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  "canonicalUrl": "https://serpentsquiggles.neocities.org//posts/essays/prosaic-virtues",
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  "publishedAt": "2023-12-15T00:00:00.000Z",
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  "textContent": "What is prose?\n\nWell, what is it?\n\nI'm in communities full of readers and writers, and yet I've met so\nmany people actually unable to answer this question. Complexity and\nambiguity and, worst of all, subjectivity hinders discussion of prose.\nI'm often guilty of belaboring the point in essays like these.^[This\nscroll bar isn't the most imposing I've inflicted, but I think you can\nalready tell my answer isn't going to be shortform] But let me break\nfrom pattern and answer right away in the first section.\n\nThe difficulty with defining prose lies in its paradox. Prose is\nextraneous, yet integral; it's omnipresent yet ephemeral; prose is\neverything, and yet so many people don't even notice it.\n\nProse is merely the thoughtful selection and careful arrangement of\nwords.\n\nA common, and temptingly simple view, notes that stories have plot,\ncharacters, setting, themes, and all sorts of fungible ideas and\ncontent, and if you subtract each of those things, prose is what's\nleftover.\n\nProse is presentation, aesthetic, the pretentious literary stuff.\n\nProse is what takes a story from the raw facts chronicling what\nhappened, into a journey that hooks and enthralls you in its flow from\nstart to finish. It's your eyes and ears, the window into a fiction\nworld.\n\nAnd yet, what is it? Sure, this all sounds good, but do you know any\nbetter how to tell if a story has good or bad prose, how to complain\nor compliment it and sound like you know what you're talking about,\nhow to write better prose if writing is what you're here to do?\n\nAt best, I've told you where to look, but you'll still only know it when\nyou see it.\n\n\"Prose\" doesn't exist. Prose is a fallacy, the misunderstanding that a\nbunch of things can be grouped together because they all seem to be\nword-level manipulations that sound good.\n\nProse isn't the leftovers. Good prose is teeming with character, and\nnothing evokes a sense of place and atmosphere like good prose. You\nmight think prose could be united by the intuition that prose is\nanything you can change without changing the plot, but this ignores\nhow often plot is designed to facilitate good lines, how thinking of a\nstriking connection or emphatic statement could inspire a writer to\nreroute their whole plan. And if themes are what are suggested by the\ntext, lurking in unspoken connections between what's explicitly\nwritten... why would I spell out the relevance of prose to theme?\n\nProse is good writing. As soon as you get more specific than that,\ndelineate what prose is and isn't, you're delineating it into\ndifferent things and you're better off ditching the word.\n\nSpecifically, you want about twelve different words.\n\nProse Fundamentals\n\nIf we're going to figure out what prose is, the easiest place is at\nthe very basics, and talk about the words themselves.\n\nWell, the very basics would be letters and symbols, but this essay\nwill not bother with spelling and grammar.\n\nSpecifically, the first thing to analyze about good prose is its\ndiction.\n\nDiction is a writer's ability to pick words. A mastery of subtle\nimplications allows you to tell a story with connotation alone. A\nbroad vocabulary grants you the ability to pick the exact word to\nevoke your intent.\n\nAt its worst, bad diction means misusing words, failing to grasp their\nmeaning on a literal or idiomatic level. Bad diction is speaking too\nplainly, too casually. Consider a serious story that described a fight\nwith language like \"he hit him really really hard\"; overreliance on\nthe most common and nonspecific words often harms amateurish prose.\nBut bad diction is also speaking too ornately, overloading jargon and\nobscure words.\n\nOne easy test of a writer's grasp on diction is dialogue (or even\nnarration, if there are multiple perspectives). Can characters be\ndistinguished by their slang, their formality, their setting-specific\nterminology?\n\nIt might be tempting to think good diction lies in fancy descriptive\nadjectives or adverbs, or even finding the perfect noun to name a\nthing, but I find the real strength of diction lies in the verbs that\nanimate each sentence. Snappy writing is side-stepping verbiage about\nintent and manner with a single \"skulked\" or \"prowled\".\n\nBut you can only wring so much value out of a thesaurus.\n\nAnother basic feature of prose is the syntax.\n\nSyntax is a writer's command of the structure of sentences. The same\nwords arranged in different ways may in fact mean the same thing, but\nthe best writers know that subtleties of ordering and phrasing can\nmake all the difference between a muddled pronouncement and a punchy\nline.  Every adverb and every comma can be placed intentionally. Big\nor small, complex or compound, each sentence is designed for purpose.\n\nBad syntax is bad grammar, plain and simple, but correct grammar isn't a\nbar, it's the floor. Bad syntax is being hard to parse. Bad syntax is\nlong, meandering sentences that introduce too many ideas, that lose the\nplot partway through. Bad syntax is sentences stuffed with unnecessary\nwords.