Serpentine Squiggles

What is prose? 

Well, what is it?

I’m in communities full of readers and writers, and yet I’ve met so many people actually unable to answer this question. Complexity and ambiguity and, worst of all, subjectivity hinders discussion of prose. I’m often guilty of belaboring the point in essays like these (this scroll bar isn’t the most imposing I’ve inflicted, but you can already tell my answer isn’t going to be shortform). But let me break from pattern and answer right away in the first section.

The difficulty with defining prose lies in its paradox. Prose is extraneous, yet integral; it’s omnipresent yet ephemeral; prose is everything, and yet so many people don’t even notice it.

Prose is merely the thoughtful selection and careful arrangement of words.

A common, and temptingly simple view, notes that stories have plot, characters, setting, themes, and all sorts of fungible ideas and content, and if you subtract each of those things, prose is what’s leftover.

Prose is presentation, aesthetic, the pretentious literary stuff.

Prose is what takes a story from the raw facts chronicling what happened, into a journey that hooks and enthralls you in its flow from start to finish. It’s your eyes and ears, the window into a fiction world.

And yet, what is it? Sure, this all sounds good, but do you know any better how to tell if a story has good or bad prose, how to complain or compliment it and sound like you know what you’re talking about, how to write better prose if writing is what you’re here to do?

At best, I’ve told you where to look, but you’ll still only know it when you see it.

“Prose” doesn’t exist. Prose is a fallacy, the misunderstanding that a bunch of things can be grouped together because they all seem to be word‍-​level manipulations that sound good.

Prose isn’t the leftovers. Good prose is teeming with character, and nothing evokes a sense of place and atmosphere like good prose. You might think prose could be united by the intuition that prose is anything you can change without changing the plot, but this ignores how often plot is designed to facilitate good lines, how thinking of a striking connection or emphatic statement could inspire a writer to reroute their whole plan. And if themes are what are suggested by the text, lurking in unspoken connections between what’s explicitly written… why would I spell out the relevance of prose to theme?

Prose is good writing. As soon as you get more specific than that, delineate what prose is and isn’t, you’re delineating it into different things and you’re better off ditching the word.

Specifically, you want about twelve different words.

Prose Fundamentals 

If we’re going to figure out what prose is, the easiest place is at the very basics, and talk about the words themselves.

Well, the very basics would be letters and symbols, but this essay will not bother with spelling and grammar.

Specifically, the first thing to analyze about good prose is its diction.

Diction is a writer’s ability to pick words. A mastery of subtle implications allows you to tell a story with connotation alone. A broad vocabulary grants you the ability to pick the exact word to evoke your intent.

Bad diction, at its worst, is misusing words, failing to grasp their meaning on a literal or idiomatic level. Bad diction is speaking too plainly, too casually. Consider a serious story that described a fight with language like “he hit him really really hard”; overreliance on the most common and nonspecific words often harms amateurish prose. But bad diction is also speaking too ornately, overloading jargon and obscure words.

One easy test of a writer’s grasp on diction is dialogue (or even narration, if there are multiple perspectives). Can characters be distinguished by their slang, their formality, their setting‍-​specific terminology?

It might be tempting to think good diction lies in fancy descriptive adjectives or adverbs, or even finding the perfect noun to name a thing, but I find the real strength of diction lies in the verbs that animate each sentence. Snappy writing is side‍-​stepping verbiage about intent and manner with a single ‘skulked’ or ‘prowled’.

But you can only wring so much value out of a thesaurus.

Another basic feature of prose is the syntax.

Syntax is a writer’s command of the structure of sentences. The same words arranged in different ways may in fact mean the same thing, but the best writers know that subtleties of ordering and phrasing can make all the difference between a muddled pronouncement and a punchy line. Every adverb and every comma can be placed intentionally. Big or small, complex or compound, each sentence is designed to purpose.

Bad syntax is bad grammar, plain and simple, but correct grammar isn’t a bar, it’s the floor. Bad syntax is being hard to parse. Bad syntax is long, meandering sentences that introduce too many ideas, that lose the plot partway through. Bad syntax is sentences stuffed with unnecessary words.

Syntax gets your meaning across, and bad syntax is every obstacle to clarity that could be fixed with a rephrase.

