# The Fancy Prose Thread



## ElHawk (Aug 13, 2012)

Hey, guys! People on this forum occasionally complain that we don't have enough craft discussions, so... here's a craft discussion!

Recently on Jane_Dough's thread titled "Trying too hard?" we had a brief but interesting conversation about prose--whether it's important, ways to step it up without overdoing it, where to deploy it in your narratives. Kboards user Weirdling suggested to the OP (who was gunshy about posting links to her books) that she post some excerpts from unpublished work for critique instead.

I thought that was a great idea that many of us could benefit from, but I didn't want to take the focus off Jane's personal questions in a thread she started.

So here's a new thread for questions, discussion, and critique of prose. Open for anybody to seek or offer advice! I'd just ask that we allow this thread to keep running for as long as it naturally wants to run, so *kindly refrain from starting flame wars that might get the thread locked*. If you don't like artful prose and don't think it has any place in fiction, then fine--mosey on and let us have our craft discussion in peace.

Anybody who has a question or an observation, feel free to jump in!


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## Amy Corwin (Jan 3, 2011)

Thank you!
I'm so glad you started this thread!
I've been wanting a few more "craft" threads, in additional to all the very helpful promotion ones.

For myself, there are two areas where I know I'm always drawn to a writer's work when there is riveting prose (I say riveting as opposed to beautiful because in some cases, it may not be beautiful, but it is magnificent or riveting to suit the type of novel).

Usually, these passages occur near the beginning of the book and at the end, where there are descriptions of the environs as seen by the character. Because how the character sees his or her world reveals so much about that character. 

The second type that I like are those passages describing a character, because if done well, the passage can describe not only the character, but also the point of view character who is thinking/feeling/responding to the arrival of the person in the description.

Once the story gets really going, though, that kind of prose tends to drop out in order to keep up the pace (I'm talking genre fiction, not literary fiction, which is all beautiful prose). Which I think is a good thing. But you sometimes get more of it at the end, as it can reveal how the main character has changed through the course of the book. Shirley Jackson did a masterful job of evocative prose framing the beginning and end of The Haunting of Hill House. Du Maurier (sp?) did that brilliant prose passage at the beginning of Rebecca. There are so many good examples.

Anyway, I think being able to discuss and post bits and pieces is fantastic. I'm really looking forward to this.


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## Word Fan (Apr 15, 2015)

I think that the best prose---of _any_ kind---comes out of people who read, enjoy, and, perhaps, have studied, poetry, because they develop a sense of the rhythm of the English language. I'm speaking here of formal poetry, not "free verse." I mean poems with rhymes and rhythmic feet. If you develop a real understanding of, and appreciation for, that type of writing, your own prose inevitably comes out with a construction and a rhythm that readers respond to, even subconsciously.

And by "construction" I mean, of course, word choice and sentence construction, but also paragraph construction, chapter development, and overall story construction. Even "pantsers" construct their stories, word by word, sentence by sentence. It's like building a wall, brick by brick. A pantser may not know where the wall is going, but the wall is being built as a well-made wall, not merely as a jumble of bricks scattered over the ground.


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## KGorman (Feb 6, 2011)

Word Fan said:


> I'm speaking here of formal poetry, not "free verse."


I'll have to politely disagree with you here--I think the study of poetry, all poetry, is good for development. In addition to all those wonderful poetic devices, it teaches concision of words. Used to start of writing sessions by doing a quick "found poem." I've fallen out of the habit, though.



Amy Corwin said:


> Shirley Jackson did a masterful job of evocative prose framing the beginning and end of The Haunting of Hill House.


Lord, but I do love that book.

I've just finished Sizzling Style by William Bernhardt, and I've found myself disagreeing with his opinion on cutting be verbs (was, am, is, are, etc) from writing as it weakens the prose. On one hand, I agree that they should be cut down in a manuscript and that many writers have a tendency to plop them in; on the other hand, I've read some wonderful books by KBoards very own SM Reine, and her use of be verbs didn't seem to slow down the pace or detract from the writing at all.

Thoughts?


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## Elliott Webber (Sep 24, 2015)

I love the English language and I love beautiful flowery prose, however, most of the time, I prefer to read slightly books written in more of a stripped down and straight forward style.

It's sort of a contradiction, but I'm the same when it comes to movies. I absolutely love cinema, I love the writing, the acting, the cinematography, the perfectly set up shot. But if the story and the characters don't intrigue me, its all just a pretty surface. I can appreciate it from a technical standpoint, but I never feel emotionally engaged by it.

I feel that's the case with a lot of pretty prose too. It just lacks substance. Not always, but a lot of the time. Where as when the author doesn't rely on the mindbogglingly beautiful prose he/she/it has to focus on the story and the characters to engage the reader.

When writing my first book, I tried my best to write beautiful prose, to focus on the wording of every sentence, and in the end I realized it just lacked substance. There was just nothing there, and subsequently that one will never see the light of day.

With my second I tried to focus on the story and the characters, while keeping the prose as pretty as I could, and it was significantly better. But even with extensive outlining, the progress was slow. And that's when I realized something - I wasn't spending my time thinking of what to write, I was spending my time thinking of how to write it. The prose was really slowing me down, and not really doing me many favors to be honest as I'm not currently writing literary fiction.

In my two latest manuscripts I've greatly simplified my prose, and as a result the story flows better and I've almost doubled my daily word count. A lot of not only my time but my creative juices were going to figuring out the perfect way to say something and it just wasn't worth it. These days I'd rather spend my time and creative energy writing effective prose than pretty prose, although, I do have a few slightly more literary projects in mind, and I'll probably dust off the old thesaurus for those, when and if I get to them.  

I do respect and admire pretty prose, and I'm always looking to improve, but personally, most of the time, it's not really worth the effort it takes to write. If that kind of prose just flowed out of me like more simple prose does, I'd definitely employ it more often.


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## ElHawk (Aug 13, 2012)

Word Fan said:


> I think that the best prose---of _any_ kind---comes out of people who read, enjoy, and, perhaps, have studied, poetry, because they develop a sense of the rhythm of the English language. I'm speaking here of formal poetry, not "free verse." I mean poems with rhymes and rhythmic feet. If you develop a real understanding of, and appreciation for, that type of writing, your own prose inevitably comes out with a construction and a rhythm that readers respond to, even subconsciously.


I totally agree! It's why I started reading and writing poetry (and I joined a local writers' group that focused on poetry when I lived in Seattle. I miss that group now that I've moved away!)

Poetry techniques are directly applicable to prose, and I feel they make prose much more memorable and engaging.

There's a really good novel that touches on this idea often--and it's a fun, charming story, too--called The Anthologist. Nicholson Baker wrote it. I highly recommend it to all prose writers! It will give you a better appreciation for poetry.

By the way, a really great instructional book for people who want to begin learning poetry techniques is In the Palm of Your Hand by Steve Kowit. It's great! Work through it one chapter at a time and you'll develop a pretty good beginner's grasp of poetry techniques.


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## ElHawk (Aug 13, 2012)

KGorman said:


> I'll have to politely disagree with you here--I think the study of poetry, all poetry, is good for development. In addition to all those wonderful poetic devices, it teaches concision of words. Used to start of writing sessions by doing a quick "found poem." I've fallen out of the habit, though.


But on the other hand (lol) I really love free-verse poetry, too, when it's well written. One of my favorite poets is Michael Ondaatje (yeah, the novelist!) He writes mostly free-verse stuff, but his concise use of language is really amazing. Sometimes that poetry group I joined would have meetings where we'd bring pieces by other people to read aloud. I read an Ondaatje poem and burst into tears! Ha!! And it wasn't just all the cider I'd consumed, either. The dude knows how to choose just the right words and how to arrange them in just the right way. The Cinnamon Peeler is a great collection of Ondaatje's poetry.



> I've just finished Sizzling Style by William Bernhardt, and I've found myself disagreeing with his opinion on cutting be verbs (was, am, is, are, etc) from writing as it weakens the prose.


Personally, I disregard any advice to cut back or entirely remove X type of words (be verbs, stacked adjectives, adverbs, whatever.) There isn't a "right" way to use words. If it works, it works. The only things that matter (as far as I'm concerned) are clarity an evoking emotion in the reader. If you can do that best by using adverbs or be verbs or whatever you need to use, then use them.


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## Bishoppess (Apr 11, 2015)

Don't read a whole lot of literary fiction here, and what I do tends to be old enough to count as 'classic'. I can say that I like to be able to understand what's going on when I read. Not have to go back over a sentence or paragraph to get the idea of what's happening. That's what I'm trying to do in my writing (even in my first draft. In know, I know). 
Another thing I like is if the other gives each character a voice. Narration, dialogue, what have you. When the writing of one character sounds almost exactly like all the other characters, they feel less like people in and of themselves and more like the author is just doing bad ventriloquism. But that's just my preference. I know I'm trying to carry that through in this book I'm writing. I have one character who cusses like a sailor in street slang and uses pretty plain English, and another from a higher strata of society who uses words with considerably more syllables. But I guess that gets more into voice than prose. Hmmmm  

Sent from my SM-N910V using Tapatalk


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## JLCarver (Sep 13, 2015)

Deleted


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

What a great idea for a thread!

The wonderful thing about prose (IMO) is how flexible it is, aesthetically. Hemingway's prose is fantastic. So is Joyce's. So is Fitzgerald's. So is Woolf's. So is Faulkner's. I'm choosing all literary writers from roughly the same period, here. Despite their being rough contemporaries, their prose styles all differ, sometimes radically. Great prose is stuff that works powerfully for the story at hand; it can take many different forms because there are many different stories.

A lot of people seem to think the best genre fiction prose is transparent, totally unobtrusive. Personally, I think there's a little wiggle room, there and occasionally give myself freer rein to focus on prose beauty. I find it helps to have different narrative approaches within a book. If the main narration relies on spare and unobtrusive prose, one way to distinguish an alternative POV is to change up the prose style and make it a little richer. This works well for me. Most of my chapters have a first-person narrator whose ordinariness I want to emphasize. She doesn't think about how beautifully she speaks, and she doesn't always say things exactly right. The prose in those chapters is generally simply structured, with relatively short sentences. But the third-person narrators I use in other POVs can push things a little more.



ElHawk said:


> Personally, I disregard any advice to cut back or entirely remove X type of words (be verbs, stacked adjectives, adverbs, whatever.) There isn't a "right" way to use words. If it works, it works. The only things that matter (as far as I'm concerned) are clarity an evoking emotion in the reader. If you can do that best by using adverbs or be verbs or whatever you need to use, then use them.


Hear, hear. The advice to "never use X" seems to be prompted by the adviser's perception that writers tend to overuse X. But even if that's the case, there's no reason to push the pendulum alllllllll the way to the other side and *never* use X. It just doesn't make sense to me.

I can't think of any category of writing-related something-or-other I haven't used at least once. I've even used the interrobang.


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## ElHawk (Aug 13, 2012)

JLCarver said:


> On this point, though, Chuck Palahniuk has an interesting blog post about cutting out "thought" verbs that is excellent food for, um, well, thought. I'm with you to a degree that anything that says you should always cut something out is probably taking it too far. After all, there is only one rule in creative writing and that is there are no hard rules in creative writing. But Palahniuk's essay presents an interesting challenge to writers. He suggest that a "thought" verb is a shortcut--that is, any instance where your character thought, wondered, figured, believed, etc.--and that when you "unpack" those thought verbs into a list of concrete details, you enrich that moment in your story. I was surprised at how much better my writing came off when I stripped out some of those "thought" moments.
> 
> Here's a link to the essay: https://litreactor.com/essays/chuck-palahniuk/nuts-and-bolts-%E2%80%9Cthought%E2%80%9D-verbs


Yeah, that totally makes sense to me. Asking yourself whether you're bringing your reader more deeply into the story or keeping them at a distance is always a good thing, whether it's "thought" stuff or some other barrier. But I always raise an eyebrow over "NEVER use X type of words!" Never? ORly?


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## Jan Hurst-Nicholson (Aug 25, 2010)

I remember a piece of a advice I was given many years ago. "If you're busy admiring the prose/words then you're not lost in the story".

*From Rules of Thumb*

Writing in English.

About half the elements used in writing are chosen by the writer, the rest are required by the structure of the language.

_Scott Parker_


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## Amy Corwin (Jan 3, 2011)

KGorman said:


> I'll have to politely disagree with you here--I think the study of poetry, all poetry, is good for development. In addition to all those wonderful poetic devices, it teaches concision of words. Used to start of writing sessions by doing a quick "found poem." I've fallen out of the habit, though.
> 
> Lord, but I do love that book.
> 
> ...


I agree about forms of the be verb. Some people see the word was and their head pops off. There is a time and place for everything.

Sent from my XT1254 using Tapatalk


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## Jim Johnson (Jan 4, 2011)

Jan Hurst-Nicholson said:


> I remember a piece of a advice I was given many years ago. "If you're busy admiring the prose/words then you're not lost in the story".


I've gotten this from writing mentors too. If you're focused on finding the perfect word and crafting perfect sentences, you might be missing the forest for the trees.

I appreciate a well-turned phrase, and I really like when authors manage to make one sentence handle multiple tasks at multiple levels, but I find it hard to be patient with pretty language for the sake of pretty language.


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## Word Fan (Apr 15, 2015)

Jim Johnson said:


> I find it hard to be patient with pretty language for the sake of pretty language.


That's not what we're talking about here. As the O.P said at the beginning: _If you don't like artful prose and don't think it has any place in fiction, then fine---mosey on and let us have our craft discussion in peace._


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

Amy Corwin said:


> Usually, these passages occur near the beginning of the book and at the end, where there are descriptions of the environs as seen by the character. Because how the character sees his or her world reveals so much about that character.
> 
> The second type that I like are those passages describing a character, because if done well, the passage can describe not only the character, but also the point of view character who is thinking/feeling/responding to the arrival of the person in the description.


At the risk of putting myself out there, I would appreciate a critique of this passage. It's the opening to an unpublished novel:

Lady Kyra Treketh looked up from her embroidery as the door opened. Kyra's lady-in-waiting trotted into the room, her face flushed and waving her hands.

"They're here! They're just driving through the main gate," Dorenda de Glaspan said.

Carefully folding her work, Kyra placed it in her sewing basket and rose to her feet. She walked across the room and through the door into the main parlor of her suite. The curtains were drawn and the room was dark. With barely a thought to her actions, she spoke a word under her breath, sending a surge of energy to the magitek device that controlled the lights, and strode toward the windows.

Sliding behind the curtain, she opened the door onto the balcony and stepped outside. Centaurus B was high in the sky, its dim light soon to be drowned by Centaurus A, just rising in the east. The spring morning was calm and sunny, the green of the hills to her left fresh and vibrant. The white city laid out beneath her was almost too bright for the eye, but it was the great courtyard and the gate from the city to her right that drew her attention.

Several ground cars flanked by armored military vehicles slowly approached her father's palace. The motorcade came to a stop, and she leaned out over the end of the balcony to get a better view. The doors to the cars opened, and a tall red-haired man stepped out of the one in front. He was joined by a red-haired woman, almost as tall as he. Jamie dan Lirian macLirian and Moreen din Lirian macLirian. Both wore the black, yellow and red traditional colors of Clan Lirian, he in a black uniform bordered with yellow and red, and she in a gray mid-calf dress with a tartan-patterned scarf in the clan colors around her neck.

Kyra's father's servants scurried about gathering luggage. The military escort looked nervous, scanning the palace building as well as the walls half a kilometer away. Some of the Imperator's subjects weren't happy with the visit of the heir to the High Lady of the Federation, and the security forces were taking every precaution.

"My, he is a handsome man," Dorenda said. "Even better looking than his pictures."

"Nonsense," Kyra replied. "He looks exactly like the pictures." She watched until the building blocked her sight of the pair as they were ushered inside. They would be staying in rooms on the floor below hers, but propriety dictated that she wouldn't see or speak to either until the reception that evening.

She turned away and walked back inside. "What time is the reception?"

"Eighteen-thirty, my lady," Dorenda answered.

"Let me know when it's time for my bath," Kyra said. "It's such a lovely day. Please have lunch served on the east balcony."

Lost in thought, she sat down and picked up her embroidery again. Somehow, seeing her husband-to-be hadn't made her wedding more real. If anything, it made it surreal. That man would soon be lying on top of her so that she could pump out babies, who hopefully would cement an alliance between the Imperium and the Federation.

She looked up at a shelf on the wall, and the dolls that stood there in their pretty clothes. It didn't seem that long since she had played with them.


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## Jim Johnson (Jan 4, 2011)

Word Fan said:


> That's not what we're talking about here. As the O.P said at the beginning: _If you don't like artful prose and don't think it has any place in fiction, then fine---mosey on and let us have our craft discussion in peace._


Except for the part that Libbie mentioned "So here's a new thread for questions, discussion, and critique of prose." I offered a critique of one aspect of prose. Sorry it didn't work for you.*shrug*



brkingsolver said:


> Carefully folding her work, Kyra placed it in her sewing basket and rose to her feet. She walked across the room and through the door into the main parlor of her suite. The curtains were drawn and the room was dark. With barely a thought to her actions, she spoke a word under her breath, sending a surge of energy to the magitek device that controlled the lights, and strode toward the windows.


I like the opening, though I'd like to get a better sense of what Kyra is feeling. She seems distant from what the arrival of her husband-to-be means, other than it feeling surreal. As for the quoted paragraph above, you mention the surge of energy toward the lights, but don't describe what the surge does. I'm guessing since the room was drawn and dark, that the lights went on, but it's not clear.



brkingsolver said:


> The doors to the cars opened, and a tall red-haired man stepped out of the one in front.


Minor nit--did the man step out of the front car or the front door? "...stepped out of the one in front" didn't make it clear.


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## Gone 9/21/18 (Dec 11, 2008)

brkingsolver said:


> Lady Kyra Treketh looked up from her embroidery as the door opened. Kyra's lady-in-waiting trotted into the room, her face flushed and waving her hands.


This is a genre I don't read and a lot of my reaction to the whole passage has to do with that, so I'll keep quiet about it except for the above sentence. For the above sentence, I think if you matched the constructions at the end, you'd have better flow: _...her face flushed and her hands waving._ Maybe that's just me, but the "... and waving her hands" where it is gave me pause.

In general, how about if all of us interested in this vow to ignore anyone who pops up with negative remarks?

Having said that, here I go with a negative remark, although it's only a lead in. I'm another one who prefers leaner fiction. You know that quote (I think from Elmore Leonard) to the effect of leaving out the parts readers skip? I'm a terrible skimmer, and if you left out the parts I skip in many novels, you'd have novellas. And what I skim is description, whether of scenery, people, interiors, or sex. That said, I don't think I ever skipped Tony Hillerman's descriptions of Navajo country or Nevada Barr's of national parks. Part of that is particular reader interest, of course, but I also think it's a way of putting interesting things in interesting ways and at just the right length. If it's a talent, I wish I had it, and if it's a skill, I want to develop it.

One of the things I admire about Dick Francis is the way his descriptions of characters address both the outer appearance and inner person all at once--as opposed to Jonathan Kellerman, for instance, who gives you a laundry list of what a character looks like and what they're wearing. I really wish I could master the Francis way of doing it:

From Francis's _Decider_: "She was tall with a flat body and a thin scrubbed face with high hard cheekbones, no compromise with femininity in sight."

What I think is one of my own better attempts: "He leaned against the side of the wagon, a dark haired man of middling height who seemed ordinary until you saw how he handled three unexpected bodies."


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

Thank you both.


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## JLCarver (Sep 13, 2015)

Deleted


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

The emotions I'm trying to convey for Kyra as the chapter unfurls are a sense of numbness and fear mixed with hopefulness. She is barely eighteen. Her older sister is married to a drunk who beats her (another arranged marriage). In the next scene:

“Everyone is watching you,” Fiona said. “An alliance with the Federation is an historic event.”

“So I’m told about fifteen times a day,” Kyra said. “Half of the lords are holding their breath hoping that Laird Lirian accepts me, and half are holding their breath hoping he rejects me.”

“And what do you hope?”

Kyra looked out on the green hills that she loved. After her marriage, she didn’t know if she would ever see them again.

“I hope that he doesn’t drink, that he’s not a homosexual, and that he’s not violent,” she finally said. 

“You have low expectations,” Fiona returned.