\n\nSyntax gets your meaning across, and bad syntax is every obstacle to\nclarity that could be fixed with a rephrase.\n\nGood syntax, though? It's difficult to appreciate syntax in isolation.\nSyntax is about what's clear, not what sounds good.\n\nNo, for that, you want texture, where diction meets syntax.\n\nTexture arises from a writer's attention to the feel of the text.\nBeyond the literal meaning and even the implication, how you chose,\narrange and omit words achieves subtle effects. Prose can be as\nbeautiful as poetry, and utilize the same devices.\n\nMuch of the bad texture you'll encounter arises from bad diction and bad\nsyntax. A word jarringly out of place, an unpalatable mess of muddled\nsentences. Further bad texture can arise from otherwise acceptable\ndiction and syntax when overused. Words repeated too often, a voice\nthat stays in the same register too long; or too many sentences in a row\nconstructed with too little variation in length or design.\n\nThe average length of sentences and paragraphs is a part of texture.\n(Overabundance of single-sentence paragraphs is a style many take\nissue with; as are overly fat paragraphs.)\n\nThe oft-cited rhythm in sentences affects texture, and there are few\nmeans to evaluate this other than reading a passage aloud and testing\nhow it feels in your mouth --- good texture flows smoothly, bad\ntexture is stilted and awkward on the tongue. Studying poetic meter\ncan help, but it's hard to say in good faith that counting feet is any\nway to edit prose.^If you'd like to know how, though, [Mark\nForsyth has you covered.]\n\nIt may strike you that I've lumped everything hard to define about prose\nunder this one, nebulously defined category, with little to say about\nthat doesn't cash out to \"texture is when it feels good\".\n\nHardly. We're just getting started --- texture accounts for little, in\nmy grand scheme.\n\nProse Techniques\n\nIf there was one thing I wanted people to take away from this essay, I\nprobably should have put it at the top of the list, but I decided to\nstart with the simplest.\n\nThe most important feature of writing --- so much else can be\ngenuinely interpreted as corollaries of this idea --- is\nspecificity.\n\nAfter all, what is show don't tell but a call\nto be more specific?\n\nSpecificity is a writer's use of detail. It requires avoiding\nshortcuts and handwaves and abstractions. Details breathe life into\nwriting, by illuminating the moving parts within a greater whole, by\ncalling attention to its impact on other things, by turning\nsupposition into inevitability.\n\nBad specificity is the absence of it. It's summarizing what should be\nexplained, vagueness cloaking the significant, offering the reader\nnothing to latch onto. But it cannot easily be remedied. The easiest\nway to add more detail is still poor writing:\n\nBad specificity is also filler details, wasting wordcount on things\nthat the reader doesn't care about. True specificity is new\ninformation --- mentioning that a table has four legs will not\nclarify one's impression. It's redundant. Likewise, this flaw crops up\nin more than descriptions --- blow-by-blows and stage directions are\nfailures to be specific in interesting ways.\n\nIn a word, specificity is rendering. The specific garners the\nreader's attention, and what the reader cares about, we expect to be\nshown in full detail. There's a word, for when some things are\nprioritized over others --- that word is the next technique.\n\nGood prose is judicious with what gets emphasis. I've written\nabout it before, actually, and half of what I say\nhere may as well be a brief summary of that older post. But I have a\nform to hew to, and I actually mean something slightly different here.\n\nEmphasis is both what a writer focuses on, and how those things gain\nthat distinction. If you imagine prose as like a song, there are on\nbeats and off beats, and aligning major progression with that natural\nrhythm makes them hit that much harder. Another word for this is\nstructure; they are two sides of the same coin.\n\nBad emphasis is form fighting content. The start and end of sentences,\nparagraphs, chapters are the most emphatic, but all of that energy is\nwasted if the writer uses it to deliver unimportant information. Worse,\nit can be misleading; a paragraph starting with a line unrelated to the\nrest of it is an emphatic faux pas.\n\nBut start/stop emphasis is only one kind. Emphasis can be had through\ndiction, through syntax, through texture. Emphasis is often imparted\nthrough repetition, and one of the most widely understood emphatic\ndevices is the rule of three. But really, any flexure of language that\nsets up expectation is a form of emphasis. Whether you say there are\nexactly five of something and list them off, whether you mirror a bit\nof syntax metronomically throughout a passage, whether you keep giving\nthings names that start with \"b\" --- the key thing is that it's\nentraining, and every time the structure is reinforced, there's a bit\nof neuron activation.\n\nAll of that is to explain another common ",
  "title": "The Twelve Prosaic Virtues"
}