Good syntax, though? It’s difficult to appreciate syntax in isolation. Syntax is about what’s clear, not what sounds good.

No, for that, you want texture, where diction meets syntax.

Texture arises from a writer’s attention to the feel of the text. Beyond the literal meaning and even the implication, how you chose, arrange and omit words achieves subtle effects. Prose can be as beautiful as poetry, and utilize the same devices.

Much of the bad texture you’ll encounter arises from bad diction and bad syntax. A word jarringly out of place, an unpalatable mess of muddled sentences. Further bad texture can arise from otherwise acceptable diction and syntax when overused. Words repeated too often, a voice that stays in the same register too long; or too many sentences in a row constructed with too little variation in length or design.

The average length of sentences and paragraphs is a part of texture. (Overabundance of single‍-​sentence paragraphs is a style many take issue with; as are overly fat paragraphs.)

The oft‍-​cited rhythm in sentences affects texture, and there are few means to evaluate this other than reading a passage aloud and testing how it feels in your mouth‍ ‍—‍ good texture flows smoothly, bad texture is stilted and awkward on the tongue. Studying poetic meter can help, but it’s hard to say in good faith that counting feet is any way to edit prose.

It may strike you that I’ve lumped everything hard to define about prose under this one, nebulously defined category, with little to say about that doesn’t cash out to “texture is when it feels good”.

Hardly. We’re just getting started‍ ‍—‍ texture accounts for little, in my grand scheme.

Prose Techniques 

If there was one thing I wanted people to take away from this essay, I probably should have put it at the top of the list, but I decided to start with the simplest.

The most important feature of writing‍ ‍—‍ so much else can be genuinely interpreted as corollaries of this idea‍ ‍—‍ is specificity.

After all, what is show don’t tell but a call to be more specific?

Specificity is a writer’s use of detail. It requires avoiding shortcuts and handwaves and abstractions. Details breathe life into writing, by illuminating the moving parts within a greater whole, by calling attention to its impact on other things, by turning supposition into inevitability.

Bad specificity is the absence of it. It’s summarizing what should be explained, vagueness cloaking the significant, offering the reader nothing to latch onto. But it cannot easily be remedied. The easiest way to add more detail is still poor writing:

Bad specificity is also filler details, wasting wordcount on things that the reader doesn’t care about. True specificity is new information‍ ‍—‍ mentioning that a table has four legs will not clarify one’s impression. It’s redundant. Likewise, this flaw crops up in more than descriptions‍ ‍—‍ blow‍-​by‍-​blows and stage directions are failures to be specific in interesting ways.

In a word, specificity is rendering. The specific garners the reader’s attention, and what the reader cares about, we expect to be shown in full detail. There’s a word, for when some things are prioritized over others‍ ‍—‍ that word is the next technique.

Good prose is judicious with what gets emphasis. I’ve written about it before, actually, and half of what I say here may as well be a brief summary of that older post. But I have a form to hew to, and I actually mean something slightly different here.

Emphasis is both what a writer focuses on, and how those things gain that distinction. If you imagine prose as like a song, there are on beats and off beats, and aligning major progression with that natural rhythm makes them hit that much harder. Another word for this is structure; they are two sides of the same coin.

Bad emphasis is form fighting content. The start and end of sentences, paragraphs, chapters are the most emphatic, but all of that energy is wasted if the writer uses it to deliver unimportant information. Worse, it can be misleading; a paragraph starting with a line unrelated to the rest of it is an emphatic faux pas.

But start/stop emphasis is only one kind. Emphasis can be had through diction, through syntax, through texture. Emphasis is often imparted through repetition, and one of the most widely understood emphatic devices is the rule of three. But really, any flexure of language that sets up expectation is a form of emphasis. Whether you say there are exactly five of something and list them off, whether you mirror a bit of syntax metronomically throughout a passage, whether you keep giving things names that start with “b”‍ ‍—‍ the key thing is that it’s entraining, and every time the structure is reinforced, there’s a bit of neuron activation.

All of that is to explain another common form of bad emphasis: when you set up an emphatic device by accident, and fail to deliver on the anticipated structure. You’ll be familiar with this if you’ve ever read a list of two or four things that really felt like it should have stopped with some other third thing.