“I have high expectations,” Kyra countered, “but since I don’t have any say in the matter, I just dwell on my worst fears."

What I'm trying to do is reveal her feelings and her personality in a "peeling the onion" sort of way. Lead the reader into the story by giving them a little bit more and then a little bit more...


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

I like this, Kyra. There are just a few places where I think I'd reward something, and I'd have a mighty hard time explaining why I want to reword, so I'll just do it, and you can see if you like it.



brkingsolver said:


> Lady Kyra Treketh looked up from her embroidery as the door opened. Kyra's lady-in-waiting trotted into the room, her face flushed and waving her hands.
> 
> "They're here! They're just driving through the main gate," Dorenda de Glaspan said.


Lady Kyra Treketh looked up from her embroidery as the door to her bed chamber opened.

Kyra's lady-in-waiting, Dorenda de Glaspan, rushed into the room, face flushed, hands waving. "They're here! They're just driving through the main gate."




brkingsolver said:


> Carefully folding her work, Kyra placed it in her sewing basket and rose to her feet. She walked across the room and through the door into the main parlor of her suite. The curtains were drawn and the room was dark. With barely a thought to her actions, she spoke a word under her breath, sending a surge of energy to the magitek device that controlled the lights, and strode toward the windows.
> 
> Sliding behind the curtain, she opened the door onto the balcony and stepped outside. She heard the curtain rustle as Dorenda, ever the faithful servant, followed her out.
> 
> ...


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## katrina46 (May 23, 2014)

I think it depends on what type of reader you are. I think Janet Fitch is a literary genius. I believe it took her like five years between White Oleander and her next book, but man she can write. Other people think she's boring as all hell with all those fancy prose.


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## 555aaa (Jan 28, 2014)

I think what brings power into a lot of "literary writing", poetry, and song lyric (which is poetry) is metaphor.  Sometimes metaphor is simply a phrase. In "The Dog Stars" Peter Heller used the phrase (I hope I am getting this right) 'the arena of competency'  to express the notion that your perception of a person changes when you see them doing something they're good at. I thought the metaphor of stepping into an area to be strikingly apt.


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## Jim Johnson (Jan 4, 2011)

brkingsolver said:


> The emotions I'm trying to convey for Kyra as the chapter unfurls are a sense of numbness and fear mixed with hopefulness. She is barely eighteen.


Sounds good. One suggestion would be to take that early paragraph (quoted below) and maybe play with her actions and the verbs a bit.



> Carefully folding her work, Kyra placed it in her sewing basket and rose to her feet. She walked across the room and through the door into the main parlor of her suite. The curtains were drawn and the room was dark. With barely a thought to her actions, she spoke a word under her breath, sending a surge of energy to the magitek device that controlled the lights, and strode toward the windows.


"She walked across the room" -- maybe she shuffles? If she's numb and fearful, maybe she doesn't want to see what's beyond the window?

"With barely a thought to her actions, she spoke a word under her breath, sending a surge of energy to the magitek device that controlled the lights..." on first read this sounded to me like she was a very competent magic-user sort, who with barely a thought and a whispered word could send a surge. If she's numb and fearful, maybe she stumbles on the word and for the first time botches the spell, suggesting she's preoccupied?

'strode toward the windows' -- 'strode' suggests confidence and fearlessness.

Anyway, just some thoughts. I'm intrigued either way and would read more.


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

"I hope you don't mind I've jotted an example of integrated story/description. It's for comparison's sake - obviously it's not your style or actual story, but it's an example of how you can integrate description into the story to make a more need-to-read-on hook and increase the pace from the first line."

Thanks. One of the things people tell me is that my books start too slow.


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## sela (Nov 2, 2014)

I'm currently reading Tana French's _In The Woods_, a police procedural with a psychological bent involving a police detective who investigates a murder case in his old home town that may have a link to a case he was involved in as a child, in which he was the only survivor of a double child murder, and of which he has no memory.

The prose in the prologue is evocative and rich, giving a vivid sense of the children running through the neighbourhood into the wood where the event takes place that will change the protagonist's life.

The author takes a full page or two to describe that summer day that became indelibly inscribed in the town's memory. She takes real care with words and images. I am not a literary critic but to me, the prose is almost too self-consciously trying to paint a picture using metaphor. I had to stop and think about the words, and to me, that is not the best thing. But the hook got me.

Here is the opening:



> Picture a summer stolen whole from some coming-of-age film set in small-town 1950s. This is none of Ireland's subtle seasons mixed for a connoisseur's palate, watercolour nuances within a pinch-sized range of clouds and soft rain; this is summer full-throated and extravagant in a hot pure silkscreen blue. This summer explodes on your tongue tasting of chewed blades of long grass, your own clean sweat, Marie biscuits with butter squirting through the holes and shaken bottles of red lemonade picnicked in tree houses. It tingles on your skin with BMX wind in your face, ladybug feet up your arm; it packs every breath full of mown grass and billowing washing lines; it chimes and fountains with bird calls, bees, leaves and football bounces and skipping chants, _One! Two! Three!_ This summer will never end.


There are several paragraphs of description of this perfect summer day -- the day that the children were murdered.

Then she delivers the hook:



> They are running into legend, into sleepover stories and nightmares parents never hear. Down the faint lost paths you would never find alone, skidding round the tumbled stone walls, they stream calls and shoestrings behind them like comet trails. And who is waiting on the riverbank with his hands in the willow branches, whose laughter tumbles swaying from a branch above, whose is the face in the undergrowth in the corner of your eye, built of light and leaf-shadow, there and gone in a blink.
> 
> These children will not be coming of age, this or any other summer. This August will not ask them to find hidden reserves of strength and courage as they confront the complexity of the adult world and come away sadder and wiser and bonded for life. This summer has other requirements for them.


It's evocative of childhood and summer, and the hints of threat in the last two paragraphs make your skin crawl and promise a dark story of tragedy revealed as the detective begins to remember that which his child-mind made him forget. I haven't finished it yet, but the opening really stuck with me. The rest of the story isn't nearly as writerly as the opening and the prose is much more sparse as the story itself slowly unfolds. Can't yet recommend the book since I haven't finished, but I'm enjoying it so far.

As a writer, I aspire to writing evocative prose but of course, as a reader, what I really love is a story I can't put down.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

brkingsolver said:


> Thanks. One of the things people tell me is that my books start too slow.


I get that criticism too. Unfortunately, in my case I think it has more to do with plotting than prose.

FWIW, I really liked karenharley's reworking. Thinking explicitly about integrating description into action ... that's helpful.


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## JV (Nov 12, 2013)

Many have mentioned the flexibility of prose and the beauty of both "flowery" and "simple" prose. For me, it's all about mood. With my first book there was a balance, but I leaned more heavily on flowery prose and heavy exposition. With my current book I needed a pallet cleanser; I'm keeping it simple and clean and short (40-50k words). One thing that dictates my use of prose is my characters. My current WIP is first person and the protagonist is a blue collar, lower income individual; having him speak like Shakespeare just wouldn't fit. 

I really appreciate both fancy and simple prose when I'm reading; sometimes I'm in the mood for David Foster Wallace and sometimes I'm in the mood for Cormac McCarthy. There are many ways to communicate the same idea and that's what I love about reading and writing, the ability it gives us to see the same picture over and over with a fresh set of eyes based on the language that is used. 

Just some random thoughts.


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## My Dog&#039;s Servant (Jun 2, 2013)

JLCarver said:


> On this point, though, Chuck Palahniuk has an interesting blog post about cutting out "thought" verbs that is excellent food for, um, well, thought. I'm with you to a degree that anything that says you should always cut something out is probably taking it too far. After all, there is only one rule in creative writing and that is there are no hard rules in creative writing. But Palahniuk's essay presents an interesting challenge to writers. He suggest that a "thought" verb is a shortcut--that is, any instance where your character thought, wondered, figured, believed, etc.--and that when you "unpack" those thought verbs into a list of concrete details, you enrich that moment in your story. I was surprised at how much better my writing came off when I stripped out some of those "thought" moments.


Hmmm....well......actually, I'd say that's a qualified "maybe." Depends on what you're trying to achieve, the pace you're trying to set, the experience you're trying to create....and what you've already established about the characters

I read his examples and they're visual but uninformative. Maybe they'd work if I knew more about the characters, but as presented, nope. Lots of description, no clear take away. I could interpret the action as reflecting a variety of different emotions, and some interpretations would lead me far astray from where I, as the author, wanted the reader to go. And I say this as a writer who LOVES to describe stuff and not explain. Sometimes, I'm better off explaining because otherwise the reader might react in a way that ensures they never, ever read my stuff again. (And, I'll admit it, his examples are exactly the sort of thing that turns me off, say, New Yorker fiction. It's for readers who want the reading experience to be about interpretation, not immersion.)


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## Nope (Jun 25, 2012)

.


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## Sapphire (Apr 24, 2012)

brkingsolver said:


> In the next scene:
> 
> "Everyone is watching you," Fiona said. "An alliance with the Federation is an historic event."
> 
> ...


This passage works for me. I stay interested all the way through. Forgive me, but the problem I had with the opening scene was that it bored me. If I opened a book off the shelf and read that first scene, I would return the book to the shelf and move on. This second passage has me hooked.


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## Sapphire (Apr 24, 2012)

OK, I'll throw myself on the chopping block. This is a scene from the middle of an episode of Anna's Legacy. 21-year-old Hayley is writing in her journal as she flies back to New York following a short visit with family. I try to keep from being too wordy (she's young and living in today's world) but want to give a sense of the deeper person maturing within:

 I helped Grandma plant geraniums Saturday. Digging in the warm earth felt good. She's aging. I hadn't noticed that before. Has this happened since I left or did I never notice? More reality.
(3 paragraphs omitted here for sake of brevity) Both Mom and Dad drove me to the airport and we picked up Grandma on the way. I gave each of them a goodbye hug before handing my boarding pass and ID to the TSA agent. I held onto Grandma a few extra seconds. She patted me on the back and whispered, "Get going, sweetheart. I'll be here for more hugs when you come back."
I never gave a thought to mortality seven months ago. Then Anna died. Grief was a new emotion for me. Sure, I cried when my dog died, but this was different. This was a real person, someone connected to my genes. I could get a new dog, but not a new Anna or a new Grandma. Bill made me take an honest look at the fact my parents wouldn't live forever. Now seeing Grandma through new eyes was a jolt. Each family member has played a unique role in who I am. Each is precious. Each is mortal. I am mortal. Fate can be weird. I could be the next one to die instead of one of them. What would that be like?
My thoughts of death are interrupted by the flight attendant serving beverages. Soon cabin lights dim. I flip on my overhead light and return to my writing.


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## ElHawk (Aug 13, 2012)

brkingsolver said:


> Thank you both.


Hi, BR -- I guess my question about the excerpts you've posted is if you're looking for ways to spice up your prose some, or whether you're happy with the prose style and are looking for a general critique of the scene. (Either one is fine for this thread, I think, but I don't want to give a critique that's "off topic" for you.  )

I like the world-building you've done. The sci-fi with fantasy element is really cool!


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## ElHawk (Aug 13, 2012)

Sapphire -- Considering you're intending to write with a "young" voice, I like it a lot. The only thing I don't like, from a literary standpoint, is this bit:



Sapphire said:


> Each family member has played a unique role in who I am. Each is precious. Each is mortal. I am mortal. Fate can be weird. I could be the next one to die instead of one of them. What would that be like?


This just feels too on-the-nose to me. It seems like your book will be more powerful if you don't say this outright, but show your character coming to understand this over the course of the book.


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

ElHawk said:


> Hi, BR -- I guess my question about the excerpts you've posted is if you're looking for ways to spice up your prose some, or whether you're happy with the prose style and are looking for a general critique of the scene. (Either one is fine for this thread, I think, but I don't want to give a critique that's "off topic" for you.  )
> 
> I like the world-building you've done. The sci-fi with fantasy element is really cool!


I wasn't looking for a critique, but more a comment on the descriptive passages, in keeping with your OP. I guess I shouldn't have used the word "critique". Oops. Sorry if things got a little sidetracked.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

Sapphire said:


> OK, I'll throw myself on the chopping block. This is a scene from the middle of an episode of Anna's Legacy. 21-year-old Hayley is writing in her journal as she flies back to New York following a short visit with family. I try to keep from being too wordy (she's young and living in today's world) but want to give a sense of the deeper person maturing within:
> 
> I helped Grandma plant geraniums Saturday. Digging in the warm earth felt good. She's aging. I hadn't noticed that before. Has this happened since I left or did I never notice? More reality.
> (3 paragraphs omitted here for sake of brevity) Both Mom and Dad drove me to the airport and we picked up Grandma on the way. I gave each of them a goodbye hug before handing my boarding pass and ID to the TSA agent. I held onto Grandma a few extra seconds. She patted me on the back and whispered, "Get going, sweetheart. I'll be here for more hugs when you come back."
> ...


I like the way you use a lot of short sentences here, Sapphire. I think it's effective at establishing your narrator's youthful, somewhat troubled (by loss), questioning voice.


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

Sapphire said:


> OK, I'll throw myself on the chopping block. This is a scene from the middle of an episode of Anna's Legacy. 21-year-old Hayley is writing in her journal as she flies back to New York following a short visit with family. I try to keep from being too wordy (she's young and living in today's world) but want to give a sense of the deeper person maturing within:


I've read this a half-dozen times and tried to figure out how I would edit it. The third paragraph just reads really dense (thick) to me. I keep trying to take the "Now seeing Grandma through new eyes was a jolt." and put it with the very first sentence, but I don't quite know what to do with the rest of it.


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## ElHawk (Aug 13, 2012)

brkingsolver said:


> I wasn't looking for a critique, but more a comment on the descriptive passages, in keeping with your OP. I guess I shouldn't have used the word "critique". Oops. Sorry if things got a little sidetracked.


Don't worry about it! I just wanted to be sure I was giving you the type of feedback you were looking for and not something that wasn't really applicable to what you were seeking. 

In terms of descriptive language, I found it to be very spare--which isn't a bad thing; it's just a style preference. I wasn't "seeing" much of the scene you were setting.

You might want to consider stepping up your descriptions a bit in this type of passage. You said it's the opening of a novel, and I find it useful to turn up the volume a little on descriptions at the beginnings of everything I write--the opening of the book itself, but also the beginnings of chapters and of major scenes within chapters. That helps ground the reader in the setting, and it can also be useful for subtly nudging them in one direction or another, mood/tone-wise, depending on what you want them to feel in that chapter/scene.

Personally, I usually save this type of to-the-point writing for mid-chapter/mid-book, when everything has been established and the pace begins to speed up.

I'll try to give some examples of what I'm talking about, because I feel like I'm not being very clear here. 



> Lady Kyra Treketh looked up from her embroidery as the door opened. Kyra's lady-in-waiting trotted into the room, her face flushed and waving her hands.
> 
> "They're here! They're just driving through the main gate," Dorenda de Glaspan said.


What does Dorenda look like? Since this is the opening of the book, we haven't "met" her yet (or any of your other characters) so we can't really form any images of these people in our minds. One or two very simple descriptors could clarify this character--and therefore your MC's culture--for the reader. Example:



> Lady Kyra Treketh looked up from her embroidery as the door opened. Dorenda trotted into the room. The white apron of a lady-in-waiting bunched in her fists as she hoisted the hem of her heavy skirt--an unusually graceless gesture. Dorenda's pale cheeks flared with color.
> 
> Kyra's fingers tightened on her embroidery hoop. What could have so unsettled her unflappable maid?
> 
> "They're here!" Dorenda released her grip on her skirts to wave her hands in desperation. "They're just driving through the main gate!"


I'd also really encourage you (and all writers) to resist the urge to stick in characters' last names the moment they show up in the scene. I find (maybe others disagree with me) that it often pulls the reader out of the main character's POV. Refer to characters the same way your POV character would refer to them mentally when they look up and see them. Does Lady Kyra think, "Here comes Dorenda de Glaspan" every time her maid enters the room? Or does she think, "Here comes Dorenda"? Or if she really has a lot of distance between herself and her servants, maybe she doesn't think of them by name at all.

As an aside, I think this is an especially obvious problem in a lot of YA/MG stories, where child POV characters observe their parents and the parents are "introduced" to the reader as Firstname Lastname. I never thought of my father as Douglas Ricks; he was just Dad to me, so Dad he would remain in any story written from my POV, unless a logical reason for bringing in his first and last name arose in the story.

If there's a compelling reason why the _reader_ needs to know that character's surname, or if it's natural in the dialogue (for example, if in an MG story the kid has to sit in on a parent-teacher-student conference and Dad introduces himself to the teacher as Firstname Lastname) then great--but usually characters' surnames don't matter to the story one bit. (I've even written a whole novel in which the main character is never named. Most readers don't even notice, because her name doesn't matter to the story, so they never think to wonder about it.)

Paying close attention to how you refer to other/non-POV characters is a nice, unobtrusive way of enhancing your world-building and drawing your reader closer to your POV character's mind.

So... more of my thoughts on description in your sample passage. Questions I had as I read are in bold; that might give you some ideas on where to add in description and why to add it in a scene/book opener like this one. 



> Carefully folding her work, Kyra placed it in her sewing basket and rose to her feet. She walked across the room and through the door into the main parlor of her suite. *What's her room like? It has a main parlor, so it must be pretty big. Maybe a few other clues about its relative opulence here could help the reader understand Kyra's class and culture. Heels clicking on marble floors? Slippers whispering across plush tufted carpets? Something like that.* The curtains were drawn and the room was dark. With barely a thought to her actions, she spoke a word under her breath, sending a surge of energy to the magitek device that controlled the lights, and strode toward the windows. *Does this feel like anything to Kyra? Speaking under her breath (as opposed to out loud) and the name "magitek" makes me think magic is involved. Or is this purely technological? If it's technological, how does it hear her if she's speaking under her breath? Something like "In the stillness of the empty parlor, the magitek detected her quiet command and responded with enough soft light for Kyra to find her way to the window." Or something.*
> 
> Sliding behind the curtain, she opened the door onto the balcony and stepped outside. Centaurus B was high in the sky, its dim light soon to be drowned by Centaurus A, just rising in the east. The spring morning was calm and sunny, the green of the hills to her left fresh and vibrant. *C. B has dim light and C. A isn't up yet, but you describe the morning as sunny. Also, the description of the outdoors feels very "tell" as opposed to "show," which is fine for later in scenes but doesn't help draw me in this early in the scene. Especially for the opener of a book, where you want to set the stage for your whole world, this kind of brief description of setting should be avoided. Give us a little more--what makes this world look unique?--and hang onto this type of clipped description for a faster-paced/later moment.* The white city laid out beneath her was almost too bright for the eye, but it was the great courtyard and the gate from the city to her right that drew her attention.
> 
> ...


I hope that helps!


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

ElHawk said:


> I hope that helps!


Wow, that was fascinating to read. Thanks so much for posting that passage, BR. As a third party, I'm finding it extremely interesting to watch different writers work through it, giving suggestions.


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

ElHawk said:


> Don't worry about it! I just wanted to be sure I was giving you the type of feedback you were looking for and not something that wasn't really applicable to what you were seeking.
> 
> In terms of descriptive language, I found it to be very spare--which isn't a bad thing; it's just a style preference. I wasn't "seeing" much of the scene you were setting.
> 
> I hope that helps!


It helps a lot. Thanks! I don't write emotions or description very well, do much better with action. But even then, I get feedback that sometimes my action is too fast and the reader wants it drawn out more.

Kyra turned 18 last month. The negotiations for her betrothal started when she was 16. Kyra's world is very Victorian in dress and propriety, while her betrothed's world is very much like 2015 without AIDS. She has seen videos of nightclubs in his world and intellectually understands a looser morality, but she attends Church religiously and is very concerned about propriety. You asked about Dorenda. Short, stout, busty from a high-gravity planet. She is the daughter of a Count. Silly, yes. Sacrilegious and irreverent. Also lethal, a bodyguard as much as an assistant.

Since this is an unfinished first draft, I'll be doing a lot of both fleshing out and condensing when I go back through it. And once I start getting feedback from beta readers, I may be doing a complete rewrite. Who knows?


