The Twelve Prosaic Virtues

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 I think 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. At its worst, bad diction means 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 for 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.^If you'd like to know how, though, [Mark Forsyth has you covered.] 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