And again, like so many of these features, it’s a matter of degree, because bad emphasis is also when you overuse emphatic devices, and it becomes grating and overwrought, even condescending.

Sometimes you just got to know when to move on. But you can’t just go anywhere.

What comes next is a matter of profluence, or better yet, what everyone calls “flow.”

Profluence is a writer segueing gracefully from one idea to the next. What simpler definition of a good book than a page‍-​turner, where every line leaves you wanting to read the next?

The tension at the heart of writing is that our brains and the ideas that inhabit them are graphs, but writing is linear. Two ideas might be equally important for justifying a third, but one of them has to be explained first. The connection between them isn’t always obvious.

Bad profluence is the lack of it. It’s moving from one topic to the next and losing readers or leaving them confused, wondering if they missed something. It’s stilted and awkward.

Sometimes, bad profluence comes from the lack of any connective tissue. Sometimes it’s a line of thought that stops too early, or started too close to its conclusion. Sometimes it’s tangents. Sometimes, the aim is off: the prose feels like it was flowing, but toward something other than what actually comes next.

There are a lot of little tricks to grease the flow. Sometimes you can fill in the gaps, daisy chain details to create a smooth line from one beat to the next. Sometimes you can bridge the gap with an emphatic structure. But the heart of profluence, I find, is conjunctives I talk about so much‍ ‍—‍ “and” and “but” and “so”. (Others too, but they’re less basic.) Joining two sentences together like this is some of the tightest flow you can get‍ ‍—‍ the ideas literally lead into each other. Actually using them all the time can get repetitive (though Cormac McCarthy made a career out of it), but interrogating what conjunction, if any, sits unspoken between two sentences can diagnosis flow hiccups.

It’s such a simple trick, but I think about it all the time when writing and editing, how something as simple as rearranging a sentence so that it ends with a reference to the subject of the next sentence can clean up the flow at the lowest level. And this is a scale invariant principle‍ ‍—‍ you could call these rhetorical cliffhangers, or something.

After all, if you want a lesson in flow, this essay wouldn’t make a bad start. Have you noticed I’ve been using flow tricks to bridge between every section?

Speaking of, it’s about time for a new one, isn’t it?

Prose Principles 

Our first section covered the fundamentals, laying out a framework almost necessitated by the structure of language. If good prose is selecting and arranging words, then prose can be judged by how well the words are selected and how well they’re arranged.

Our second section covered techniques, which are less trivially grounded in how language functions (though if you look, there’s a curious parallel between the three fundamentals and the three techniques).

Fundamentals operate on the level of individual words; techniques are broader scale, at the inter‍-​sentence level. You might expect the next section to cover something even broader still, but prose is almost synonymous with the low level. Expand the scope too far, and we’re talking about scene construction.

So what we’ll talk about next are the principles that pervade prose, from the lowest level to the highest. Although I admit, as this essay goes out, it’s difficult to decide if I’m running out of steam, or running out of new things to say.

If it’s the latter, that’s a mark against the otherwise competent prose of this essay, because the first principle is novelty.

Novelty is a writer’s ingenuity on display. The line between workman and wordsmith is drawn by creativity. Sparks of originality and individual expression in the right place can elevate even plain lines to high art.

As a principle, it crops up everywhere. You can have novel diction, novel phrasing. The best details are novel, and emphasis on novelty makes both more effective.

It won’t be novel to point out that, like everything else, it’s bad when you don’t do it, and it’s bad when you try to do it and fail. Overly familiar, cliché language is a failure of novelty; obvious details are a failure of novelty; over‍-​repetition is a failure of novelty. If it’s random, if it’s incomprehensible, it’s too novel.

Creativity is the art of finding what’s unexpected, yet fitting.

What novelty does is shake things up‍ ‍—‍ in other words, it lends contrast.

Contrast is a writer’s sense of variety and balance. It is tempting to polish a whole until it all shines, but then how do highlights stand out? You need negative space, a silence to calm the passions, grays that make the hues pop. It is likewise tempting to stay in one key, but what better way to illustrate the progression of a story than evolution of the language that tells it?