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## A past poster (Oct 23, 2013)

Word Fan said:


> I think that the best prose---of _any_ kind---comes out of people who read, enjoy, and, perhaps, have studied, poetry, because they develop a sense of the rhythm of the English language. I'm speaking here of formal poetry, not "free verse." I mean poems with rhymes and rhythmic feet. If you develop a real understanding of, and appreciation for, that type of writing, your own prose inevitably comes out with a construction and a rhythm that readers respond to, even subconsciously.


When I began writing, it was in poetry, not prose. It was lucky, although I didn't realize it at the time. Poetry makes you aware not only of the rhythms of language, but of the weight of words. English is a wonderful language--strong, flexible, rhythmic, full of endless possibilities.


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## ElHawk (Aug 13, 2012)

brkingsolver said:


> Kyra turned 18 last month. The negotiations for her betrothal started when she was 16. Kyra's world is very Victorian in dress and propriety, while her betrothed's world is very much like 2015 without AIDS. She has seen videos of nightclubs in his world and intellectually understands a looser morality, but she attends Church religiously and is very concerned about propriety. You asked about Dorenda. Short, stout, busty from a high-gravity planet. She is the daughter of a Count. Silly, yes. Sacrilegious and irreverent. Also lethal, a bodyguard as much as an assistant.


Great! Show all that stuff in the beginnings of books or scenes and you should be golden.


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

ElHawk said:


> Great! Show all that stuff in the beginnings of books or scenes and you should be golden.


Check your IM. Almost everything I said is contained in the first chapter, the rest in the second. Hints about Dorenda build until about halfway through the book. "You're not asking the right questions," she keeps telling people.


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

After a short discussion with ElHawk offline, here is a revision taking into account the comments and suggestions of all the kind folk who were nice enough not to tell me it was a total piece of crap. 

CHAPTER 1

Dorenda came into Kyra’s sitting room and said, “Your sister is here.”

“Fiona?” Kyra asked, although she couldn’t imagine it would be anyone else. She had thirty-three half-sisters, but was close with only one.

“Yes,” Dorenda said with a smile.

“Please set another place for lunch,” Kyra said, rising with a smile of her own to greet her best friend.

But when Fiona entered, Kyra’s smile faltered. Even with heavy makeup, Kyra could see the bruise on the left side of Fiona’s face, and when Kyra embraced the older woman, Fiona winced.

“Will you stay for lunch?” Kyra asked. “It’s such a pretty day, and we’re eating on the balcony.”

“Thank you, that would be nice,” Fiona answered. “I heard that your betrothed is arriving today. Have you seen him yet?”

Kyra led her out to the balcony on the other side of the suite. Centaurus B was high in the sky, its dim light soon to be drowned by Centaurus A, rising above the hills in the east. Only two places were set, and she looked a question toward Dorenda.

Dorenda gave a slight shake of her head and ran her hand over the side of her own face. Kyra agreed, Fiona, Duchess of Toland, wouldn’t feel comfortable discussing her injuries in front of someone below her station. Dorenda at times could be a rather silly girl, but she was also extremely intelligent, diplomatic, and subtle.

“No,” Kyra said, answering Fiona’s question. “I won’t meet him until the reception at the Federation embassy tonight.”

“I’m surprised that they’re allowing you to go,” Fiona said. “After all, you haven’t been formally introduced as yet.”

“And the Imperatrix said that since the betrothal has not been formally agreed to as yet, he is just another suitor and there’s no reason I shouldn’t go,” Kyra said with a grin. “I loved the look on the Imperator’s face when she said that.”

“Everyone is watching you,” Fiona said. “An alliance with the Federation is an historic event.”

“So I’m told about fifteen times a day,” Kyra said. “Half of the lords are holding their breath hoping that Laird Lirian accepts me, and half are holding their breath hoping he rejects me.”

“And what do you hope?”

Kyra looked out on the green hills that she loved. After her marriage, she didn’t know if she would ever see them again.

“I hope that he doesn’t drink, that he’s not a homosexual, and that he’s not violent,” she finally said. 

“You have low expectations,” Fiona returned.

“I have high expectations,” Kyra countered, “but since I don’t have any say in the matter, I just dwell on my worst fears. I feel like a brood mare. Did you ever see the list of things I have to offer?”

Fiona shook her head.

“Along with pictures, including some without my clothes on, they listed my height and weight, my bra size, a list of my magical abilities, my DNA profile, a doctor’s certification as to my fertility, and my genealogy going back 50 generations.” Kyra didn’t mention an obscure clause in the marriage agreement that made her almost physically sick whenever she thought of it. Her second son and second daughter by her husband would be turned over to the Imperator on their second birthdays. 

Abruptly, she changed the subject. “The Duke hit you again.”

Fiona’s expression didn’t change and the heavy makeup hid her face, but her ears turned red. “He was drunk.”

“He’s always drunk.”

Fiona looked away. She had lost the genetic lottery. The daughter of the Imperator, niece of the Imperatrix, inexplicably she had been born without any magic whatsoever. Although her father had provided a generous dowry, the only noble who had sought her hand was the aging Duke of Toland, seeking his third wife after the death of the previous two. The Imperator had agreed, seeking to bind the powerful Duke even closer to the throne.

“Mother asked the Imperatrix to intervene,” Fiona said. “I don’t know if that’s good or not. We don’t spend all of our time here on Nert, and I pray he doesn’t save up his venom for when we go home.”

Fiona’s mother was the Imperatrix’s younger sister, and was closer to the Imperatrix than the children of the Imperator’s other concubines. Kyra hoped it would help, but it hadn’t made much of a difference thus far.

After Fiona left, Kyra took up her embroidery when Dorenda trotted into the room, her face flushed and her hands waving.

“They’re here! They’re just driving through the main gate.”

Carefully folding her work, Kyra placed it in her sewing basket and rose to her feet. She contained the urge to run, her skirts swishing against the thick carpet as she walked through the door into the main parlor of her suite. She was a full month past her eighteenth birthday, and she reminded herself that a proper lady always contained her emotions. Even in private.

The curtains were drawn and the room was dark. With barely a thought to her actions, she spoke a word under her breath, sending a surge of her energy to the magitek device to brighten the lights. Navigating her way through the expansive room, with its heavy wood and upholstered furniture and priceless paintings lining the walls, she moved toward the windows.

Sliding behind the curtain, she opened the door onto the balcony and stepped outside. The white city laid out beneath her was almost too bright for the eye, but it was the great courtyard to her right that drew her attention.

Several ground cars flanked by armored military vehicles slowly approached her father’s palace. The motorcade came to a stop fifty meters away. Gripping the balcony’s railing, she leaned far out to get a better view, her feet barely touching the floor. As much as she tried to present a calm demeanor to Dorenda, her heart hammered in her chest. Biting her lip, she tried to take deep, even breaths.

The doors to the cars opened, and a tall red-haired man stepped out of the car in front. He was joined by a red-haired woman, almost as tall as he. Jamie dan Lirian macLirian and Moreen din Lirian macLirian. The children of the High Laird and High Lady of the Federation. Both wore the black, yellow and red traditional colors of Clan Lirian, he in a black uniform bordered with yellow and red, and she in a gray mid-calf dress with a tartan-patterned scarf in the clan colors around her neck.

Kyra’s father’s servants scurried about gathering luggage. The military escort held their weapons at the ready, their eyes scanning the palace building as well as the compound walls half a kilometer away. Two gunships hovered overhead. Some of the Imperator’s subjects weren’t happy with the visit, and the security forces were taking every precaution.

“My, Laird Lirian is a handsome man,” Dorenda said. “Even better looking than his pictures. And built.”

“Nonsense,” Kyra replied. “He looks exactly like the pictures.” Just like the pictures, tall, broad-shouldered, erect military bearing. Handsome, yes, but with a stern expression on his face that masked anything he might be feeling. Dorenda didn’t have to live with him. Looks were nice, but what was inside his head?

Just then, the red-headed woman looked up, her head turning toward Kyra and Dorenda. Bright green eyes seemed to zero in on Kyra’s face, freezing her in place. Moreen din Lirian, Truthsayer and one of the strongest mages in the galaxy. Her stare seemed to last forever, and Kyra felt as though her soul was bare to that intense scrutiny. Then Lady Lirian’s brother leaned close and spoke to her. With a jerk, she turned to him and let him take her arm. With one last look up at Kyra, she followed the servants. 

Kyra watched until the building blocked her sight of the pair as they were ushered inside. They would be staying in rooms on the floor below hers, but propriety dictated that she wouldn’t see or speak to either until the reception that evening.

She turned away and walked back inside. “What time is the reception?”

“Eighteen-thirty, my lady,” Dorenda answered.

“Let me know when it’s time for my bath,” Kyra said.

Lost in thought, she sat down and picked up her embroidery again. Somehow, seeing her husband-to-be hadn’t made her wedding more real. If anything, it made it surreal. That man would soon be lying on top of her so that she could pump out babies, who hopefully would cement an alliance between the Imperium and the Federation.

She looked up at a shelf on the wall, and the dolls that stood there in their pretty clothes. It didn’t seem that long since she had played with them.


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## TheLemontree (Sep 12, 2015)

Wow, thank you so much for sharing this process. I'm learning a lot just by observing this discussion.

My one piece of feedback (as a reader) is that I couldn't see what Kyra and Fiona were doing while having their dialogue. Did they ever sit down and have lunch? I realised when it came time for Fiona to leave that in my head they had been just standing facing each other on the balcony the whole time, like two talking heads.

Perhaps instead of:


> "No," Kyra said, answering Fiona's question. "I won't meet him until the reception at the Federation embassy tonight."


"No," Kyra said, turning her full attention back to Fiona and escorting her to lunch table. "I won't meet him until..."

And maybe have some "reaching for her water glass", "pushing her food around her plate" etc in the midst of the dialogue, so I can 'see' them as people a bit better.

I do like this passage better than the first, I know Kyra better and have a better sense of what she thinks about things.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

Wonderful revision work, BR! The only suggestion I can make, looking at it now, is to drop some of the speech tags. When only two people are speaking, you can often drop a lot of them. Though the advice to avoid speech tags at all costs is (IMO) sort of silly, I do find that reducing them helps pick up the pace a bit.



> "No," Kyra said, answering Fiona's question. "I won't meet him until the reception at the Federation embassy tonight."
> 
> Her sister looked surprised. "They're allowing you to go? You haven't been formally introduced as yet."
> 
> ...


I added a couple action tags ("Her sister looked surprised," "Fiona returned her smile") and transformed one dialogue tag into an action tag ("Kyra said with a grin" > "Kyra grinned."). Other than that, I just dropped tags. I don't think it's ever unclear who's speaking, even with the lighter tagging.


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## Word Fan (Apr 15, 2015)

How about _In Defense Of Purple Prose_ by Paul West:

http://www.nytimes.com/1985/12/15/books/in-defense-of-purple-prose.html?pagewanted=all


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

TheLemontree said:


> Wow, thank you so much for sharing this process. I'm learning a lot just by observing this discussion.
> 
> My one piece of feedback (as a reader) is that I couldn't see what Kyra and Fiona were doing while having their dialogue. Did they ever sit down and have lunch? I realised when it came time for Fiona to leave that in my head they had been just standing facing each other on the balcony the whole time, like two talking heads.
> 
> ...


You're so right. Conversations are always better when interspersed with some kind of action to give the reader a sense of place and attitude. There's so much still to do on this book. I still have to manufacture a personality for the leading man.


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

Becca Mills said:


> Wonderful revision work, BR! The only suggestion I can make, looking at it now, is to drop some of the speech tags. When only two people are speaking, you can often drop a lot of them. Though the advice to avoid speech tags at all costs is (IMO) sort of silly, I do find that reducing them helps pick up the pace a bit.
> 
> I added a couple action tags ("Her sister looked surprised," "Fiona returned her smile") and transformed one dialogue tag into an action tag ("Kyra said with a grin" > "Kyra grinned."). Other than that, I just dropped tags. I don't think it's ever unclear who's speaking, even with the lighter tagging.


I usually have to do a huge amount of cleanup on the 2nd and 3rd passes. When I'm writing, it's a matter of getting the story out of my head. The best dialog doesn't need many tags, but as noted above, it does need some action which would help.

I appreciate the helpful comments everyone has made. Now in Dec-Jan I'll find out how many friends I have. Two ways to make people duck and run: "I need some help moving", and "I need a few beta readers".


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

brkingsolver said:


> I usually have to do a huge amount of cleanup on the 2nd and 3rd passes. When I'm writing, it's a matter of getting the story out of my head. The best dialog doesn't need many tags, but as noted above, it does need some action which would help.
> 
> I appreciate the helpful comments everyone has made. Now in Dec-Jan I'll find out how many friends I have. Two ways to make people duck and run: "I need some help moving", and "I need a few beta readers".


LOL ... reminds we we'll be moving soon.  Is this book a paranormal romance, BR?


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## Sapphire (Apr 24, 2012)

BR, I really like the revision. Now I want to keep reading and find out what is going to happen.


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## Sapphire (Apr 24, 2012)

I'm finally back on-line and want to say thank you to Libby and Becca for BR for comments and suggestions. BR, I'm perplexed by your term 'dense' for the third paragraph. This is her journal entry while in a contemplative mood. I was trying to convey a jumble of thoughts in her brain as she's piecing together a string of recent events that have brought her face to face with the hard facts of life and death. However, I don't want it to be confusing for the reader.


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## Shiriluna Nott (Aug 26, 2014)

Thanks for starting this thread. I was just thinking about this exact topic a few days ago when I got (yet another) critique saying my novels were "too flowery". 

I really never considered my writing to be "fancy". But I LOVE LOVE LOVE similes (and metaphors). I write vivid descriptions and have a bad habit of always wanting to bring attention to a character's eyes and what they're doing. I'm working on toning this down (just a little. moderation and all  ), but it's nice to see other people embracing such a style of writing. 

Anyway, I don't have much to add to the discussion, but I'm having fun reading it!


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## ElHawk (Aug 13, 2012)

BR, I really love your revision! It does feel much more vivid now--I can see and feel a lot more of what Kyra is experiencing. Nice work!

And I knew at least a few people would enjoy seeing the revision. It's hard to learn how to apply comments in a critique during a revision, so seeing a before and after can be so useful.


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## ElHawk (Aug 13, 2012)

Shiriluna Nott said:


> Thanks for starting this thread. I was just thinking about this exact topic a few days ago when I got (yet another) critique saying my novels were "too flowery".
> 
> I really never considered my writing to be "fancy". But I LOVE LOVE LOVE similes (and metaphors). I write vivid descriptions and have a bad habit of always wanting to bring attention to a character's eyes and what they're doing. I'm working on toning this down (just a little. moderation and all  ), but it's nice to see other people embracing such a style of writing.
> 
> Anyway, I don't have much to add to the discussion, but I'm having fun reading it!


Well, my prose style is too flowery for a lot of people, too. I think you have to go with what feels right to you, and as long as most of your readers are happy with it, you can't worry too much about the few who aren't happy with it. It's just not the book for them. 

I've found that when you bring in more senses than just sight, the "she saw"/"she glanced"/"she stared" stuff becomes less obvious and problematic. I try to subtly group three senses together in order to make it feel less like I'm relying on visual stuff alone. Something like _She gazed down from the balcony to the fields spread below. The sun was bright on their green, rolling flanks, and the fresh scent of sprouting grass rose up to meet her. She breathed it in deeply until dizziness overcame her._

Remember that we have more senses than just sight, taste, touch, sound, and smell. Equilibrium/balance, proprioception, hunger, thirst, pain, itch, temperature detection, vibration, and sensing the passage of time are all senses. You can use any of them in groups of three or four punch up prose and take the focus off of sight.

I think authors rely on sight so strongly because for many of us we "see" what we're writing playing out like a movie in our heads (I do!) and you can't experience a movie through any senses other than sight and sound. A film has to trick your other senses into engagement by its craft, but it gets the engagement of your eyes and ears automatically. So we tend to watch that film in our heads and write down what we see--which comes out as what the character sees, and not much beyond what the character sees. I think as long as you remain aware that you're being "tricked" into only engaging one sense, and consciously work to get around that trick, you'll come out all right in the end.


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## ElHawk (Aug 13, 2012)

Word Fan said:


> How about _In Defense Of Purple Prose_ by Paul West:
> 
> http://www.nytimes.com/1985/12/15/books/in-defense-of-purple-prose.html?pagewanted=all


This is great! I love it. It definitely sums up my feelings about words and their use. I've never had a problem with it when people have called my prose purple. I'm more inclined to thank them for the compliment.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

Okay, folks, I'm posting a passage from my WIP, hoping for stylistic feedback. It's draft material from very near the beginning of the book. This or a similar scene might make it into the final version, or it might not. I had so much trouble with first portion of the story over the summer that I just bagged it and started working on Act 2. Hopefully the rest of the story will tell me what needs to go at the beginning. (I did read your plotting book, Libby, honest! My pants seem to be stuck around my ankles or something.  )

This is an action scene, and those are often what I struggle with most. I'm not naturally a writer of taut, fast-paced prose, so I find myself rewriting fight scenes over and over, trying to find the right balance between pace and clarity. I also struggle to maintain the narrator's voice through those scenes ... but maybe I shouldn't be trying to do that?

I won't say a lot about the passage since, if it comes at or near the beginning of the book, it should stand on its own, but this is Book 3 in a series, so most readers will know that the "ice people" are giant gorillalike creatures, and that the narrator/MC is living with them. The MC is a woman in her mid-twenties.

Any and all feedback is welcome. I'm slapping a spoiler tag on this because it contains graphic violence (ice people getting hurt, not human beings, but nevertheless). If no one wants to read it and respond for that reason, that's totally okay. I know this sort of material is not for everyone.



Spoiler



Here's a weird thing about ice people: their saliva is pink.

That's because their fangs scrape their own gums raw. The constant low-level bleeding colors their spittle.

There's another weird thing about their spit: when they get alarmed or angry, it gets all thick and sticky. That's because they're venomous, and their venom causes clotting. When the blood in their saliva starts to clot, they end up with a mouthful of stringy pink glop.

Fortunately, their venom glands only get going when they're riled up.

Unfortunately, the adolescent staring me down from across the combat space was plenty riled. He looked like he'd raided a bubblegum machine. He opened his mouth waaaay wide and flipped his upper lip back over his nostrils. His jaws seemed to jump from his face like a feeding shark's, all blood-streaked gums, six-inch fangs, and quivering, pink strings.

He roared.

It was a sound meant to make me feel small, and it did.

My sparring partner, one of the adult males responsible for my combat training, stepped back and tilted his head toward me. That meant the adolescent was my problem to deal with.

No surprise there. My instructors would probably step in if I were about to get killed, but survivable injuries didn't seem to bother them. They should all have that cliché about stuff that doesn't kill you making you stronger tattooed on their furry butt cheeks.

I shifted the hard-water staff I'd been using to one hand and began tracing a small, slow circle with the other, imagining the energy I wanted to produce. In front of me, a two-foot disk of intense infrared radiation leaped into being, mirroring the movement of my hand as though I were gripping the back of it, like a shield.

The air in front of me shimmered. Water from the chamber's icy ceiling began to rain down on me, hissing into steam where it touched my shield.

The adolescent shook his head, flinging strands of pink over the other young males around him. Then he charged, vaulting across the space on the knuckles of one hand and sweeping the other at my belly, claws raked, aiming to disembowel.
I jerked the disk to the left. His hand and forearm turned to char as they passed through it. The blackened remnant of his limb crumbled to ash when it hit me. The blow was nothing.

The adolescent sprawled to the side, thrown off more by the swing-and-a-miss than by the injury. He righted himself quickly and crouched on the ice, snarling, the stump of his left arm held out of the way behind him.

I jerked in surprise when one of the other adolescents launched himself across the room and tore into my attacker. The two grappled, slashing with claws, biting over and over. Fur and blood spattered the ice. My attacker lost his one-handed grip on his opponent's blood-slicked head and was gored badly in the belly. His opponent reached into the wound and began ripping stuff out. My attacker squealed in pain, then reared back and struck, burying his teeth in his adversary's exposed back and tearing out a big chunk. It must've included a section of spine, because the other's legs stopped working, and he went down like a cut marionette. My opponent flipped him over and bit his throat away. Blood gushed across the floor, sending steam up from the ice.

I'd watched the fight out of my peripheral vision, keeping most of my attention on the remaining adolescents across the room. They tended to catch one another's rages, so I might well be attacked again. I needed to be ready.

