Writing Forum

Tobber asked a compelling question about good prose in another thread. At least I think it was a compelling question because it seems to get at the heart of what writers do. I once heard Brandon Sanderson say in one of his Youtube lectures that story ideas are cheap, that they come and go, dozens in a day, hundreds in a week, thousands in a year.

However, the way those ideas are delivered to an audience, the manner in which a story is told, that part of the writing process is a bit trickier, or so it seems to me, than just coming up with workable concepts for plots which are ripe with intriguing characters and conflicts.

What makes one author's writing more palatable than another's? Is it all just a matter of personal taste? If that is the case and if there is no way to at least somewhat measure the quality of prose, no way of distinguishing the good from the bad, then why do scholars and critics consider some writing to be more literary than others, to be of a finer writing quality?

Perhaps when all is said and done it is just a matter of personal taste, and each and everyone of us must come up with our own individual measuring sticks. What kind of prose do we like? Why do we like it? Just because our World Literature professor said Charles Dickens is a better prose smith than Anne Rice, does that make it true? By the way, I love Anne Rice's prose. I find it to be sexy and sensual, rich and indulgent. Like chocolate-covered strawberries flush on the written page.

In spite of all the refinements of civilization that conspired to make art--the dizzying perfection of the string quartet or the sprawling grandeur of Fragonard's canvases--beauty was savage. It was as dangerous and lawless as the earth had been eons before man had one single coherent thought in his head or wrote codes of conduct on tablets of clay. Beauty was a Savage Garden.

How to describe what humans look like to us! I’ve tried to describe it a little, when I spoke of Nicki’s beauty the night before as a mixture of movement and color. But you can’t imagine what it’s like for us to look on living flesh. There are those billions of colors and tiny configurations of movement, yes, that make up a living creature on whom we concentrate. But the radiance mingles totally with the carnal scent. Beautiful, that’s what any human being is to us, if we stop to consider it, even the old and the diseased, the downtrodden that one doesn’t really “see” in the street. They are all like that, like flowers ever in the process of opening, butterflies ever unfolding out of the cocoon.


Since there is certainly a bit, at least, of the subjective in the way we each individually measure prose, then it behooves us as writers to attempt a study of it. So, being compelled by the original question, I did a bit of research. I asked the internet what makes good prose. That can be a sometimes pointless or a sometimes dangerous thing to do, to ask the internet anything. One never knows what kind of madness will turn up. But I did find a few answers that I liked and agreed with, though I myself had never taken the time to put the matter into so many words. Here is a link to an article by Marian Halcombe, and I really liked her criteria---readability, vivid language, and distinctive character voices:

https://shutupheathcliff.wordpress.com/2012/07/23/what-makes-prose-good-or-bad/

And those qualities mentioned by Ms. Halcombe are just a few of the characteristics of good prose. Individually, we each will put more emphasis on some qualities and less on others. This is why Anne Rice entertains me, yet my close friend and fellow English nerd, Christian, thinks Ms. Rice sucks and he laughs at me when I comment glowingly on her prose style.

Anyway, I like reading snippets and excerpts during breaks at work. I like making a personal study of the elements of writing too in between drafting boring legal documents. I invite others to post any interesting research/articles they've run across on the subject as well. What makes good prose? We all have our personal favorites, but maybe we've never properly articulated, not even in our own minds, what distinguishes the good from the bad. Well, this is our chance.