. So you can build something interesting and distinctive and colourful to read without using fancy language she wouldn't use.

The way I see it (and a very shorthand description to make my point here), fiction is a more colourful version of real life. People talk how they talk, except more interestingly. Events reflect real life, but are often more intense. So IMO you should strive to get the speech as strong and interesting and memorable as you can while staying within the style you would expect from that character.

he takes four hours to write a 5,000 word story, then just gets it out there.

Unfortunately there are folk out there who can do this

Did you ever see 'the Libertine' where Rochester remarks in a bored manner that he got banished from court for accidently reading a scandalous peome to the king that 'took him a whole hour' to write ?

I'm not sure writing is like elbow grease and the more effort you put in the brighter the sheen - for us mortals maybe but there are always going to be the happy few out there who can just fling words at the page and they stick while the rest of us are still grovelling around on the floor trying to find where we dropped the dots and crosses?

Sarah

<Added>

poem!

[Perhaps you are thinking of literary prose? Perhaps you are thinking of overblown, purple prose? Perhaps you are thinking of fine, beautiful writing?
]

Deb
Using your own definitions, I would call some of the example novel passages, which have been posted on the subject of prose, as literary prose or purple prose. This is where I became confused. I was just not sure what was being discussed.

It seems to me, that many here are talking about literary prose, as opposed to good prose. To me (and I may be wrong), many modern fiction book writers (who turn out huge amounts of work yearly) use the-first-word-at-hand. This would be bad prose. To me, good prose, would still be a vanilla ice-cream sentence, but with some thought going into the selection of words, and the arrangement of those words in a sentence. One would not use the first word at hand, or the first arrangement. I think this is very different from literary prose.

Azel

it's probably closest to women's fiction (i.e. not chick lit but not literary either).

ah, definitions. How to define women's fiction? Can't it be literary? In which case, what's literary fiction? And what's GOOD literary fiction?
Reminds me of a discussion with friends recently: if chick lit is literature for young women, and hen lit is literature for older women, maybe children's literature is egg-lit.
And mainstream fiction is...om-lit?!.
Hi everyone, I'm new.
Susiex

if chick lit is literature for young women, and hen lit is literature for older women, maybe children's literature is egg-lit. And mainstream fiction is...om-lit?!.

Well I've been reading this thread on & off all day, and that's the first thing to make me laugh out loud.
Good one, susie.


- NaomiM

To me, good prose, would still be a vanilla ice-cream sentence, but with some thought going into the selection of words, and the arrangement of those words in a sentence. One would not use the first word at hand, or the first arrangement. I think this is very different from literary prose.

How would you define literary prose, then?

I'm not saying I disagree with what you say there, btw. My own opinion is that the definitions of good prose and literary prose are pretty much in the eye of the beholder.

Deb

Deb

(How I define good prose.)

When you or I (or a character) uses everyday conversational words—that would be normal prose.

When we (or a character) feels emotional about something, we tend to move beyond everyday conversational words to describe-what-we-feel. This would be good prose. These would be words that are not used often. They are saved for special occasions, but ‘they still fall within a normal vocabulary’.

But, when we start using words outside ones normal vocabulary, this would be literary prose (or purple prose). I find it to be dangerous territory. If a writer is dishonest, at what point is the writer saying to the reader, “look at how clever I am.”

Azel

<Added>

When this discussion started, it was about writing good prose, which interested me. But I think good prose somehow got side-tracked into literary prose. Since most writers can’t agree on what literary prose is, I'm going to let-it-rest here. I’m finished with the subject.

Azel

<Added>

I went back and re-read all the posts about prose, (because I think the subject is important as a writer) and I have to say, Dee, said it best. I have to agree with her.

[Not all readers want to work. When I'm reading for pleasure (as opposed to
reading as a writer) I don’t want to notice the writing. If the prose makes me stop
and check, it pulls me out of the story and, no matter how brilliant it is, it reminds
me I'm just reading rather than experiencing the story.]

I can’t say it any better than she did, so I’ll stop here.

Azel

Ah but purple prose and literary prose are not generally considered the same thing, are they? Purple prose denotes work that is OTT or over embellished to the point of being unintentionally comical.

I go with deb here on the basic definition of prose. That's what prose is, if you're talking about its basic quality rather than what you personally make of it - which, as Terry pointed out, is subjective to taste, and doesn't actually define the form.

JB

Alternatively there's the Irish/Celtic lyrical prose.

The way I see it (and a very shorthand description to make my point here), fiction is a more colourful version of real life. People talk how they talk, except more interestingly. Events reflect real life, but are often more intense. So IMO you should strive to get the speech as strong and interesting and memorable as you can while staying within the style you would expect from that character.

I think that's it in a nutshell, Deb. If you're writing about ordinary, mundane, characters, you need to do it in such a way that, while the reader believes they're boring, he's also entertained by how you show that. Good sitcoms often deal with this--I'm thinking of Trigger in Only Fools, for example; who's boring, monotone and thick but is also funny to the viewer. And the accountant in Scrubs. Okay, you may not be going for laughs in a novel, but you should be using prose that provides the reader with some kind of elevated view of, say, boring characters. Obviously, this should be subtle and not preachy: you show the elements, causes, even possibilities of a boring person's life so that we, the also boring a lot of the time, reader can be interested in the human community story of boringness (and any other mundane aspect of life). Good prose, in this respect, is a kind of sparkly glue--it's the writer saying, Hey, look, we're all like this boring character I'm writing about here; it's okay to admit it, now let's look at what's behind it and what we can do about it.

Terry


<Added>

Which makes me feel that perhaps it's not so much that good prose makes the reader work--although I still disagree that this is necessarily a bad thing, but then I'm personally not interested in junk/comfort/commercial fiction--but it elevates the reader's perceptions of otherwise ordinary things.

I don't think I've got much which is intelligible to add to this discussion..... except how depressing it is that any discussion of 'good' writing (and Terry initially made it very clear that he felt this could be found within any genre) always seems to metamorphose into the old argument about whether 'good' equals 'literary', and with people apparently dividing on genre lines.

I've said it before but I'll say it again: I hate the way writing has to be categorised and pigeonholed, and I hate the value judgements that seem to inhere in that process. It is stultifying and reductive; it breeds snobbery, division and discontent.

Of course it would be ideal if every writer strove to choose exactly the right words to say what she or he wanted to say. I actually believe that the vast majority of us, across every genre, do just that. But what amounts to 'good' prose is very much a matter of personal taste, and can vary widely depending on the effect the writer is trying to achieve - whether it's to make people laugh or cry, to draw them into a tear-jerking romance, chill them until their flesh crawls, caterpault them through a breathlessly paced story, or strike them with the lyrical beauty of the writing itself, or exhilarate them with each wittily turned phrase. The aim may be one of those, or more than one. A sparse, sharply honed style may suit one story, a more richly textured style another. As Terry originally said - 'good' writing can be found in any genre.

Rosy