The only thing that bothered me about these deaths was that they no longer bothered me. They had at first, but the young males no longer seemed like people to me. That was wrong. They were people - people in the grip of some horrible, violent madness, but people nonetheless. Yet I couldn't bring back my empathy for them. Attack after attack, bloodbath after bloodbath, had burned it out. In my mind, they'd become an undifferentiated mass of murderous rage.

I watched out of the corner of my eye as the blood-drenched winner of this particular bout began slicing the hide from his dead opponent's belly, working awkwardly with his one remaining hand. His intestines slapping wetly against his thighs as he moved.

If he survived his wounds, he would chew the pelt to softness and stitch it into a greave. All the ice people covered their bare lower legs in this way, but only the males' greaves were made of their own species' skin.

The victor got halfway through his task before his wounds got the better of him, and he collapsed onto his victim's corpse.

The adult male I'd been sparring with walked forward and prodded the fallen victor. He must've been a goner because the icy floor softened and swallowed both adolescents. I watched as their bodies moved through the ice toward the fortress's outer wall. They and the blood and gore they'd shed would be pushed through the glacier to a spot some distance from the fortress, then disgorged for the enjoyment of Fur's various scavengers.


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## Hudson Owen (May 18, 2012)

F. Scott Fitzgerald said: "If you can write a good sonnet, you can write anything."  Of course, that was written in a more literate time.  The best prose has been  "informed" by poetry.  James Joyce was a weak poet but a powerhouse as a prose stylist.  My own observation of today's writers is that too many use short, choppy sentences to fill up their books.  They should be mixed in with longer, more complex, sentences.


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## Shiriluna Nott (Aug 26, 2014)

> My own observation of today's writers is that too many use short, choppy sentences to fill up their books. They should be mixed in with longer, more complex, sentences.


My co-author is constantly yelling at me for almost paragraph-long sentences. Haha. I do think a mix of short and long is the perfect combination. I tend to go longer ALL the time though, which is probably just as cringe-worthy. I have been trying to work in more short, crisp sentences lately. They really can have a great effect on a scene.



> I've never had a problem with it when people have called my prose purple. I'm more inclined to thank them for the compliment.


I should start doing this. I don't even understand why many people hate on purple prose. Maybe it's just because I grew up reading flowery novels, but I love it!


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## sela (Nov 2, 2014)

Becca Mills said:


> Okay, folks, I'm posting a passage from my WIP, hoping for stylistic feedback. It's draft material from very near the beginning of the book. This or a similar scene might make it into the final version, or it might not. I had so much trouble with first portion of the story over the summer that I just bagged it and started working on Act 2. Hopefully the rest of the story will tell me what needs to go at the beginning. (I did read your plotting book, Libby, honest! My pants seem to be stuck around my ankles or something.  )
> 
> This is an action scene, and those are often what I struggle with most. I'm not naturally a writer of taut, fast-paced prose, so I find myself rewriting fight scenes over and over, trying to find the right balance between pace and clarity. I also struggle to maintain the narrator's voice through those scenes ... but maybe I shouldn't be trying to do that?
> 
> I won't say a lot about the passage since, if it comes at or near the beginning of the book, it should stand on its own, but this is Book 3 in a series, so most readers will know that the "ice people" are giant gorillalike creatures, and that the narrator/MC is living with them. The MC is a woman in her mid-twenties.


Wow -- that was an intense scene! I wouldn't change it at all, personally, and felt that it had the right amount of description and a great voice. My only quibble is about the fangs scraping the gums constantly. Although the symbolism is great -- facing an already bloodied opponent and the sense of what tough formidable opponents they are that they make themselves bleed, the biologist in me (undergrad BSC in biology) was stopped for a moment since I wondered how evolutionarily beneficial it would be to be constantly losing blood for no apparent reason. I would think that those individuals that had fangs that did NOT constantly cause a small level of bleeding might be selected over those with fangs that did cause bleeding. It may just be my mind and your average reader might not even think about it so YMMV.

ETA: You could keep that great symbolism by having the hormones / pheromones make the spittle pink due to their chemical nature, therefore they look fierce in battle. That might be something evolution would select to ensure the warriors appeared fiercer and thus gave them a benefit when facing an opponent. You could remark how it made them look as if they'd already torn someone apart, etc. with their fangs and how it struck fear into their opponent's or enemy's heart.

Otherwise, I really enjoyed it!


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

Sela said:


> Wow -- that was an intense scene! I wouldn't change it at all, personally, and felt that it had the right amount of description and a great voice. My only quibble is about the fangs scraping the gums constantly. Although the symbolism is great -- facing an already bloodied opponent and the sense of what tough formidable opponents they are that they make themselves bleed, the biologist in me (undergrad BSC in biology) was stopped for a moment since I wondered how evolutionarily beneficial it would be to be constantly losing blood for no apparent reason. I would think that those individuals that had fangs that did NOT constantly cause a small level of bleeding might be selected over those with fangs that did cause bleeding. It may just be my mind and your average reader might not even think about it so YMMV.
> 
> Otherwise, I really enjoyed it!


Thanks, Sela! 

On the bleeding ... well, see, it's a sexual selection thing, like a peacock's tail. Specimens that can withstand the blood loss must be especially strong and are therefore more attractive! (Er ... totally just made that up. Really, I tossed in the pink spit because it seemed cool, without giving it much thought. I'd better think about it some more!  )


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## Sam Kates (Aug 28, 2012)

Becca Mills said:


> Okay, folks, I'm posting a passage from my WIP, hoping for stylistic feedback. It's draft material from very near the beginning of the book. This or a similar scene might make it into the final version, or it might not. I had so much trouble with first portion of the story over the summer that I just bagged it and started working on Act 2. Hopefully the rest of the story will tell me what needs to go at the beginning. (I did read your plotting book, Libby, honest! My pants seem to be stuck around my ankles or something.  )
> 
> This is an action scene, and those are often what I struggle with most. I'm not naturally a writer of taut, fast-paced prose, so I find myself rewriting fight scenes over and over, trying to find the right balance between pace and clarity. I also struggle to maintain the narrator's voice through those scenes ... but maybe I shouldn't be trying to do that?
> 
> ...


Great thread.

Becca, I thought that scene was excellent. The thing with the bleeding and evolution didn't occur to me but, unlike Sela, I have no biology background.


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

Give a passage to an editor, and the urge to edit takes over. I would highlight my changes, but not familiar enough with this editor to know how:

Here's a weird thing about ice people: their saliva is pink.

That's because their fangs scrape their own gums raw. The constant low-level bleeding colors their spittle. 

There's another weird thing about their spit: when they get alarmed or angry, it gets all thick and sticky. That's because they're venomous, and their venom causes clotting. When the blood in their saliva starts to clot, they end up with a mouthful of stringy pink glop.

Fortunately, their venom glands only get going when they're riled up.

Unfortunately, the adolescent staring me down from across the combat space was plenty riled. He looked like he'd raided a bubblegum machine. He opened his mouth waaaay wide and flipped his upper lip back over his nostrils. His jaws seemed to jump from his face like a feeding shark's, all blood-streaked gums, six-inch fangs, and quivering, pink strings.

He roared, a sound meant to make me feel small, and it did.

My sparring partner, one of the adult males responsible for my combat training, stepped back and tilted his head toward me. That meant the adolescent was my problem to deal with.

No surprise there. My instructors would probably step in if I were about to get killed, but survivable injuries didn't seem to bother them. That cliche about stuff that doesn't kill you making you stronger should be tattooed on their furry butt cheeks. 

I shifted the hard-water staff I'd been using to one hand and began tracing a small, slow circle with the other, imagining the energy I wanted to produce. In front of me, a two-foot disk of intense infrared radiation leaped into being, mirroring the movement of my hand as though I were gripping the back of it, like a shield.

The air in front of me shimmered. Water from the chamber's icy ceiling began to rain down on me, hissing into steam where it touched my shield.

The adolescent shook his head, flinging strands of pink over the other young males around him. Then he charged, using the knuckles of one hand to vault across the space and sweeping his claws at my belly, aiming to disembowel me.

I jerked the disk to the left. His hand and forearm turned to char as they passed through it. The blackened remnant of his limb crumbled to ash when it hit me.

The adolescent sprawled to the side, thrown balance, but seemingly not bothered too much by the injury. He righted himself quickly and crouched on the ice, snarling, the stump of his left arm held out of the way behind him.

I jerked in surprise when one of the other adolescents launched himself across the room and tore into my attacker. The two grappled, slashing with claws and teeth. Fur and blood spattered the ice. My attacker lost his one-handed grip on his opponent's blood-slicked head and was gored badly in the belly. His opponent reached into the wound and began ripping stuff out. My attacker squealed in pain, then reared back and struck, burying his teeth in his adversary's exposed back and tearing out a big chunk. It must've included a section of spine, because the other's legs stopped working, and he went down like a cut marionette. My opponent flipped him over and ripped his throat out. Blood gushed across the floor, turning the ice into steam.

(in the passage above, didn't like the word "gored" as that normally is applied to a wound from a horn. also, "ripping stuff out", the 'stuff' word didn't seem to fit. the usage of both of those words pulled me out of the story.)

I'd watched the fight out of my peripheral vision, keeping most of my attention on the remaining adolescents across the room. They tended to catch one another's rages, so I might well be attacked again. I needed to be ready.

The only thing that bothered me about these deaths was that they no longer bothered me. They had at first, but the young males no longer seemed like people to me. That was wrong. They were people -- people in the grip of some horrible, violent madness, but people nonetheless. Yet I couldn't resurrect my empathy for them. Attack after attack, bloodbath after bloodbath, had burned it out. In my mind, they'd become an undifferentiated mass of murderous rage.

I watched out of the corner of my eye as the blood-drenched winner of this particular bout began slicing the hide from his dead opponent's belly, working awkwardly with his one remaining hand. His intestines slapped wetly against his thighs as he moved.

If he survived his wounds, he would chew the pelt to softness and stitch it into a greave. All the ice people covered their bare lower legs in this way, but only the males' greaves were made of their own species' skin.

The victor got halfway through his task before his wounds got the better of him, and he collapsed onto his victim's corpse.

The adult male I'd been sparring with walked forward and prodded the fallen victor. He must've been a goner because the icy floor softened and swallowed both adolescents. I watched as their bodies moved through the ice toward the fortress's outer wall. They and the blood and gore they'd shed would be pushed through the glacier to a spot some distance from the fortress, then disgorged for the enjoyment of Fur's various scavengers.
-----------------------
As to the fangs and bleeding, I agree with Sela (BS Biology and BS Nursing). A cobra's fangs fold up when its mouth is closed. Some other vipers have grooves the fangs fit into when their mouths are closed. The bleeding thing is counter evolutionary because it opens the organism to infection.

On the whole, thought it was well written. Is this for a YA audience? The reason I asked is they might like the explicit gore more than a more adult audience.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

brkingsolver said:


> Give a passage to an editor, and the urge to edit takes over. I would highlight my changes, but not familiar enough with this editor to know how:
> 
> [...]
> 
> ...


Thank you, BR, that's definitely tighter!

I'm aiming it at grown-ups, not YAs. A fair minority of reviewers refer to it as YA, though, so perhaps it is being read by a younger crowd.

Yeah, the ice people do have horns. Sorry, should've mentioned that.

So, to replace "stuff," how specific should I get? This is the kind of thing where clarity vs. pacing trips me up. I could go with something more specific but still general ("insides"? "viscera"?), or I could go with something more specific ("guts"?).

On this line ... "He roared, a sound meant to make me feel small, and it did." ... how important is it to keep the characters' actions in separate paragraphs? I've been trying to keep them very strictly separate, unless there's a specific reason to mix them, but when one action is very short ("he roared"), combining it with another character's reaction, as BR is doing, seems way more economical. How much wiggle room is there on this stuff? Is there a good rule of thumb I could follow?



Sam Kates said:


> Becca, I thought that scene was excellent. The thing with the bleeding and evolution didn't occur to me but, unlike Sela, I have no biology background.


Thanks, Sam!


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

Considering the viewpoint and the MC's voice, I'd go with 'guts'.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

brkingsolver said:


> Considering the viewpoint and the MC's voice, I'd go with 'guts'.


Yeah, I think you're right.


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## Gone 9/21/18 (Dec 11, 2008)

I also thought the excerpt was powerful, and it made me curious about some things, which is what we're all trying to achieve, right? As to the prose, the big thing I wondered about is the paragraphs of explanation about saliva at the beginning. The reader needs to know these things, but if the MC is working with an adult sparring partner wouldn't this have come up earlier, maybe in a place where it didn't slow down entry into the action?

My other thought is as to scents. Charred flesh and bone, an abdominal cavity opened and intestines out - even in a cold environment wouldn't there be noticeable smells? And did the scents disappear with the bodies? (In my own experience, blood alone doesn't have a strong smell the way many novelists describe, and I've had blood dripping down my face from an injured eye, sprayed on the walls of my house by an injured dog, and have observed veterinary surgeries close up.)


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## smw (Mar 9, 2015)

Word Fan said:


> I think that the best prose---of _any_ kind---comes out of people who read, enjoy, and, perhaps, have studied, poetry, because they develop a sense of the rhythm of the English language. I'm speaking here of formal poetry, not "free verse." I mean poems with rhymes and rhythmic feet. If you develop a real understanding of, and appreciation for, that type of writing, your own prose inevitably comes out with a construction and a rhythm that readers respond to, even subconsciously.
> 
> And by "construction" I mean, of course, word choice and sentence construction, but also paragraph construction, chapter development, and overall story construction. Even "pantsers" construct their stories, word by word, sentence by sentence. It's like building a wall, brick by brick. A pantser may not know where the wall is going, but the wall is being built as a well-made wall, not merely as a jumble of bricks scattered over the ground.


IMO, I don't believe that skillset is limited to poetry. The writers who tend to have the best prose, in my experience, tend to be people who studied any sort of discipline in which one needed to develop an intuitive sense of rhythm and phrasing. Sure, word selection is key, as it always is, but building sentences that are based in solid rhythms is very similar to building, say, drum or bass tracks with solid rhythms, or melodic phrases that flow smoothly. You can "feel" when the song is constructed well, just like you can "feel" when prose is constructed well.


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## Sylvia R. Frost (Jan 8, 2014)

I like this opener BC. You have a strong voice, and word building that feels real instead of just painted on scenery. I too think while cool, the opening hook for your story isn't the strongest it could be. For me, I like to have my hooks be something about my characters. Almost a mini thesis of my story. Basically I like to put some element of "What does my protag want" or "why are they doing this" right up front. Even if it's couched in description. As your excerpt went on I didn't feel grounded enough in why your protagonist was fighting to care. She will survive it. But why fight at all? I feel as if I don't quite know her yet. And for me knowing the protag is the best hook of all. 

Also the checkov in me wants the pink spit to be relevant later in the scene (or more reasonably) later in the story. Because it takes up such real-estate I want her to use it's pinkness to defeat it. Or just to illuminate something imporant about the character/situation. It sort of does already (The ice people are in pain.) At least that's what I got from it, but I wasn't totally clear. 

EDIT: I re-read and see it's an excerpt not a hook, but I think my point still stand. I come at a lot of writing from a drama perspective, and the best scenes are always when the protagonist wants something and is being kept from getting it. What does she want? What is holding her back? What are the stakes? Some of that may be obvious via context for sure, but I think too, that even if it's not, an interesting perspective, beyond just "getting through the moment" is usually what keeps me invested in a character. But again, if this isn't a hook than a lot of what I said is a lot less applicable. 

That said your world-building and vividness of prose was AWESOME. 

So on that note here's my go from my WIP dystopian fantasy new adult romance, Chronomancer. I mainly worry if the world-building, scene feels cohesive. To me it feels like I have so  many different elements going on, I hope the reader doesn't feel overwhelmed. 

Mom had always said dawn was the most beautiful time in the world. I didn't understand why until Dad, Bex and I moved to the 100th floor in the ramshackle apartment complex in the worst part of Sector 2. No private bathroom. But what a view.  Below my tiny window, regiments of hundreds of gray sky-scrapers spread out in every direction.  It was only by the grace of the Regent's magic that the buildings still existed-- as their metal and concrete had been mutated by magic into something that could stand the test of time. A test that had gone on for two-hundred years. 

At least that was what the witches said. 

I wasn't sure if I believed them. 

But on clear days in the early morning I didn't care. Because then I could see the lake beyond the edge of the city, blue and roiling. Watching the peach dawn crest over the shoreline like an endless wave was the only time I could call the warmth in my belly hope and not be lying.  Sometimes I swore I could see a figure out there. A woman's silhouette.  

But not today. 

Today fog swallowed the tops of even the shortest skyscrapers, and the window above my bed was opaque with frost. My fingers were too numb from cold to linger and wait for it to clear. It was fall, the month of culling, but with the weather of the month of withering.  As I shivered fully awake, my hands gripped the worn sheets close to my body before I rolled out of bed. When my toes touched the ground, they stopped being numb and started throbbing. Better. At least they weren't frost-touched. A pair of socks lolled on the ground beside my bed. I put them on. 

I had left them there for my twin brother, Bex, but he hadn't taken them. He never did.  I didn't blame him. If Bex had done to me what I had done to him, I would've died before I accepted even such a small gift. 

I slipped into my bra, underwear and then grey jumpsuit. That was the extent of my morning routine. My hair was short and uneven from cutting it myself. Sometimes I missed the ritual of tying it up in the elaborate fighters knot before heading off to Prep, but today I was grateful for the speed.  My ID jangled as I grabbed it from  where it was tied around the rickety bed-post. It had no picture, just a gender, female, and a name: Sanna.  I lost my last name the same time I lost Mom. Because of the spell I wouldn't remember it even if you screamed it in my face. But I'd give up my first-name too. If that would bring Mom back. 

On the other side of the door, Dad fiddled with the burner and empty pot. His curly hair covered his eyes and his overgrown beard covered his mouth and his silence covered everything else. Dad hadn't spoken more than ten words since Mom was exiled.

I wriggled between my bed and the set of free weights I found for Bex, and into the adjacent room which also functioned as a kitchen, a living room and Dad's bedroom. 
"Dad?" 

He stared rapt at the hissing gas flame licking at the corners of the worn pot. Judging by the copper tinge of rust on the edges and the deepness of the scratches the time-magic must have been wearing off on it. That happened when you lived as far away from the witches as we did. I'd have to take it to the recycling plant tomorrow, before the choosing.

 Dad reached out to touch it. Not the handle. But the scalding metal. 

I gently pushed his hand away.  "You need water, Dad, and rice, remember?"

Silence. 

I got the package of rice and measured it out into the pot along with a some of today's water supply.  I took extra care to make sure he ate on time so he could get work.  Tardiness to his job as a janitor could cause him to be called in for his own ten year Evaluation early. And that wouldn't go well. 

I placed a lid on top of the rice, and turned up the flame. "Have you seen Bex, Dad?" 

He shook his head slowly. He was doing worse than usual.

Hastened by the last dregs of enchantment in the pot, the rice rumbled under the lid. Boiling and ready. I uncapped it with one hand and fished out a strainer with the other, pouring the hot liquid through the plastic. Like everything, the buildings, our clothes, the laws, the stupid strainer was hundreds of years old. Preserved like new by magic. Well, almost new.   Dad watched it with rapt attention, before fishing out a bowl, one for him and one for me. The routine was familiar to him, so he could accomplish it. It was just decisions that gave him trouble. 

 I took the bowl from his hand, but then put it back in the shelf above his head. "I don't have time to eat, Dad, sorry. I have to go to the Evaluation." 

His eyes widened and he nodded. I had given up on trying to decipher what his facial expressions meant anymore. 

"You have to go to work today." I patted him on the shoulder. "But not tomorrow. Remember. Tomorrow is the Choosing." 

Nod. Blink. 

I bent over, to grab my backpack under the sink.  While rifling through it to make sure I had everything I needed for the Evaluation, I heard the door slam. 

"Bye," I yelled.  I liked these moments, just after he left. Where I could pretend that he was grumpy, instead of just gone. The forgetting spell, was just supposed to erase our last name and mom's first, but on Dad it had gone wrong somehow. 

I took one last gulp straight from the tap before wiping off the flecks of rust left on my lips from the faucet and bounding down the stairs. I didn't see Dad on the way down. I hoped he'd go into work today, but I didn't have time to worry.  The Evaluation began in twenty minutes, and I had a long run ahead of me to the Evaluation Grounds.

