Writing Forum

I'm glad to see my question sparked some debate.

Small and unimportant note to one of Eliot's posts: Steven Erikson's books are published by Tor in the US (Tor is Macmillan's US fantasy/sci-fi imprint). It was his British publisher and the original publisher of the Malazan books, Bantam UK, who asked for nine more books.

I completely agree with what has been mentioned in the thread, that "good prose" is subjective. I also agree with Bob and K. Pelborrow in that good prose doesn't necessarily means poetic or flowery.

Now the reason I posted the original question was both to spark some debate but also to get some different opinions on what makes prose good so I could reading material with different styles, since the fact still remains that my sentence level writing needs a lot of work.
unlike many writers I don't have a problem with adding too much description or overly long paragraphs of flowery prose, quite the contrary. That's the reason why I was looking for this sort of story, perhaps even ones going a bit overboard with the poetic language and description (that's also why I was a bit disappointed with Mice and Men, that and the story as a whole wasn't very good).

In my own opinion good writing is concise, as Bob also mentioned. Though, I don't think that is enough. There needs to be strong images too and a bit of distinctiveness in the author voice, though not too much, helps too.