Contrast is a slightly different thing from novelty. You can be novel without contrast (though it’ll wear off quick), and you can have contrast without novelty, if you employ a familiar set of linguistic tropes.

Bad contrast is of course repetition, but repetition at its most obvious is a failure instead of texture. Bad contrast may be writing that never distinguishes its most important moments, or it may be a misplaced dramatic flourish, whether it is a lavishing description that bogs down the pace, or a rhetorical anticlimax at an anticipated moment.

Bad contrast is overabundance without a break. Like with novelty, you can contrast word choice and phrasing and level of detail and how you emphasize them and even how much novelty you pack in. (Change them too much, though, and the results are inconsistent, a different kind of bad.)

You’ve perhaps read stories that are dense, that you might even find well‍-​written, but there’s something taxing about reading them. It demands your total attention, and it might even pay off, but you certainly aren’t as addictively hooked as with other writing. Could this be alleviated with better balancing and variety in the prose? I can’t rightly say, but so many of the tools we’re told are essential for good prose result also in dense prose. Use powerful, specific language. Find novel, deep phrasing. Cut every bit of filler and predictable wording.

So perhaps this warrants another principle. Call it focus.

Focus is a writer acting with restraint in service of clarity. It may come through concision but also through explication. There is virtue in being as clear and simple as the truth. Prose is essential, but what is said is as important as how it is said.

With how every principle on this list is defined by a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” kind of moderation, perhaps it was inevitable that I would claim one of the keys to fancy prose is not being fancy. But that’s not quite what focus is.

Bad focus is not fanciness, but distraction. It is a mistake to think the flowers of florid prose are there as ornamentation, and plain prose would be likewise elevated by mere addition. Flowers grow from plants, and the reason for their presence can be traced back to the roots. Purple prose may be bad, but stripping and cutting away passion is not the only cure; good prose can still teem with vivid details so long as they are placed with a focused eye.

Bad focus is confusion. In simple matters, yes‍ ‍—‍ failing to convey the layout of a room when it matters, jumbling action sequences, and various other infelicities of parsing‍ ‍—‍ but a lack of focus curses every passage written with ambiguity of intent. Lean too hard on implications and subtext, and what will readers take away?

Sometimes‍ ‍—‍ often, even‍ ‍—‍ you have to just write what you mean, naked and direct.

You might find, more than the fundamentals or techniques, the principles are reflections of similar ideas. Novelty creates contrast, contrast creates focus. Perhaps it’s a sign that I’m reaching now, and have run out of features worth coining terms for.

Hardly. I saved the truly important concepts for last. Everything I’ve described so far is instrumental for writing prose, methods to better achieve the goals. All of these are mere tactics‍ ‍—‍ so what is the strategy to writing prose?

Beyond Prose 

There’s something uniquely parochial to prose. Translate a work into another language, and the plot and characters and setting and theme all survive in large part still intact, but the prose? There’s no guarantee your translator shares your mastery of syntax and profluence, or that the target language can even support the nuances of diction and phrasing that enchanted your writing.

Skillful employment of the first nine concepts enhances writing, yields something easier to read and enjoy, but I think they fall short of describing what’s actually rich and memorable and valuable about prose.

The last principle brushed against the reality‍ ‍—‍ it’s not about how you say it, but what you say. And what can prose say?

Good prose offers imagery.

Imagery is a writer’s style and aesthetic. Whether with an eye for illustrative details, or the imagination for colorful metaphors, striking and evocative images animate description. Even (especially) when nonvisual, it’s the sensual touch that grounds and immerses the reader in a story.

Sensory specificity opposes summary, but symbolically, the imagery actually excels at summary. If you had to define a character, a plot point, a location, with a single crisp image, what would you pick? Answer this question well, and you’ve started exercising the sensibility of imagery.

Bad imagery is what every writing guru is warning you away from when they bemoan the vices of telling and exposition. Neither is incompatible with good imagery, but in avoiding them, you’re forced to think in terms of sensory experience. A story is expected to deliver a certain caliber of concrete detail‍ ‍—‍ read a summary, and contemplate whether it feels like a story, and why not.

Don’t think imagery must all be poetic and painterly descriptions‍ ‍—‍ a character cutting backflips in a gunfight is imagery. Monuments crumbling with thunderous explosions is imagery. Shambling armies of undead crawling from graves, glowing with auras of unnameable alien colors is imagery. Good imagery is cool. Great imagery is awesome.