EDIT: Shortened. Realized was more than a scene. Probably not useful as too long.


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## Nope (Jun 25, 2012)

.


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## Sylvia R. Frost (Jan 8, 2014)

P.J. Post said:


> It is cool - barbaric even, which makes the setting more intense.
> One option to avoid the evolution quandary is to create a tribal custom (mating ritual) of filing their teeth, the more blood, the more desirable they are. (I assume their culture is inherently violent.) This solves the evolution issue and also creates the opportunity to explore the filing ritual, customs and history of this aspect of their culture (also it could be used as a metaphor or foreshadowing). I think this deliberate self-mutilation makes them scarier too.
> 
> Sometimes very short sentences provide punch and description can be woven into the action:
> ...


I like P.J's rewrite quite a lot.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

Sela said:


> ETA: You could keep that great symbolism by having the hormones / pheromones make the spittle pink due to their chemical nature, therefore they look fierce in battle. That might be something evolution would select to ensure the warriors appeared fiercer and thus gave them a benefit when facing an opponent. You could remark how it made them look as if they'd already torn someone apart, etc. with their fangs and how it struck fear into their opponent's or enemy's heart.


Ooo, that's good! Thank you!

I suppose if I wanted to keep the gooeyness, I could just have the venom be gooey. I was going for a mouth full of this kind of stuff ...










... probably because for reasons I don't quite understand, I find thick, stringy drool to be the absolute grossest thing ever. Probably from having to chase big puddles of it around cage-bottoms when I worked at a vet's office as a teen. Slime amoeba. Oh god, just the memory ... 



ellenoc said:


> I also thought the excerpt was powerful, and it made me curious about some things, which is what we're all trying to achieve, right? As to the prose, the big thing I wondered about is the paragraphs of explanation about saliva at the beginning. The reader needs to know these things, but if the MC is working with an adult sparring partner wouldn't this have come up earlier, maybe in a place where it didn't slow down entry into the action?


Yeah, this is the kind of thing I struggle with. I originally wrote this as one of the first scenes of the book -- possibly as the first one featuring the MC. In that case, there'd be no other opportunity to introduce the info.

I also like, in theory, the idea of starting off an action scene with indirection -- it sounds like the MC is just chatting us up with random info, and then you realize, no, she's about to be attacked. But I think it goes on too long. A sentence of it, or maybe two, would have the effect without the loss of pace. Maybe?



ellenoc said:


> My other thought is as to scents. Charred flesh and bone, an abdominal cavity opened and intestines out - even in a cold environment wouldn't there be noticeable smells? And did the scents disappear with the bodies? (In my own experience, blood alone doesn't have a strong smell the way many novelists describe, and I've had blood dripping down my face from an injured eye, sprayed on the walls of my house by an injured dog, and have observed veterinary surgeries close up.)


Great point. There should be a strong smell from the abdominal injury, at the very least. Will have to think about the char smell ... it would smell, but like what, exactly, if the flesh had been completely burned up? Not meaty, maybe. Like the inside of an old charcoal grill, maybe?



Sylvia R. Frost said:


> I like this opener BC. You have a strong voice, and word building that feels real instead of just painted on scenery. I too think while cool, the opening hook for your story isn't the strongest it could be. For me, I like to have my hooks be something about my characters. Almost a mini thesis of my story. Basically I like to put some element of "What does my protag want" or "why are they doing this" right up front. Even if it's couched in description. As your excerpt went on I didn't feel grounded enough in why your protagonist was fighting to care. She will survive it. But why fight at all? I feel as if I don't quite know her yet. And for me knowing the protag is the best hook of all.
> 
> Also the checkov in me wants the pink spit to be relevant later in the scene (or more reasonably) later in the story. Because it takes up such real-estate I want her to use it's pinkness to defeat it. Or just to illuminate something imporant about the character/situation. It sort of does already (The ice people are in pain.) At least that's what I got from it, but I wasn't totally clear.
> 
> ...


Thank you! Yeah, thing is, I really don't know what's happen there, yet. That's why I eventually bagged working on the beginning. I wrote that scene when I was going for _hardened by brutality and just trying to survive and find a way out_, but the beginning might end up looking very different. I just don't know, yet. That might be why the MC's emotion status feels a bit absent -- I wasn't committed when I wrote it. :-/

I love the idea of an implied "mini-thesis" upfront. Thank you! That's really helpful. I've never thought of a hook in that way. And I was thinking of this scene as at least potentially a hook when I wrote it.

You know, this is going to sound crazy and heretical ... but I'm anti-Chekhov. Well, not in a larger sense: I like me some Chekhov. But in the way you mean -- the idea that every detail needs to be instrumental, that all the fat should be cut away. As we all know, real life is not streamlined that way. It's fully of random stuff that doesn't matter in the least. Cutting all that out is, I think, what gives Chekhov such a "stagey" feel, despite the psychological naturalism of his characters. I never forget the artifice of the work, when I'm watching/reading Chekhov. The constructedness of it is very present for me at all times. It works for him, but I don't really care for that mode in speculative fiction. There are an awful lot of _Star Trek_ eps that follow the Chekhov rule: a new technology is introduced in the first scene, and it seems wholly disconnected from the main events of the plot, but sure a shootin' it turns out to be key to resolving the plot at the end. I just don't like that. It feels overly neat and constructed to me.

Instead, I follow Tolkien's advice in, I think, his essay on fairy stories. Or maybe it's the one on _Beowulf_. I forget. Anyway, he points out that people living in the real world have this depth of shared knowledge, and that that knowledge gets referred to in passing constantly, without explanation. If I were to mention World War II, I wouldn't pause to say, "As you know, World War II was ..." and explain the thing. I trust that you already know about it because it's a major part of the recent shared history of our species. He points out that those references, when added to fiction, create the illusion of "depth." The characters know something that we don't, and they don't bother with explanations because doing so wouldn't be realistic for them. We get the sense of a barely glimpsed well of shared history lying beneath the story, and that makes it feel real. Achingly real, at times, since we're forever denied that knowledge.

Even though Tolkien was talking about setting and Chekhov about plot, I think of their lines of thought as representing opposite philosophical poles: Chekhov is in favor of tightness and neatness, and Tolkien, of expansiveness and loose ends. I'm for loose ends. 

I'm looking forward to reading your passage tomorrow, Sylvia. Gotta take my heinous head cold to bed, now.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

P.J. Post said:


> It is cool - barbaric even, which makes the setting more intense.
> One option to avoid the evolution quandary is to create a tribal custom (mating ritual) of filing their teeth, the more blood, the more desirable they are. (I assume their culture is inherently violent.) This solves the evolution issue and also creates the opportunity to explore the filing ritual, customs and history of this aspect of their culture (also it could be used as a metaphor or foreshadowing). I think this deliberate self-mutilation makes them scarier too.
> 
> Sometimes very short sentences provide punch and description can be woven into the action:
> ...


Ooo ... I really, really like your rewrite, P.J. You're right that the pacing would accelerate nicely as that section of the scene progressed. The short sentence, followed by an even shorter one, followed by a tiny one -- that really snowballs. And the idea about tooth-filing is awesome! Thank you!


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## Sylvia R. Frost (Jan 8, 2014)

Becca Mills said:


> Ooo, that's good! Thank you!
> 
> I suppose if I wanted to keep the gooeyness, I could just have the venom be gooey. I was going for a mouth full of this kind of stuff ...
> 
> ...


Great thoughts, Becca. I agree with you about the depth of world. I certainly don't think everything needs explaining. And especially in fantasy things can often just serve the purpose of milleu and mood. But I suppose, the "evolutionary biology" mood explaining the intricacies of their spit gave a mood to me of almost cavalier friendliness to the reader. When really this seems to be an novice training. She's done this before, but if she's done it enough she can tell you about the hue of their spit, than maybe she's beyond hack and slash in the arena. Or maybe not. And maybe that's interesting, but it also just didn't feel like it dovetailed into the story you wanted to tell it.

I firmly beleive that not every gun you put on stage should go off. But -- to mix metaphors -- a string can be left loose, as long as it's the right color for the tapestry as a whole. And I don't know if your pink spittle was quite the right color. But again, that's something that I think you'd need to see the full story to really get complete hands on. But I'm glad you found my comments useful, and I look forward to your feedback tomorrow!


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## Marti talbott (Apr 19, 2011)

I confess I am not formally trained. I don't even know what prose is exactly, so I submit the beginning of my work in process so you can tell me if I write prose, fancy or otherwise. 

*** Beloved Secrets, book 3

Fortunate were the times when the MacGreagors had no scandals laid at their doorstep. This, however, was not one of those times.

Three years earlier Glenartair Castle burned. The intense fire gutted the entire inside, crumbled some of the walls, and left little more than a hideous black ruin. The duke hired Charles MacGreagor to rebuild it and so far everything was right on schedule. The outside walls were up, the roof was on to keep out Scotland’s abundance of rain, and most of the concrete floor had already been poured.

The dogs were kept on the property to scare away scavengers, thieves, and mischief-makers. That they dug up objects was not unusual, but this time, both of the Scottish terriers were furiously digging in the same place – which just happened to be where the men were about to pour concrete.

Annoyed, Charles whistled for the dogs, and when that did not work, he yelled their names once, and then a second time. The white and the black Scottish terriers paid him no mind, so he went to see what had them so preoccupied. 

It was the worst that could happen to a builder, for the dogs had uncovered a human skull.
***


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## ElHawk (Aug 13, 2012)

I'm not formally trained, either, Marti.  

I really like your passage. It's clear, reads easily, and does a great job of depicting the scenery and other aspects of the setting (the family involved, etc.) I wouldn't necessarily call it a literary prose style (though it's really too short to make that kind of call) but it's nice and tight and vivid, and strictly speaking, that's all a good book requires out of its prose style. 

I like it!


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## Marti talbott (Apr 19, 2011)

ElHawk said:


> I'm not formally trained, either, Marti.
> 
> I really like your passage. It's clear, reads easily, and does a great job of depicting the scenery and other aspects of the setting (the family involved, etc.) I wouldn't necessarily call it a literary prose style (though it's really too short to make that kind of call) but it's nice and tight and vivid, and strictly speaking, that's all a good book requires out of its prose style.
> 
> I like it!


Thanks much. I'll keep trying to understand what a literary prose style is.


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## ElHawk (Aug 13, 2012)

Martitalbott said:


> Thanks much. I'll keep trying to understand what a literary prose style is.


Well, I could recommend lots of authors to read and observe. Literary style just puts some emphasis on the artsy aspects of writing along with the other aspects of writing. (On occasion it puts all emphasis on the artsiness and none on the rest of the stuff. I'm not a big fan of that type of literary fiction.) You will find similarities in artsiness/creative use of language/very bold and unusual imagery in all these folks' books. I'm sure other people in this thread can add to the list, too:

Hilary Mantel
Vladimir Nabokov
Michael Ondaatje
Annie Dillard
Haruki Murakami
Anthony Doerr
Joyce Carol Oates (some of her stuff; she has a lot of stuff that is less toward the artsy end of things, too)
Paul Harding
Cormac McCarthy

Here's a chunk from a literary/historical novel I'm working on at the moment. I've tried to put some emphasis on artistic flair to kick it over the line into literary territory. (People can feel free to critique it if they want! I'm not necessarily looking for a crit, but I find input useful all the same. But I'm mostly posting this here to help illustrate literaryness for Marti, since she's looking for clarification on that point.  )



> The night comes early, purpling the clouds and settling hard upon the land, sinking its chill down to break the earth like the coulter of a plow.
> 
> Emma's candle makes a spot of brightness on the window pane. She cannot see out. So she blows out the flame, and her room fills with the scent of singe, of the fatty, oily, warm smell of melted tallow. The freezing violet of the night reaches toward her. Her night-dress is wool, of her mother's finest spinning and Emma's own weaving, but it is not enough to keep the cold away. Still, she presses close to the pane and stares out into the darkness.
> 
> ...


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

That's really wonderful, ElHawk. You seem to be writing about the founding the LDS church? If so, that must be a fascinating topic.

Reading this, I'm curious about how you decide when to use a comma splice. You do it here: "Does the stone shine? Is it dark, like deep water? Is it flecked, is it pitted? Do flaws warp its surface like the glass of her window?" Is there a reason you chose to use that form in that spot in particular?


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## ElHawk (Aug 13, 2012)

Becca Mills said:


> That's really wonderful, ElHawk. You seem to be writing about the founding the LDS church? If so, that must be a fascinating topic.


Thanks! Yeah, it's about Emma Hale Smith--her life and experiences. There's some interesting history in that story.



> Reading this, I'm curious about how you decide when to use a comma splice. You do it here: "Does the stone shine? Is it dark, like deep water? Is it flecked, is it pitted? Do flaws warp its surface like the glass of her window?" Is there a reason you chose to use that form in that spot in particular?


Rhythm. I liked the sound of it. I make pretty much all my prose choices by sound.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

Sylvia R. Frost said:


> So on that note here's my go from my WIP dystopian fantasy new adult romance, Chronomancer. I mainly worry if the world-building, scene feels cohesive. To me it feels like I have so many different elements going on, I hope the reader doesn't feel overwhelmed.
> 
> Mom had always said dawn was the most beautiful time in the world. I didn't understand why until Dad, Bex and I moved to the 100th floor in the ramshackle apartment complex in the worst part of Sector 2. No private bathroom. But what a view. Below my tiny window, regiments of hundreds of gray sky-scrapers spread out in every direction. It was only by the grace of the Regent's magic that the buildings still existed-- as their metal and concrete had been mutated by magic into something that could stand the test of time. A test that had gone on for two-hundred years.
> 
> ...


Sylvia, I really like this passage. In keeping with the thread's theme, I commented mostly on the prose, but on larger issues:

The scene does feel cohesive to me.
Genrewise, I'm definitely getting dystopian fantasy.
Here's what it tells me, in terms of world-building: Sanna and Bex and their Dad live in either the Earth's future, where magic is now a thing, or in an Earthlike world. They're having rice for breakfast. Maybe that indicates some connection to a past Asian culture, or maybe not. Something has happened to prevent the creation of new things -- new buildings, new clothes, new things -- so magic is being used to preserve the things that were made before the something-that-happened happened. This magic is geographically sensitive, so that the further you get from the magic-worker, the weaker the spell. Distance from the magic-workers probably has socio-economic ramifications (getting this from the fact that "the worse part of Sector 2" also happens to be far from the witches). There's some sort of authoritarian regime in place, and Sanna's mother has run afoul of it. Sanna seems to have absorbed some of her mother's resistance -- she's not sure she believes what the witches say. The suggestion of the woman's silhouette in the dawn is a lovely touch. It could be a symbolic vision of Sanna's hope, a vision of her mother, or something much more concrete, like the Statue of Liberty.
Characterwise, you've set things up nicely: Sanna is about to undergo her Evaluation, which must be some kind of you're-screwed-if-you-fail test. One assumes there'll be a problem! She's in a bad family situation -- she's effectively motherless, her father is disabled by the spell gone wrong, and she's done something awful to her brother, ruining their relationship.
This is a nicely tension-filled situation!


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## Marti talbott (Apr 19, 2011)

Very nice. So basically, you incorporated more feelings, much more detailed description and some words I would have to look up. 

I should probably stick with what I am doing now. Prose looks very hard to learn and I can see how some love it and some do not. I have not read any of the authors you suggested, but then I stopped reading books after Silence of the Lambs. I figured it was just going to get worse from there, and at 70 I don't need to know. Now, I don't have time to read, but I very much appreciate your suggestions and your help.


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## ElHawk (Aug 13, 2012)

Martitalbott said:


> Very nice. So basically, you incorporated more feelings, much more detailed description and some words I would have to look up.
> 
> I should probably stick with what I am doing now. Prose looks very hard to learn and I can see how some love it and some do not. I have not read any of the authors you suggested, but then I stopped reading books after Silence of the Lambs. I figured it was just going to get worse from there, and at 70 I don't need to know. Now, I don't have time to read, but I very much appreciate your suggestions and your help.


Have you ever done audiobooks? I don't have a lot of time to read, either, but I love listening while I'm at the gym or going for my walks!


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## Sam Kates (Aug 28, 2012)

Martitalbott said:


> I confess I am not formally trained. I don't even know what prose is exactly, so I submit the beginning of my work in process so you can tell me if I write prose, fancy or otherwise.
> 
> *** Beloved Secrets, book 3
> 
> ...


Nothing wrong wth your prose. I have one tentative suggestion about the passage, more to do with pacing, but don't want to offer unsolicited, unwanted suggestions.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

Martitalbott said:


> Very nice. So basically, you incorporated more feelings, much more detailed description and some words I would have to look up.
> 
> I should probably stick with what I am doing now. Prose looks very hard to learn and I can see how some love it and some do not. I have not read any of the authors you suggested, but then I stopped reading books after Silence of the Lambs. I figured it was just going to get worse from there, and at 70 I don't need to know. Now, I don't have time to read, but I very much appreciate your suggestions and your help.


Prose is just any writing that's not poetry. Like, if it doesn't have hard returns at the end of most lines, it's prose. Different prose styles are appropriate for different types of books. I think yours is very effective, Marti -- clean, concise, and confident. I'm not seeing anything there that I would change. The more literary style of ElHawk's excerpt wouldn't be appropriate for the kind of thing I'm writing (urban fantasy). It might not be appropriate for what you're writing, either. It depends on what sort of series Beloved Secrets is. If it's genre fiction, the prose should be ... I don't know ... less artistic for the sake of art, might be one way to put it. The best genre-fiction prose tends to be less attention-getting, more about providing a clear window onto the story. That's the approach you seem to be taking, and it works well.


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## Sylvia R. Frost (Jan 8, 2014)

Hey, ElHawk, I hope you don't mind me giving my thoughts. 

The night comes early, purpling the clouds and settling hard upon the land, sinking its chill down to break the earth like the coulter of a plow. 

( I like this opening quite a bit. I think the real power of "literary prose" is that it can make the "point of the story" subtly, and in every sentence. That's really what I see mood as. A way to make palpable the place and the time, and feeling. Mood, and word choice can allow the reader to do some work and thus gain connection. Evocative language as it's best has more insinuations, layers, so that each sentence is rich with meaning, creating the resonance and readability that is the hallmarks of classics everywhere. For example from this sentence I get -- and again this may be my own assumptions here. We're some place rural, probably fall (night is coming early). The land here is important, it's own character. Even before we get to the word plow, I am seeing rolling hills, a pastoral setting. Farmers. But although this is a pretty image, it holds tension. . But more interesting is the turnabout in the next phrase. Night breaks the ground, but it's plowing something. You grow things in a field. Usually growing has a positive connotation, but here I'm not sure. This tension is a nice, subtle, descriptive hook. For me, as someone who doesn't read a lot of literary fiction, and is really not as great as abstraction. I wish we had the character sooner. But that's my own personal wish, and probably not shared by your readers. All in all a nice bit of prose. 

My only niggle is I wish you could nix "settling hard upon the land" to me settling is very different from breaking, and I think you lose some of your punch by including it.)



Emma's candle makes a spot of brightness on the window pane. She cannot see out. So she blows out the flame, and her room fills with the scent of singe, of the fatty, oily, warm smell of melted tallow. The freezing violet of the night reaches toward her. Her night-dress is wool, of her mother's finest spinning and Emma's own weaving, but it is not enough to keep the cold away. Still, she presses close to the pane and stares out into the darkness.

(Very nice imagery here. Although I do wonder what her purpose is. Emma is a little obscure to me at the moment. But I think the level of intimacy with the characters is a valid choice. As I said I always like to know why they do what they do. Or at least why they think what they do. Without it books can almost feel movie like to me. I'm curious about your choice not to go deep in Emma's personal head and worries at the moment. This is a choice I see sometimes in literary fiction, as if telling what people are thinking would be too obvious?)

Hale House is silent. The men have gone to their rooms, turned in early with Mother's hot stew in their bellies. They will rise up before dawn, take their pick-axes and shovels and hoes, and Joseph will take his peep-stone and look into its depths, scrying for the promised gold. 

(This is some nice reflection. I like this writing a lot. My tendancy as a writer is always to connect action to thought, because it can read more compelling that way to me. Although I suppose in real life we wander aimlessly around all the time. I like this voice here. Although it feels very different from the voice that opened the paragraph. This is a woman concerned for her family. She can't see out the window, and yet some more remote narrator is telling us about the night settling into the  land. I suppose would this make this a little bit omniscent, almost, or just not super deep 3rd. Either way I wonder if this is a choice you would consider literary, the slightly less deep POV.) 

She wonders about this stone. She always wonders, when she hears talk of scryers. She considers the tools of mysticism with her father's suspicion and her mother's ordered reason, but the tremor of fear that leaps in her heart is all her own. Does the stone shine? Is it dark, like deep water? Is it flecked, is it pitted? Do flaws warp its surface like the glass of her window? Does God's eye peer out from its depths, to watch Joseph watching Him? The image unsettles her. The smell of the blown-out candle is suddenly too close, choking, and her night-dress constricts at her throat. Despite the cold, Emma eases down the window's sash. There is a sharp, almost smoky bite to the air--snow. Not tonight; perhaps not even tomorrow. But soon. She breathes it deeply.

(I like the rhythm of this paragraph quite a bit. Especially the smell of the blown out candle. Really nice and more specific than smoke. We can taste a little bit of the wax on there too.) 

A faint, tinny, broken sound rises over the dark forest and fades away. She pauses. She waits. The sound comes again, a distant, wailing cry. There is no pain in it, but even from miles away, across the breadth of Harmony's neat-stitched quilt of muddy brown acres, she can hear its urgency. Even at this distance she can feel the heat of the cry--the same fire that crackles in Uncle William's eyes and makes the spittle fly from his lips. Somewhere on the fringes of the township, a tent is glowing with light. Somewhere in Harmony, a traveling circuit preacher is shouting and stamping his feet, and the flames of fervor are kindling.

Once, before she'd chased all her suitors away, before she'd grown sensible and accepted a commission to teach at the schoolhouse down the lane, Emma had possessed a wild streak. On a summer night she pinched herself to stay awake until at last the house was quiet. Then she stole out to the long barn and bridled her favorite mare. She could ride well with or without a saddle, and saddling the horse would only cost more time. In the falling dusk, still warm and perfumed by the hay field's first cutting, she kissed into the horse's ear, and the mare had loped down the lane, with Emma swaying on its back as gently as a babe in a cradle. 

She found the revival tent by ear, following the cries of wild delight, the hallelujahs and the yes-Lords. She tied the mare to a snag, then flowed through the gray twilight field like warm honey. The fragrant grass-heads had whisked against her night-dress, prickling the backs of her hands. No one noticed the tall, dark-haired, big-eyed girl who watched from the tent's open door. No one would have remarked on her shocking attire, the simple night-dress as bright against the darkness as the robes of a vestal virgin. 

The interior of the tent was rank with the smell of bodies, the sourness of sweat and the warmer, lower reek of arousal. It was a meeting of the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing--the Shakers. Emma watched as they worked themselves into their pale-faced frenzy.  ((I like the rhythm of this "pale-face-frenzy" the alliteration of the fricative consonants juxtaposed with the pop of the p.)

The men on one side and the women on the other, their palms raised up to the tent-roof, up to God, they bent and stamped, the women's shoulders heaving and shivering beneath their wide white collars. The lines marched one toward the other, and parted again, and the poles of the tent rattled with the imperfect, not-quite-unison of their feet. The feel of it beat through the packed earth and up into Emma's bones.

Every voice was raised to its own pitch, without regard for harmony, for to make a pleasing sound is to be vain. The noise of it, the forceful unloveliness, clutched at her senses and she felt all at once, with a flush like a fever, the heightened awareness of God. She felt Him bend in curiosity, his lazy interest piqued by the din, felt His eye fall upon the tent--upon her--as a little boy's eye falls on an ant scrambling over a flat stone. She was exposed, helpless, battered by the sound.

The Shakers sped their dance, their limbs jerking in the lamplight, and the words of their song crashed around her.

Shake, shake out of me all that is carnal!

Faster, and faster still, until any suggestion of rhythm was destroyed, and the earth thundered with the disorder of their feet.

I'll take nimble steps, I'll be a David,
I'll show Michael twice how he behaved!

By the time she'd crept back to the snag, even her mare was frightened. She rode the long way home, and kept her horse to a walk, afraid the beat of its hooves might direct God's attention to her--in a night-dress only, and fled from her home without her mother knowing, and with nothing carnal, she knew, yet shaken out of her. 

The cry rises again on the November night. It is as sharp now as the scent of promised snow. Far beyond, past Harmony, past the great spreading forest of hemlocks and white pines, the night is livelier still. The northeast is afire, burning for God in all His variant forms, the Shakers and the Campbellites, the Methodists and Millers, the Second Advents and the Seventh-Days, the Disciples, the Friends, the Churches of Christ. They sprout like seeds on a damp rag. Their tendrils are pale and thin, but grasping.

Some preachers have called this place "burned-over," as if a roaring blaze has swept the countryside, the kiln of fervor baking away everything live and fertile until the inhabitants of rural New York and Pennsylvania are as tired and finished, as used-up as the rocky, unproductive soil of Vermont. ( Sometimes I wonder if there are things you could cut without losing the rhythm too much. For me here, this sentence dragged on. I think it's the repetition of the two clauses, "roaring blaze of country side + the kiln of fervor" and then "as tired and finished +as used up." I like the momentum moving toward as used up as the rocky soil of Vermont. I feel like unproductive is dragging it a bit here as well.)  

But she has heard that in Vermont the farmers dig boulders from their fields, and pile the stones in heaps, and generation after generation the heaps lengthen, become walls, long and meandering, lying along the dark flanks of hills like great pale snakes basking in the sun. And wherever the boulders are rolled away, the black earth yields a fine and dogged crop. (Very nice. I like this a lot.) 

This place is not burned over. The seeds continue to sprout. The embers are banked, and in their lonely alcoves and forest dells they glow very hot indeed.

The boy is from Vermont--Joseph. Joseph with his peep-stone. Joseph with the eye of God in the palm of his hand. ( Iike this quite a lot as well.)  He told her over supper how his family moved away from Vermont, in search of finer things. She hopes the boy has found what he sought. 

She pushes up the sash of her window. At once her room feels warmer, and the scent of the candle's scorched wick is gone. She feels her way to her bed, slides beneath the quilt. She thinks of Joseph. She imagines him rolling a boulder up a hill, tucking it among the other stones. He stands back to consider his wall, the interminable line of it, all the stones of the earth dug up and laid bare, etching the soil with a secret sign, for God can read the runes of His own creation. There is dirt on Joseph's hands. He brushes them together, and the Vermont sky smells like a snuffed candle. ( I really reallly really like the return here to the snuffed candle.) 

All in all really lovely LIbby!


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## Marti talbott (Apr 19, 2011)

ElHawk said:


> Have you ever done audiobooks? I don't have a lot of time to read, either, but I love listening while I'm at the gym or going for my walks!


Good suggestion, I should do that too.


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## JLCarver (Sep 13, 2015)

Deleted.


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## Sylvia R. Frost (Jan 8, 2014)

The scene does feel cohesive to me.
Genrewise, I'm definitely getting dystopian fantasy.

-- Good. Right on the money. Although technically it's romance dystopian fantasy. But I think I ended up writing less romance than normal. 

Here's what it tells me, in terms of world-building: Sanna and Bex and their Dad live in either the Earth's future, where magic is now a thing, or in an Earthlike world. They're having rice for breakfast. Maybe that indicates some connection to a past Asian culture, or maybe not. Something has happened to prevent the creation of new things -- new buildings, new clothes, new things -- so magic is being used to preserve the things that were made before the something-that-happened happened. This magic is geographically sensitive, so that the further you get from the magic-worker, the weaker the spell. Distance from the magic-workers probably has socio-economic ramifications (getting this from the fact that "the worse part of Sector 2" also happens to be far from the witches). There's some sort of authoritarian regime in place, and Sanna's mother has run afoul of it. Sanna seems to have absorbed some of her mother's resistance -- she's not sure she believes what the witches say. The suggestion of the woman's silhouette in the dawn is a lovely touch. It could be a symbolic vision of Sanna's hope, a vision of her mother, or something much more concrete, like the Statue of Liberty.

--Yes all this is what I was going for. Excellent. 

Characterwise, you've set things up nicely: Sanna is about to undergo her Evaluation, which must be some kind of you're-screwed-if-you-fail test. One assumes there'll be a problem! She's in a bad family situation -- she's effectively motherless, her father is disabled by the spell gone wrong, and she's done something awful to her brother, ruining their relationship.

-- Lovely. 

Thanks for a lot of your littler suggestions, all very useful! If you ever would like to do a beta-swap let me know! I'm happy to help.


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## Marti talbott (Apr 19, 2011)

Sam Kates said:


> Nothing wrong wth your prose. I have one tentative suggestion about the passage, more to do with pacing, but don't want to offer unsolicited, unwanted suggestions.


Suggest away. I am only 15,000 words into this book and I don't even know where it's going yet. Lots of editing to do still.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

JLCarver said:


> I don't think the prose has to be less artistic for genre fiction. There are authors out there who take a more literary approach to their genre fiction. I love reading Benjamin Percy. His writing has a lot of literary style, but he writes novels about werewolves, and his newest novel is a post-apocalyptic story. Justin Cronin is also more literary, and he has a series about vampires-- definitely a good read. Then Colson Whitehead has a zombie apocalypse novel with a literary style. You don't have to dumb down your writing to write genre fiction. Not saying that you do, and every writer needs to find their own voice and style. And, of course, if literary prose isn't what a writer enjoys reading or writing, no one should pressure that writer to write it. A looser style works well for plenty of authors, and plenty of authors that I love reading. But, if a writer likes writing genre fiction, but their prose leans more toward literary, there is nothing preventing that author from pursuing genre fiction.


Sure, I agree. And I think the line between genre fiction and literary fiction is extremely fuzzy, especially now that post-modernism has made incorporating "popular culture" into "high art" (problematic categories) all the rage. But I don't think prose that strives not to call attention to itself is "dumbed down." I think it's quite difficult to do well, actually.


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## RachelAMarks (Oct 27, 2015)

That is wonderfully done, ElHawk!!! Very vivid and tactile! And a super interesting and unfamiliar subject matter, which makes it all the more intriguing.

I think this is a very person-to-person subject for a lot of writers and I find myself falling on both sides of things. I love beautifully written books but I also love stories to get lost in. In the end it comes down to: is the writing distracting from the character/story?

This is the opening to a story I wrote that I really wanted to be felt as much as read. It was a really important story for me so I spent a lot of time on it (10 years).



> The pungent stench of sweat and whiskey fills the air. The smells of Pa, of what might be coming. Pa and his anger. Pa and his fists. Pa and his dangerous grip.
> 
> He killed the rest of our chickens last night in a rage when Mamma wouldn't stop her coughing. Tore them to pieces. All blood and floating feathers. I was glad it wasn't me, but now we have nothing except grain to eat all winter. And what's left of that fills the sack that's thrown over Pa's broad shoulders--the sack that says he won't be back for several months. By then, Me and Becca and Mamma could be dead.
> 
> He walks past me, out the door, not even acknowledging my existence with a look or a goodbye. I might as well be a ghost or a puff of smoke in his way. I follow him for a few steps, my feet silent in the newly fallen snow. His back disappears into a flurry of white as he heads down the hill. I should yell for him not to go, not to abandon us, but it sickens me that I need him for anything. I want him gone. I always have.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

Sylvia R. Frost said:


> Thanks for a lot of your littler suggestions, all very useful! If you ever would like to do a beta-swap let me know! I'm happy to help.


I'd definitely be interested in that, Sylvia!


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## Sylvia R. Frost (Jan 8, 2014)

By the by, Martialbot, I really liked your prose. I thought it was clean and evocative. Both hard things to do seperately and harder still to do together. My only quibble was the last line. It felt a little too on the nose for me, if that makes any sense, a little too obvious. But that's my own personal preference.

Rachel, I like that opening quite a lot. I do feel as if the pace is too fast. If you're going to actually show us Pa, leaving, which you are, this seems like a moment that deserves more page space than you gave it. He's gone in a paragraph, when it feels like it should have a whole scene. But like most things, this is all hard to judge without the whole story. And maybe that's the effect you were going for, the feeling of something important happening fast and suddenly. If so, good job. Really nice prose though, which is what we are here to talk about anyway.



> But I don't think prose that strives not to call attention to itself is "dumbed down." I think it's quite difficult to do well, actually.


I agree with this quite a lot Becca.


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## RachelAMarks (Oct 27, 2015)

Thanks, Sylvia!!  Yeah, it's a novella so the movement is instant.



> But I don't think prose that strives not to call attention to itself is "dumbed down." I think it's quite difficult to do well, actually.


I have to third this! So true. Being invisible is super important for any writer to learn.


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## Sam Kates (Aug 28, 2012)

Martitalbott said:


> Suggest away. I am only 15,000 words into this book and I don't even know where it's going yet. Lots of editing to do still.


Thanks - I wasn't sure if you were inviting specific suggestions.

This paragraph:



> Three years earlier Glenartair Castle burned. The intense fire gutted the entire inside, crumbled some of the walls, and left little more than a hideous black ruin. The duke hired Charles MacGreagor to rebuild it and so far everything was right on schedule. The outside walls were up, the roof was on to keep out Scotland's abundance of rain, and most of the concrete floor had already been poured.


I'd consider moving it. It's essentially backstory. Unless there's an overhwelmingly compelling reason to have it here so close to the opening sentences of the book, I think you should be able to move it without losing anything. In fact, the opening is likely to be even more enticing without it. (Purely in my opinion, of course.)


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## Marti talbott (Apr 19, 2011)

Becca Mills said:


> Prose is just any writing that's not poetry. Like, if it doesn't have hard returns at the end of most lines, it's prose. Different prose styles are appropriate for different types of books. I think yours is very effective, Marti -- clean, concise, and confident. I'm not seeing anything there that I would change. The more literary style of ElHawk's excerpt wouldn't be appropriate for the kind of thing I'm writing (urban fantasy). It might not be appropriate for what you're writing, either. It depends on what sort of series Beloved Secrets is. If it's genre fiction, the prose should be ... I don't know ... less artistic for the sake of art, might be one way to put it. The best genre-fiction prose tends to be less attention-getting, more about providing a clear window onto the story. That's the approach you seem to be taking, and it works well.


Becca, thanks for your very kind words. I write historical fiction that follows one Scottish family from the Viking era to the early 1900s. I didn't start out with consecutive books in mind and I sure wish I had, because readers now want me to fill in the gap between the 1200s and the 1900s. That's what the "Beloved" lost MacGreagor books are about. It's crazy, but then so am I.


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## Marti talbott (Apr 19, 2011)

Sam Kates said:


> Thanks - I wasn't sure if you were inviting specific suggestions.
> 
> This paragraph:
> 
> I'd consider moving it. It's essentially backstory. Unless there's an overhwelmingly compelling reason to have it here so close to the opening sentences of the book, I think you should be able to move it without losing anything. In fact, the opening is likely to be even more enticing without it. (Purely in my opinion, of course.)


Great suggestion, but wouldn't moving it make the following paragraphs confusing?


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## JLCarver (Sep 13, 2015)

Deleted.


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

Martitalbott said:


> Becca, thanks for your very kind words. I write historical fiction that follows one Scottish family from the Viking era to the early 1900s. I didn't start out with consecutive books in mind and I sure wish I had, because readers now want me to fill in the gap between the 1200s and the 1900s. That's what the "Beloved" lost MacGreagor books are about. It's crazy, but then so am I.


One thing that stuck out to me was "pouring concrete". The first thing I thought was that the setting struck me as historic, but pouring concrete might be an anachronism. Floors used to either be wood on the upper stories or stone set in a mortar on the ground floor.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

JLCarver said:


> Yeah, "dumbed down" was a poor choice of terms on my part. But I guess I don't see literary prose as necessarily calling attention to itself either. When I read Jonathan Franzen, Margaret Atwood, or Joyce Carol Oates, the prose becomes just as transparent to me as it does in a genre novel. I think that most writers try for transparency in their prose. We want our words to fall away for the sake of the story. Prose that deliberately calls attention to itself is purple prose, and not really a prose style that many like to read, whether literary or genre.


Oh, yeah, I definitely agree that "transparent" prose happens a lot in literary fiction, too. I just think genre fiction more often aims for it, and literary fiction more often stretches its prose wings a bit more. Hopefully the prose isn't jumping up and down screeching "look at me, look at me!!!" That would feel affected and would annoy me. But in some literary fiction, if you're open to examining sentence-level detail, to consciously taking yourself out of story mode and looking at form, you'll find a lot going on, more than in most (but not all) genre fiction. It's more of a continuum thing than two discrete categories.


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## Sam Kates (Aug 28, 2012)

Martitalbott said:


> Great suggestion, but wouldn't moving it make the following paragraphs confusing?


Sure, you might need to slightly adjust some of the surrounding sentences, but I don't think it essential that the reader understands fully what's going on during the opening scene. It's more important, in my view, that he feel intrigued enough to want to carry on reading.

Just something for you to consider when you come to edit.


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## juliannwhicker (Aug 1, 2015)

This thread has been very interesting. I like to write challenging scenes, which means creating evocative imagery that's been compared to (oh dear) Joyce. I have a series that isn't easy to read. Nope. Fantasy readers don't have a problem with it because I think they're used to more challenging reading, but others completely stall after the first thirty pages. It's not a successful way to write, but I think there is an audience for it. My other book is easier to read. I wrote it quickly without thinking too much about it or making it particularly beautiful or interesting as a writer. It's much more popular as well. 

I'm the writer that I am, so I'll continue to write both ways for the story I have to tell, but it definitely changes accessibility.


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## Marti talbott (Apr 19, 2011)

brkingsolver said:


> One thing that stuck out to me was "pouring concrete". The first thing I thought was that the setting struck me as historic, but pouring concrete might be an anachronism. Floors used to either be wood on the upper stories or stone set in a mortar on the ground floor.


Well, this part of the story is set in 1912 when they were using concrete, according to research. Maybe I'm wrong. I hope not, but it's an easy fix if I am.


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## Marti talbott (Apr 19, 2011)

Sylvia R. Frost said:


> By the by, Martialbot, I really liked your prose. I thought it was clean and evocative. Both hard things to do seperately and harder still to do together. My only quibble was the last line. It felt a little too on the nose for me, if that makes any sense, a little too obvious. But that's my own personal preference.


Thanks much, Sylvia. I'll see what I can do with that last line.


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## ElHawk (Aug 13, 2012)

RachelAMarks said:


> That is wonderfully done, ElHawk!!! Very vivid and tactile! And a super interesting and unfamiliar subject matter, which makes it all the more intriguing.


Thankee kindly, ma'am. I have to amble on home now*, but I'll check out your excerpt later today.

*I have no idea why I am talking like an old-timey cowboy right now.


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## Marti talbott (Apr 19, 2011)

Sam Kates said:


> Sure, you might need to slightly adjust some of the surrounding sentences, but I don't think it essential that the reader understands fully what's going on during the opening scene. It's more important, in my view, that he feel intrigued enough to want to carry on reading.
> 
> Just something for you to consider when you come to edit.


Thanks again for the food for thought.


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

OK, that's fine then. I had it in my head that it was set 100-200 years earlier.


Martitalbott said:


> Well, this part of the story is set in 1912 when they were using concrete, according to research. Maybe I'm wrong. I hope not, but it's an easy fix if I am.


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## SunshineOnMe (Jan 11, 2014)

I'm posting to say.... ahhhhhhhhh. I love this thread, like a cup of hot cocoa on a winter day, while watching the kids outside having a snowball fight.  LOVELY to read all these amazing words from talented authors. 

And now, after this post, I will be able to find it in the future. Thanks ElHawk!

PS- Sylvia- I adore your writing!