Bad imagery, then, is delivering plenty of sensory experience the reader doesn’t give a shit about, that stirs no passion.

But maybe there is passion, just not in the imagery. When I decided to define what a story is, sensory imagery was central to my definition‍ ‍—‍ but the other half was drama.

Good prose offers perspective.

Perspective is a writer capturing a character’s voice. We don’t just see the world, we see the world through a specific pair of eyes. A character’s background and opinions and values bleed into everything from word choice, to what’s justified and what’s assumed, to where their attention is drawn and lingers.

The essence of storytelling is a character in tension with the world, and when character infuses prose with perspective, suddenly storytelling is happening in nearly every paragraph. Because the flipside of writing that feels strongly filtered through a perspective is the sense that, by implication, there’s an independent reality simultaneously portrayed. Thus, in seeing what analogies do they draw, how they frame issues, what they emphasize and omit, we implicitly see how they grapple and cope with the world.

I’ll stop short of saying that bad perspective is detached, objective writing that offers no room for characterization, but I can’t deny the sense of missed opportunity. When that subjectivity is present, though, it courts the risk of truly bad perspective‍ ‍—‍ the voice slipping, speaking lines that feel uncharacteristic, unfiltered. The deeper you lean into a character’s voice, the more every line has to accord with the character and their priorities. The smallest dissonance magnified.

Deep perspective can get repetitive, too‍ ‍—‍ once the reader gets the point, it may be time to reel back the psychic distance. Depends on the story, of course, and the character, whether perspective is a spice or the main course.

It’s sometimes said that an author gives every one of their characters a piece of themselves. Is it perspective, then, if what the prose limns is not the character, but the author? Sometimes, prose is a glimpse not of fiction, but truth.

Good prose offers insight.

Insight is a writer’s observation and understanding of the world. We respect books full of depth, laced with wisdom, something to teach; learning is fun. But pithy observations aren’t just about profundity‍ ‍—‍ it takes insight to be funny.

Perhaps it’s just me struggling to put it into words, but it’s hard not to throw up my hands and grab examples of this sort of thing. “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” was good prose, not because of any poetic flexing, but because it feels true. (To wit, Anna Karenina was translated into English.)

And at this point, we have truly stepped beyond prose‍ ‍—‍ what is “bad insight”? Is it untrue, unconvincing, morally deplorable? Condemning a lack of insight feels both entitled and a bit unfair; and I don’t think the absence is a vice. Now, I do think you can critically engage with what’s funny, what’s deep, what’s true. But this is a craft essay, and that discussion certainly beyond the scope of merely cataloging answers to what is prose.

Outro 

Are we done? Have I solved the problem of prose?

I must admit to some skepticism of my own model‍ ‍—‍ four categories that split neatly into exactly three sub‍-​concepts each is cute, but it stinks of a theory designed to look pretty rather than carve the world at the joints. But if nothing else, I’ve striven to practice what I preach here, so maybe the clean categories reflect well‍-​structured rhetoric, exhibiting clarity and focused intent.

Or maybe that’s pretentious, but maybe pretension is fitting for four thousand words about prose.

A better essay of this type would have given examples for each of the twelve concepts, showing what it really looks like when they succeed and fail. I can treat it as an exercise for the reader, hope my gesturing helps you dissect and categorize the prose you encounter in the wild‍ ‍—‍ I could say the point of this post was to lay down some “quick” definitions as a reference for future discussions. But truth is, finding and/or creating relevant examples was simply too much work. Maybe in a revision?

Until then, I’ll stop wasting time. A quick recap:

The key value of these twelve concepts is not as a checklist, but as a set of choices. Everything listed is important for writing most stories, but style is in part defined by what you value. Is imagery important to you? Do you care about novelty for its own sake? Does a smart vocabulary appeal to you at all? If nothing else, I hope this list allows a richer understanding the differing strengths and weakness a story might have.

Good writing is what you enjoy reading. If you can read over a scene and find no line that makes you grin with how clever or fitting it is, it might not be a bad scene, but I’m skeptical it has good prose.