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## MarkdownFanatic (Jan 14, 2014)

Flowery prose, to me, represents "rich" sensing -- i.e., what is sensed acutely and with multiple senses.
.
So what we want to describe, the POV character needs a reason to notice. If the Gestalt psychs are right, we notice in detail whatever impacts what we want to avoid or achieve at any given moment (the hungry person walking down a street will notice any baker, grocer and restaurant with all senses going full blast - the sights, smells, etc. of *food*). Such noticing can be "justifiably" expressed in flowery language that speaks of rich sensing. Flowery, detailed descriptions of stuff that doesn't really seem relevant to the POV character's current concerns will, by the same theory, feel "off" somehow, as if someone else is stepping in and describing scenery or other things that the POV character doesn't really notice.
.
In the stuff below, I've taken the liberty of rearranging brkingsolver's fine prose based on the above. My assumptions are that everyone *around* Kyra are over-excited about the impending marriage. Kyra herself sees this as a threat, since it drives their pushing her into it. So she notices that, with extreme frustration (everyone's against me, even the morning). Since she does not want to be in the position she is, she wants to escape. She can't escape physically, so she repeatedly tries to regress mentally into the little-girl she'd like to still be - meaning she notices everything that puts her back in that little-girl's spirit -- at least until the ever-closer threat of the marriage drives her into associating from her little-girl things into what's going to happen today.
.
Lots of explanation and I probably only managed to illustrate it clumsily in my mangling of brkingsolver's great stuff -- but I hope the *idea* comes across.
.
----
.
"They're *here*!" Dorenda, lady-in-waiting to lady Kyra, burst into her ladyship's parlor like a storm bursting through a door, dress billowing, hands fluttering, chest heaving, plump face glowing pink. "They're here, milady! An entire *cortege*. A -- "
.
"*Calm*, Dorenda!" The lady Kyra forced herself look up *slowly* from her embroidery, and to pause and beat back the snarl that threatened to erupt into her voice. "Calm. Please. You are not a swooning schoolgirl, are you?" Kyra even managed to drive a smile onto her face.
.
Dorenda checked herself, flushing, straightening her gown with a flurry of pats and swats. "No, no, of course, pet."  She clapped her hands together, as if applauding a superb performance. "You are lady Kyra Treketh. Soon lady Jamie dan Lirian macLirian." An impish giggle bubbled out of her. "But you *were* a schoolgirl less than three months ago." The giggle died in a sigh. "Eighteen! My pet's *eighteen*. I can't *believe* it, little one. How *fast* time passes. It seems only -- "
.
"Yes. It does." Kyra suddenly missed the snarl -- it would have hidden the wistfulness creeping into her voice. She bit her lip, and folded her embroidery neatly and precisely before depositing it on the small teak table beside her. "Let's have a look at them, then, shall we?"
.
Rising from her chair, she managed a regal pace as they went to the doors leading to the balcony outside the parlor -- despite wanting to run in the opposite direction. Kyra bit back a most un-ladylike oath -- did Dorenda *have* to trot along like an overeager puppy? Like everyone *else* this morning.
.
Kyra had to linger at the door. Of course this morning had to be heartlessly beautiful. The white city laid out below below them, nestling snugly in the sea of lush green hills, beneath a sky as gentle as satin under the subdued light of Centaurus B. Kyra's only consolation was that it wouldn't last -- Centaurus A was already rising in the East. Soon, its loud glare would drown out its quieter brother's light, and everything would be sharp and harsh.
.
Still, Kyra could not help savoring the scented dew rising from the grass and flowers below. It brought back still-fresh memories. Rising on a morning like this, giggling at the toy-city view from up here, running down to lose herself in the hills, sweeping bare feet through the grass, and eventually throwing herself full-length onto it, embracing the cool, light wetness before the second sun turned the day hot and --
.
"Look at all those fancy armored cars." Dorenda's hands were fluttering again, waving her mistress forward like a teacher would, to make sure the child did not miss a splendid experience. "How can you be so ... *calm*, my lady?"
.
Stubbornly silent, Kyra left her memories behind and joined Dorenda at the railing, looking down at her future. One by one, the sleek civilian and blockier military vehicles down there came to a stop in front of the palace. Out of the foremost ground vehicle, white and golden rather than black or drab like the rest, stepped two people.
.
"Is that him?" Dorenda squealed. "My, he's a *dream*. Even better looking than his pictures."
.
"Nonsense," Kyra replied. "He looks exactly like his pictures."
.
Indeed, from up here, Jamie dan Lirian macLirian looked just like the formal photograph she'd been shown of her husband-to-be. Red-haired, tall, wearing the traditional black, yellow, and red uniform of Clan Lirian.
.
"Who is the lady with him?" Dorenda asked.
.
"Moreen din Lirian macLirian." Kyra turned away, slipped back into her main parlor, and snapped a word under her breath to dim the magitek-controlled lights. Then she marched calmly back to her sewing basket and picked up the embroidery she'd laid aside. She sat down, but couldn't find it in herself to pick up her needle.
.
Dorenda followed her, more puppy-like than ever, but now the puppy sensed something not quite right with its mistress. Wetting her lips twice, Dorenda spoke in a faltering voice. "The reception ... the reception is at eighteen-thirty, my lady."
.
"Good. Thank you." Kyra stared at the embroidery. Sunlight. Flowers. Grass. Hard thread on dry cloth. "Let me know when it's time for my bath. It's a lovely day."
.
"Do you want lunch ... I mean, do you want lunch outside today?"
.
"Fine. East balcony."
.
Dorenda left. Or fled.
.
Kyra's gaze drifted to her dolls, mustered on a long ledge high on the far wall. All dressed in their finest. They'd always been. She had spent entire days dressing them so gorgeously, then undressing them, and dressing them again, even *more* gorgeously.
.
Her family would dress *her* up gorgeously today. Jamie macLirian would undress her tonight. But he would not dress her again. He would put her on top of his bed - *their* bed -  and put himself on top of her, so that she could soon swell into a matron pumping out babies. Human dolls to be living proof of the alliance between the Imperium and the Federation.
.
---
.
Oh, and BTW - the romans used concrete, and it was already old hat by then. I just Wiki-ed it


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## Sylvia R. Frost (Jan 8, 2014)

MarkdownFanatic said:


> Flowery prose, to me, represents "rich" sensing -- i.e., what is sensed acutely and with multiple senses.
> .
> So what we want to describe, the POV character needs a reason to notice. If the Gestalt psychs are right, we notice in detail whatever impacts what we want to avoid or achieve at any given moment (the hungry person walking down a street will notice any baker, grocer and restaurant with all senses going full blast - the sights, smells, etc. of *food*). Such noticing can be "justifiably" expressed in flowery language that speaks of rich sensing. Flowery, detailed descriptions of stuff that doesn't really seem relevant to the POV character's current concerns will, by the same theory, feel "off" somehow, as if someone else is stepping in and describing scenery or other things that the POV character doesn't really notice.


I think one thing to keep in mind is there's a difference between flowery and literary. Not that you said they were the same. That said I really do like your idea of Gestalt, (although as a designer I have a bit of a different understanding of his work) being we notice what need. The world should be fundamentally a mirror for the character. But I think sometimes in literary fiction the author is/can be the character. Or at least the narrator is. IMHO literary can have that distance.

But I could be wrong.


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

"Dorenda checked herself, flushing, straightening her gown with a flurry of pats and swats. "No, no, of course, pet."  She clapped her hands together, as if applauding a superb performance. "You are lady Kyra Treketh. Soon lady Jamie dan Lirian macLirian." An impish giggle bubbled out of her. "But you *were* a schoolgirl less than three months ago." The giggle died in a sigh. "Eighteen! My pet's *eighteen*. I can't *believe* it, little one. How *fast* time passes. It seems only -- "

Your reworking brought a smile to my face. As the book progresses, the image of Dorenda above is what many people see. I'm glad I made you think of her this way with so few words. 

In actuality, Dorenda is only 22 yo and a trained bodyguard/assassin. She is noble, the daughter of a Count, and she and Kyra have been friends since she was 12 and Kyra was 8. While to the outside world Dorenda comes across exactly as you portray her, Kyra knows differently. But with your permission, I may lift some of what you wrote. I may be able to use it, if not in that scene, then possibly in another. 

Later in the book:

“What about Lady Dorenda?”

Mirram stopped what she was doing with Moreen’s hem and straightened. “You’ve spoken to Carsters about her?” Moreen nodded. Mirram bent back to her task. “No one notices Lady Dorenda,” Mirram said. “She’s just a mousey little lady-in-waiting, shadowing Kyra around. A little too plump, a little too plain, a little too casual and lacking grace. Not quite what you would expect of a noble lady.”

Moreen said, “That’s the impression she seems to want people to have.”

“Exactly. Let me tell you, there isn’t an ounce of fat on that girl. Everything except her chest is muscle. She’s hard as a stone. One of my girls mentioned to me once about how clumsy Dorenda was. That’s an act that should win a vid award. If you truly watch her, she’s smooth, silent, and fast. She’s deadly, that one. She brought in a dress to be mended, and I swear by the Goddess that she was carrying at least a half-dozen weapons, not to mention two mini-grenades, and a dozen more little glass vials hidden in the inside pockets she has me sew into her dresses. I don’t know what was in those, and I didn’t want to ask.”

“She was wearing the dress that needed mending?”

“Yes. This was just a month or so ago. Kyra told me that they were out shopping and Dorenda slipped and fell.” Mirram pursed her mouth. “That wasn’t a tear in the dress, it was cut with a knife. Funny thing is, Kyra paid me in cash, didn’t want it added to her bill. Told me that she wanted to spare Dorenda the embarrassment of people thinking she was clumsy. Later that day, three men were found dead in a park about a kilometer from here. They’d all been stabbed to death.”

“You’re sure it was a knife cut?”

Mirram snorted. “One other thing that’s different about the dresses I make Dorenda. The upper body has a lining made with fabric embedded with the material used in light battle armor. She brings me the fabric. That’s the only reason that girl wasn’t badly hurt.”

“That’s certainly unusual.”

“So is the way her clothes are paid for. Kyra gets a clothing allowance from the Imperatrix, as do all the Imperator’s daughters. For Dorenda, I send the bills to the Imperator’s private secretary.”

“Three men?” Moreen asked.

“Yes, and the first thing both of those girls asked for when they showed up here was a place to wash their hands.”


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## MarkdownFanatic (Jan 14, 2014)

Brkingsolver - you have my totally unneeded blessing to lift anything you can use - it's your stuff you've allowed us all to play with!

And here I thought Dorenda was a sprightly little matron of my own (middle) age who handed everyone a cup of tea when the world falls apart - and then she's really a hot young chick who kicks ass! Ain't no *romance* left in this world any more


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

MarkdownFanatic said:


> Brkingsolver - you have my totally unneeded blessing to lift anything you can use - it's your stuff you've allowed us all to play with!
> 
> And here I thought Dorenda was a sprightly little matron of my own (middle) age who handed everyone a cup of tea when the world falls apart - and then she's really a hot young chick who kicks ass! Ain't no *romance* left in this world any more


Oh, Dorenda would love to find romance. Maybe in the next book if this one has any success. But just for you, the first description of Dorenda:

The ambassador fell in by Moreen's side as she reached Kyra and her lady-in-waiting, Dorenda de Glaspan. Lady Dorenda was stouter and more voluptuous than Kyra, and no one would ever think her a great beauty. She had that curious coloring common in the Imperium but almost unknown in the Federation, blonde hair, blue eyes, and skin the color of coffee.

Moreen knew she was the youngest daughter of an obscure Count and four years older than Kyra. Her stance and the way the woman's eyes darted about the room showed that she understood her first duty. Those full skirts could hide an anti-tank gun, and the scanners should have identified any weapons. But if Dorenda wasn't armed, Moreen would eat her bra.


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## MarkdownFanatic (Jan 14, 2014)

brkingsolver said:


> Lady Dorenda was stouter and more voluptuous than Kyra, and no one would ever think her a great beauty.


Then I wasn't *totally* wrong in my imagination of Dorenda -- give her thirty years more and a pacifist conversion in future installments of this promising saga, and she'll be the lady of my dreams


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

MarkdownFanatic said:


> Then I wasn't *totally* wrong in my imagination of Dorenda -- give her thirty years more and a pacifist conversion in future installments of this promising saga, and she'll be the lady of my dreams


For a sufficient bribe, I might be able to wrangle an introduction for you ...


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## Nope (Jun 25, 2012)

.


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## 555aaa (Jan 28, 2014)

OK, I am going to beg everyone's indulgence and post some writing from the 1920s, because I was thinking of an example where the writer lets the sentences flow on luxuriously like the cascading golden locks of the sun god. It's Plato's unfinished _Critias_, which tells the story of Atlantis. This is from the W.R.M. Lamb 1925 translation:

"For many generations, so long as the inherited nature of the God remained strong in them, they were submissive to the laws and kindly disposed to their divine kindred. For the intents of their hearts were true and in all ways noble, and they showed gentleness joined with wisdom in dealing with the changes and chances of life and in their dealings one with another. Consequently they thought scorn of everything save virtue and lightly esteemed their rich possessions, bearing with ease the burden, as it were, of the vast volume of their gold and other goods; and thus their wealth did not make them drunk with pride so that they lost control of themselves and went to ruin; rather, in their soberness of mind they clearly saw that all these good things are increased by general amity combined with virtue, whereas the eager pursuit and worship of these goods not only causes the goods themselves to diminish but makes virtue also to perish with them. As a result, then, of such reasoning and of the continuance of their divine nature all their wealth had grown to such a greatness as we previously described. But when the portion of divinity within them was now becoming faint and weak through being ofttimes blended with a large measure of mortality, whereas the human temper was becoming dominant, then at length they lost their comeliness, through being unable to bear the burden of their possessions, and became ugly to look upon, in the eyes of him who has the gift of sight; for they had lost the fairest of their goods from the most precious of their parts; but in the eyes of those who have no gift of perceiving what is the truly happy life, it was then above all that they appeared to be superlatively fair and blessed, filled as they were with lawless ambition and power. And Zeus, the God of gods, who reigns by Law, inasmuch as he has the gift of perceiving such things, marked how this righteous race was in evil plight, and desired to inflict punishment upon them, to the end that when chastised they might strike a truer note.

Wherefore he assembled together all the gods into that abode which they honor most, standing as it does at the center of all the Universe, and beholding all things that partake of generation and when he had assembled them, he spake thus: ..."

The manuscript is lost from that point on.


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## ElHawk (Aug 13, 2012)

*Sylvia* -- I missed your comments the first time around, but saw them this time. Thank you for taking the time to give your feedback! I appreciate it.



RachelAMarks said:


> The pungent stench of sweat and whiskey fills the air. The smells of Pa, of what might be coming. Pa and his anger. Pa and his fists. Pa and his dangerous grip.
> 
> He killed the rest of our chickens last night in a rage when Mamma wouldn't stop her coughing. Tore them to pieces. All blood and floating feathers. I was glad it wasn't me, but now we have nothing except grain to eat all winter. And what's left of that fills the sack that's thrown over Pa's broad shoulders--the sack that says he won't be back for several months. By then, Me and Becca and Mamma could be dead.
> 
> He walks past me, out the door, not even acknowledging my existence with a look or a goodbye. I might as well be a ghost or a puff of smoke in his way. I follow him for a few steps, my feet silent in the newly fallen snow. His back disappears into a flurry of white as he heads down the hill. I should yell for him not to go, not to abandon us, but it sickens me that I need him for anything. I want him gone. I always have.


For the most part, I really like this. I just have a few minor suggestions. "Pungent" and "stench" might be overkill when used together. They're both pretty strong words, so you could get away with just the pungent smell (or odor) or just the stench.

Also, I'd choose only one incident of repetition for this passage. You have the repetition of "Pa and his..." in the first paragraph, and then the repetition of "the sack..." later. I feel it will strengthen the impact of both those moments if you restructure one of those "repetition areas" so it doesn't repeat itself. So "Pa and his anger, his fists, his dangerous grip" and keep repetition of "the sack," or keep the repetition of "Pa and..." with "What's left is in the sack thrown over Pa's broad shoulder. He won't be back for several months."


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## Gone 9/21/18 (Dec 11, 2008)

RachelAMarks said:


> This is the opening to a story I wrote that I really wanted to be felt as much as read. It was a really important story for me so I spent a lot of time on it (10 years).


Rachel, your opening had exactly the effect on me you wanted - I had a lump in my throat when I finished. Take that with whatever grains of salt you think appropriate considering I am an emotional reader. In paper days, I used to say you could tell which books I thought best because they had wavy pages from being wet with tears. Also, while I've never suffered physical abuse I come from a background that understands family misery. I regularly see reviews unhappy about my tendency to emphasize less than lovely family relationships in my own work. And finally, I like repetition for emphasis. I didn't even notice you'd used it twice until Libby pointed it out.


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

JLCarver said:


> You don't have to dumb down your writing to write genre fiction. Not saying that you do, and every writer needs to find their own voice and style. And, of course, if literary prose isn't what a writer enjoys reading or writing, no one should pressure that writer to write it. A looser style works well for plenty of authors, and plenty of authors that I love reading. But, if a writer likes writing genre fiction, but their prose leans more toward literary, there is nothing preventing that author from pursuing genre fiction.


It's been suggested that I might use simpler words, simpler language, in my writing. From what some reviewers have said, maybe I should use simpler concepts. My all time favorite 1-star review was from a young girl who complained that I made her think because I presented ideas that were foreign to her. I think educated people like genre fiction, too. I know I do. It may not be as marketable as work written to an eighth grade reading level ...


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

brkingsolver said:


> It's been suggested that I might use simpler words, simpler language, in my writing. From what some reviewers have said, maybe I should use simpler concepts. My all time favorite 1-star review was from a young girl who complained that I made her think because I presented ideas that were foreign to her. I think educated people like genre fiction, too. I know I do. It may not be as marketable as work written to an eighth grade reading level ...


There are definitely subgroups of readers, even within genres of fiction. I figure one reader of my books might be someone like me (hyper-educated, well read, self-identifying [perhaps only wishfully] as an intellectual), who's looking for some deeper exploration of ideas; and another might be a 16-year-old who's bright and interested in stuff but doesn't have a big storehouse of knowledge and reading experience; and another might be someone who really just wants a fun story. I think you can slant your writing toward the subgroup of your choice, but you'll always get readers from other subgroups, and the more oriented your writing is toward pleasing Subgroup A, the greater the chance the other subgroups won't like it.

There's also just a lot of subjective difference, I think. Regarding prose complexity specifically, I've gotten reviews complaining both that my writing was too simplistic and that it was hard to understand.


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

Becca Mills said:


> There's also just a lot of subjective difference, I think. Regarding prose complexity specifically, I've gotten reviews complaining both that my writing was too simplistic and that it was hard to understand.


This. Along with "the writing had too much description and bored me" and the next review says "I wish there had been more description. I couldn't visualize the setting."


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## Sam Kates (Aug 28, 2012)

brkingsolver said:


> This. Along with "the writing had too much description and bored me" and the next review says "I wish there had been more description. I couldn't visualize the setting."


Quite. This is why I write enough description to please the only reader whose tastes I am absolutely certain about - me.


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## Sapphire (Apr 24, 2012)

ElHawk said:


> For the most part, I really like this. I just have a few minor suggestions. "Pungent" and "stench" might be overkill when used together. They're both pretty strong words, so you could get away with just the pungent smell (or odor) or just the stench.
> 
> Also, I'd choose only one incident of repetition for this passage. You have the repetition of "Pa and his..." in the first paragraph, and then the repetition of "the sack..." later. I feel it will strengthen the impact of both those moments if you restructure one of those "repetition areas" so it doesn't repeat itself. So "Pa and his anger, his fists, his dangerous grip" and keep repetition of "the sack," or keep the repetition of "Pa and..." with "What's left is in the sack thrown over Pa's broad shoulder. He won't be back for several months."


Libby has far more expertise than I do. Nevertheless, I'd say I agree with her change on 'Pa and his' but not on the second repetition. It seems to me repetition of 'the sack' adds emphasis.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

Sapphire said:


> Libby has far more expertise than I do. Nevertheless, I'd say I agree with her change on 'Pa and his' but not on the second repetition. It seems to me repetition of 'the sack' adds emphasis.


I think she's saying you don't want to go to repetition as a device twice in such close proximity, so keep one or the other. It seems like a good piece of advice. The second repetition didn't jump out at me when I read the passage, perhaps because it's structured differently from the first one, but if it jumps out at some readers, the device could feel to them more like a tic: "Boy, this writer is _repetitive_."


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## WHDean (Nov 2, 2011)

Interesting thread.



MarkdownFanatic said:


> Oh, and BTW - the romans used concrete, and it was already old hat by then. I just Wiki-ed it


Yes and no. The Romans did use (some say invented) concrete, but they didn't _pour_ it. Roman concrete wasn't liquid, like ours, it was thick and heavy. They _packed_ it into forms by hand. As for poured concrete floors in early twentieth-century houses, I doubt it enough that I'd think it an anachronism if I read it. But I could be wrong because I haven't checked.

That's the interesting thing about history--and the easiest pitfall for historical fiction writers.


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## Sapphire (Apr 24, 2012)

Becca Mills said:


> I think she's saying you don't want to go to repetition as a device twice in such close proximity, so keep one or the other. It seems like a good piece of advice. The second repetition didn't jump out at me when I read the passage, perhaps because it's structured differently from the first one, but if it jumps out at some readers, the device could feel to them more like a tic: "Boy, this writer is _repetitive_."


Good point, Becca.


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## Marti talbott (Apr 19, 2011)

WHDean said:


> Interesting thread.
> 
> Yes and no. The Romans did use (some say invented) concrete, but they didn't _pour_ it. Roman concrete wasn't liquid, like ours, it was thick and heavy. They _packed_ it into forms by hand. As for poured concrete floors in early twentieth-century houses, I doubt it enough that I'd think it an anachronism if I read it. But I could be wrong because I haven't checked.
> 
> That's the interesting thing about history--and the easiest pitfall for historical fiction writers.


The first concrete high rise was built in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1903. The Ingalls Building, as it is called, has sixteen stories, making it one of the great engineering feats of its time.

Portland cement was used to build the London sewer system in 1859-1867.

The first widespread use of Portland cement in home construction was in England and France between 1850 and 1880 by Frenchman Francois Coignet, who added steel rods to prevent the exterior walls from spreading, and later used them as flexural elements.

Note: These examples and more are easily found by searching the history of cement. They had wheelbarrows too, so shoveling it in or pouring it? I'll just leave the word pouring out and use "adding" instead.


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## lmckinley (Oct 3, 2012)

Hi everyone,
I haven't been on kboards for a really long time. My time for writing evaporated this past year and the whole shebang had to go on the back burner for a while. But I stopped by recently and noticed this thread and have come back to follow it. I've enjoyed it - Thanks all of you for contributing. Anyone want to take a shot at critiquing something for me? These are the opening paragraphs of a Christian romance. The first half of the book was for sale for a while and went nowhere. I decided it really wasn't ready and removed it. So I'm tinkering with it once and while when I get a chance. In the past, I've definitely been guilty of trying too hard to make my prose sound pretty, and making it vague and labored instead. So I'm trying to be evocative and simple at the same time. Any feedback is welcome.

Anna Graham stood at the edge of the pier, and knew that she was standing at the edge of her life. She had a chance to start again. _Every day_, she reminded herself,_ I still have chance_. But this was the only place where she felt like that was true.

The waves were deep blue and striped with tangled white lines of surf, but under the pier beneath her feet, the water was a muddy brown. On the Texas gulf coast you didn't get crystal clear waters. You got mud. It was beautiful anyway.

A cold wind was blowing behind her, tossing her long hair around her head and over her face, so that she looked out at the empty sky and crashing water through a veil that whipped her cheek. The wind stung her skin and hurt her ears. Seagulls called to one another as they flew in slow motion, suspended in mid air as they struggled to glide into the wind.

She crossed the pier and looked once again at the enormous sign behind the restaurant: _Where the Land Ends, The Magic Begins_. Underneath the words was a mural of happy people with blurred features riding through the sky, and below them, a baby blue ocean.
Where the land ends, the magic begins. She knew it was just advertising, something jingly to put on a billboard, but sometimes she wanted it to be true. She needed it to be true. Camille had warned her before she came here, to remember that a place is just a place. "Everywhere you go, you'll find the same disappointments, the same struggles. Don't put your hope in a new place." But Camille had found the apartment, coached her for the job interview, bought her a bed. If it wasn't for Camille, she would have no bed of her own. If life seemed a little dull, a little cold, if it was so much less than she longed for - well, at least she had her own pillow.


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## ElHawk (Aug 13, 2012)

I think you've reached your goal of being evocative without labored language! This was very nice. It held me all the way through and had enough detail for me to sense the surroundings without over-doing it. Nice job!


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## Marti talbott (Apr 19, 2011)

I like it to.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

lmckinley said:


> Hi everyone,
> I haven't been on kboards for a really long time. My time for writing evaporated this past year and the whole shebang had to go on the back burner for a while. But I stopped by recently and noticed this thread and have come back to follow it. I've enjoyed it - Thanks all of you for contributing. Anyone want to take a shot at critiquing something for me? These are the opening paragraphs of a Christian romance. The first half of the book was for sale for a while and went nowhere. I decided it really wasn't ready and removed it. So I'm tinkering with it once and while when I get a chance. In the past, I've definitely been guilty of trying too hard to make my prose sound pretty, and making it vague and labored instead. So I'm trying to be evocative and simple at the same time. Any feedback is welcome.
> 
> Anna Graham stood at the edge of the pier, and knew that she was standing at the edge of her life. She had a chance to start again. _Every day_, she reminded herself,_ I still have chance_. But this was the only place where she felt like that was true.
> ...


lmckinley, I'm guessing by the use of Anna's full name that this is the absolute beginning of the novel ... is that right?


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## SamAlbion (Oct 19, 2015)

Oh, how I long for writers to wrap me snug in fancy prose and croon delicious alliterative utterances, their polished works shining like jewels upon a backdrop of absinthe green velvet yet alas, most writers no longer seem to wrestle with their work as if that work was an unruly bear intent on feasting upon the author's offspring.  No longer do authors reside in garrets, write longhand by candlelight and dine on tinned peas.

I miss the old days...


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## ElHawk (Aug 13, 2012)

You're just reading the wrong guys. (And gals.)


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## lmckinley (Oct 3, 2012)

Thank you Libbie and Marti. That's encouraging!

Becca, yes, the very beginning. And you know as I was posting this earlier, it struck me as potentially odd that I started with her full name. It sounded right when I wrote it, but I wonder if it would look strange in an Amazon preview.  Hmm...


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## WHDean (Nov 2, 2011)

Martitalbott said:


> The first concrete high rise was built in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1903. The Ingalls Building, as it is called, has sixteen stories, making it one of the great engineering feats of its time.
> 
> Portland cement was used to build the London sewer system in 1859-1867.
> 
> ...


Sorry, I didn't mean that pouring concrete was anachronistic in the early twentieth-century; I meant that concrete floors in residential homes would be. The floor probably would've been wood, not concrete.


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## Marti talbott (Apr 19, 2011)

WHDean said:


> Sorry, I didn't mean that pouring concrete was anachronistic in the early twentieth-century; I meant that concrete floors in residential homes would be. The floor probably would've been wood, not concrete.


Okay, I give up.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

lmckinley said:


> Thank you Libbie and Marti. That's encouraging!
> 
> Becca, yes, the very beginning. And you know as I was posting this earlier, it struck me as potentially odd that I started with her full name. It sounded right when I wrote it, but I wonder if it would look strange in an Amazon preview. Hmm...


I think the first-name-last-name is okay. I've definitely seen it done before. You can see how powerfully I associated that phrasing with "first line of a novel." I think it's a thing. So, keeping in mind that this is the opening and that you're trying to keep things lovely but lean ...

Anna Graham stood at the edge of the pier, and knew that she was standing at the edge of her life. She had a chance to start again. Every day, she reminded herself, I still have [a] chance. But this was the only place where she felt like that was true.

I think I like the choice to put a comma after "pier" in the first sentence. Technically you don't want one there, but given the momentousness of the sentence's second half, placing one there seems defensible to me.

The waves were deep blue and striped with tangled white lines of surf, but under the pier beneath her feet, the water was a muddy brown. On the Texas gulf coast you didn't get crystal clear waters. You got mud. It was beautiful anyway.

Since stripes aren't tangled (by definition, they're parallel, right?), could you just say "and tangled with white lines of surf"?

A cold wind was blowing behind her, tossing tossed her long hair around her head and over her face, so that she looked out at the empty sky and crashing water through a veil that whipped her cheek. The wind stung her skin and hurt her ears. Seagulls called to one another as they flew in slow motion, suspended in mid-air as they struggled to glide intoagainst the wind.

She crossed the pier and looked once again at the enormous sign behind the restaurant [what restaurant? sounds like you've introduced it already, but you can't have]: Where the Land Ends, Tthe Magic Begins. Underneath the words was a mural of happy people with blurred features riding through the sky, and below them,above a baby blue ocean.

Where the land ends, the magic begins. She knew it was just advertising, something jingly to put on a billboard, but sometimes she wanted it to be true. No, that was too mild: she needed it to be true. Camille had warned her before she came here, to remember that a place is just a place. "Everywhere you go, you'll find the same disappointments, the same struggles. Don't put your hope in a new place." But [why "but"? What you're about to say doesn't really contract Camille's advice.] Camille had found the apartment, coached her for the job interview, bought her a bed. If it wasn't for Camille, she would have no bed of her own. If life seemed a little dull, a little cold, if it was so much less than she longed for -- well, at least she had her own pillow.

The "but" in the last paragraph ... is it there because Camille's actions helped Anna get set up in the new location, and therefore Camille seems to be acting in contradiction to her own advice? If so, I think the paragraph is trying to convey too much info: 1) Anna is depending on a new start by the seaside to bring some "magic" into her life; 2) she has this friend named Camille who takes a realistic line on how much a new place can do for someone; 3) yet Camille seems to be undercutting her own advice by giving Anna so much help getting started in this new place [so, we're supposed to be getting something about Camille's psychology here, though I'm not sure what]; 4) but Anna is now thinking Camille was probably right, as this new life seems "dull" and "cold" and way "less" than what she wants; 5) Anna feels she ought to be thankful for her friend and for the basics of a comfortable life.

That seems like a large amount to pack in. Maybe Camille could be introduced in a later paragraph, and this paragraph could just focus on the (already complex) idea that Anna is 1) trying to start over because she isn't happy 2) and is worried it won't help 3) but is nevertheless holding out hope.


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## lmckinley (Oct 3, 2012)

Wow, Becca. Thanks so much for taking the time to edit that for me. Below I tweaked things and addressed your comments. Gotta' go for now, but thank you again! That was really helpful.

Anna stood at the edge of the pier and knew that she was standing at the edge of her life. (I took out the comma after pier and like it much better. Seems more immediate.) She had a chance to start again. _Every day_, she reminded herself,_ I still have chance. _But this was the only place where she felt like that was true. (I left in the where. Feels too cluttered without it. Messes up the cadence? Just sounds right?)
The waves were deep blue and striped with tangled white lines of surf, but under the pier, the water was a muddy brown. (I don't want the waves to be tangled. I want the surf to be tangled. I could say -- The white lines of surf were tangled on the surface of the waves. I don't think it matters much. I'll think about it though.) On the Texas gulf coast you didn't get crystal clear waters. You got mud. It was beautiful anyway.
A cold wind tossed her long hair around her head and over her face, so that she looked out at the empty sky and crashing water through a veil that whipped her cheek. (tossed is much better.) The wind stung her skin and hurt her ears. Seagulls called to one another as they flew in slow motion, suspended in mid air as they struggled to glide into the wind. (I like them gliding. Otherwise you might picture them flapping into the wind, and for some reason, that's not what I'm picturing
She crossed the pier and looked once again at the enormous sign behind the restaurant: (Yes, I am introducing the restaurant, I like in media res. It works for me.) _Where the Land Ends, the Magic Begins._ Underneath the words was a mural of happy people riding through the sky, their painted smiles suspended above a baby blue ocean. (This was an awkward sentence. I tried to rewrite it a little.) 
Where the land ends, the magic begins. She knew it was just advertising, something jingly to put on a billboard, but sometimes she wanted it to be true. (You suggested 'No, that was too mild: she needed it to be true.' This is more accurate, but I dislike it. I don't need to tell the reader that it's too mild. I want the reader to see that for themselves.) She needed it to be true. Camille had warned her before she came here, to remember that a place is just a place. "Everywhere you go, you'll find the same disappointments, the same struggles. Don't put your hope in a new place." But Camille had found the apartment, coached her for the job interview, bought her a bed. If it wasn't for Camille, she would have no bed of her own. If life seemed a little dull, a little cold, if it was so much less than she longed for -- well, at least she had her own pillow.

I really appreciate your comments here. I'll have to think about this one. Your thoughts suggest this is potentially confusing, which I don't want. But maybe it can't be helped. I'm hinting at something ambiguous here. She has to take practical steps to move forward in her life -- and her friend Camille helps her with this -- but she has to keep her thoughts practical too, which is a lot harder. I'm trying to say what I just said without saying it.

Maybe I'm being too vague again. I do that a lot. But this tension between what she has to do and what she wants to do is a BIG part of the book. For the most part, you got what I wanted you to get out of it. If you had just been reading along, I doubt you would have thought so much about what is actually going on in the paragraph. But hopefully you would have gotten an inkling of this idea. But this kind of editing is so hard to do in a short excerpt. Anyway, I'll think about adding more to this.

After reading this thread, I've been thinking a lot about what literary prose is, and in some ways, I think it's a sacrifice. Prosy prose sacrifices clarity for imagery, metaphor and suggestion. It tries to create a feeling in the reader, rather than explaining a feeling. Of course if you go too far, you lose the reader all together, so its a thin line to walk. I don't know that I've necessarily accomplished that feat here. Probably not. But I think that's what makes it so difficult to write, and so difficult to really take apart.


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## lmckinley (Oct 3, 2012)

After walking away, it occurred to me that I should explain this better. If I say that writers should ever sacrifice clarity for anything, someone is going to object. What I was thinking about is this.

If I say "He groaned and complained in a pathetic voice." I'm being clear. If I say:

"The voice sounded like shoe leather."
or
"The voice sounded like a mud slide."

(Took these lines from The Book of The Dun Cow by Walter Wangerin. I don't have time to add the dialogue.)

This is technically less clear. But if it creates a vivid, specific image in the reader's mind, it's more clear. Indirectly. My two cents about fancy prose. 
I'm thinking maybe I should try to use the ocean as a metaphor for that tension in my character's life. Or else add more of her own thoughts to show the struggle I'm trying to imply in that last passage. I hadn't thought about any of this before this morning. I'll have to chew on this some more.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

I like the way you're working the passage, lmckinley!

On that one longish paragraph, what I was thinking was more mechanical: not that the ideas were too complex, but that trying to develop both Camille and Anna in a single paragraph was too much. Breaking that material into two paragraphs (or moving the development of Camille to a later point in the chapter) would reduce density and add clarity to that one paragraph, I think. One way to think about it is that a paragraph, traditionally, is a unit of prose that's dedicated to just one thing, so Camille should get her own rather than being squeezed into a paragraph that's primarily about Anna.

The question about metaphorical rather than literal description is such an interesting one. It seems to me like there are actually two issues. One is bigger than prose style. It's a question of how "on the nose" you want to be in giving your readers all the answers. Do you want to _say_, explicitly, that "in trying to hang on to her husband so hard, Sally only succeeded in driving him away," or do you want to _show _that happening without telling it directly?

Then there's the question of how to tell in those instances where you've decided telling is the way to go: should you be direct/literal or should you be allusive, metaphorical, imagistic? It seems to me that the latter approach introduces more richness but also a greater chance for ambiguity (when someone calls you their "rose," are they talking about your sweetness and beauty or your thorns?  ).


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## Nope (Jun 25, 2012)

.


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## Nice (Jul 29, 2014)

I LOVE purple prose! I only wish more authors could pull it off. My go-to word porn author is Cassandra Clare, her words are stunning. Absolutely ravishing. I dislike padding and unnecessary words, so finding an author who can not only write beautifully, but maintain brevity is absolute bliss. 

Sarah J. Maas is exquisite as well. When she does go for flowery prose it isnt as scenic as Cassandra's, more visceral and tugging, but it leaves me equally breathless. 

I sometimes wonder what would happen if they wrote a book together ... but then I have to stop myself, because I don't want the world to end so soon 

Sent from my SM-T210R using Tapatalk


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## lmckinley (Oct 3, 2012)

P.J. Post said:


> So I reworked it, not to improve, *it's good just as it is *  - but to show another way of thinking about it for discussion purposes. I mainly addressed structure (moved sentences and ideas all over the place, like the second chance line is at the end now), metaphor and pacing, in part with shorter sentences and paragraphs. lol This version may totally suck. Feel free to discuss that too.
> 
> Anna stood at the edge.
> The Gulf Coast never promised crystal-clear seas, but, beyond the muddy waters under her pier, the tangled white lines of surf that marked the rolling waves of the tide hinted at a deeper ocean, a bluer ocean -- a not-Texas ocean.
> ...


Thank you, PJ, for saying that its good
And thank you for the re-write. I really like a lot of what's going on there. And its pretty

This is really, really interesting to see someone else's idea of my scene. It's impossible to actually 'see' what someone else 'sees' when they read your stuff. This is cool and kind of surreal to get a glimpse of what you pictured there.

I think rearranging the slogan gives it an extra resonance. And I like how it reinforces her feeling of apathy in spite of help and encouragement from Camille. There's more good stuff in there. I'm going to come back to this later and think it over some more.

I also feel like adding a caveat that the Texas coast does have a nice blue ocean sometimes, depending on how the sun is shining. I don't want to ruin anybody's vacation hopes or anything. I also found out after I wrote this scene that it's not just mud but some kind of life form, (bacteria I think) that makes the water look brown sometimes. But I don't think that would have the same effect in the story . I'm sure some of it is mud, so I decided to leave it alone.



Becca Mills said:


> The question about metaphorical rather than literal description is such an interesting one. It seems to me like there are actually two issues. One is bigger than prose style. It's a question of how "on the nose" you want to be in giving your readers all the answers. Do you want to _say_, explicitly, that "in trying to hang on to her husband so hard, Sally only succeeded in driving him away," or do you want to _show _that happening without telling it directly?
> 
> Then there's the question of how to tell in those instances where you've decided telling is the way to go: should you be direct/literal or should you be allusive, metaphorical, imagistic? It seems to me that the latter approach introduces more richness but also a greater chance for ambiguity (when someone calls you their "rose," are they talking about your sweetness and beauty or your thorns?  ).


And all the writing books make it sound simple, right?  That's very clear-minded to separate to the two. Although, I think the trend in literary fiction has been towards both more elaborate prose and indirect, suggestive storytelling. So we usually see the two together. All writers move back and forth between explaining things explicitly and being more implicit and allusive, (that's a great word, I'm stealing it). But they are definitely two different things, aren't they?

I know I've often marveled at good prose, but I'm starting to appreciate that it's good in part because it's actually very specific and clear, which is why it works so well. On the other hand, the degree of ambiguity behind the author's idea depends a lot on what the author wants to accomplish. Certainly being consistent makes it easier for the reader to pick up on those connections. Metaphor can be vague, but prose shouldn't be.

I'm not sure I'm really going anywhere with this, but I have to go now.

Thank you both for the feedback!


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## Word Fan (Apr 15, 2015)

On of my favorite modern authors---modern meaning the twentieth century onward---has always been William Goldman, author of _The Princess Bride_, _Marathon Man_, _Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid_, and others. There's just something about the words that he puts on the page that almost always connects with me.

This passage is from his book, _Your Turn To Curtsy My Turn To Bow_&#8230; which I think is a great title just by itself, let alone the story inside:

_"His name was Peter Bell and he was seventeen years old. Physically, he was big and clumsy, pimply-faced, neither as handsome as he wished nor as ugly as he feared. Mentally, he was bright, but not as bright as he secretly believed. He was indiscriminately virginal, a blank slate, a tabula rasa. But unhappily so. He desired nothing more than for the acid of experience to eat away at him, to burn some imperishable message on his imperishable soul. He wanted to taste of everything; he particularly thirsted after the world.

"In other words, he was looking for trouble. Can there be any wonder that he found it&#8230;?"_


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

Word Fan said:


> On of my favorite modern authors---modern meaning the twentieth century onward---has always been William Goldman, author of _The Princess Bride_, _Marathon Man_, _Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid_, and others. There's just something about the words that he puts on the page that almost always connects with me.
> 
> This passage is from his book, _Your Turn To Curtsy My Turn To Bow_... which I think is a great title just by itself, let alone the story inside:
> 
> ...


I really like the way the different metaphors pile up -- he's a blank slate, then some kind of metal in need of etching, then a gourmand, then thirsty. The piling up is "indiscriminate[]" in that the metaphors compete and repeat. Nicely done.


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