#TheProcess - Prose

 

Prose

Prose is the language through which we tell a story. As a reader, it’s the thing that makes or breaks a story for me. A concept can be unique and interesting, but if the prose is sloppy, dull, or difficult, I’m out. When I talk about how important craft is to me, I’m talking about prose: about imagery and metaphor, subtlety and nuance, unique character voices and diversity of sentence structure. All of these things working in conjunction are what make a book accessible and interesting. Too purple, and it sounds ridiculous; too abrupt and there’s no spark; too repetitive in its structure, and it’s just plain annoying.

It takes lots of reading, lots of practice, and lots of time to develop a signature style as an author. It’s a long process of consuming the written word, figuring out what you like best, and then putting it to paper, over and over, until your authentic voice starts to shine through.

For me, writing is a very cinematic experience. By that I mean, the scenes play out in my head like movie reels, and then my goal with prose is capturing those exact images. In my mind I see specific camera angles: close-ups, and fade-ins, those nifty focus shifts. I see a shot focused on the elegant movement of someone’s fingers; or the slanted, early morning light illuminating half of someone’s face in blind-shaped stripes. I spend time studying favorite actors’ facial tics and head tilts, and then translate that on the page so that those motions are alluring, or threatening, or melancholy. Lighting plays a tremendous role in film, and so I write it into all my work. Little visual details like a swirl of dust motes, or clouds scudding across the moon, or the lonely sway of a rotting window shutter. Those are the elements, the details, the little things that make a movie or a TV show feel real, and I write those things because I want my readers to see my stories come to life, not merely scan through a summary of actions.

This focus on prose is the reason it takes me so long to write a book. Book Twitter likes to scoff at anyone who claims they edit as they go, so I won’t say that. Instead, I’ll say that I fiddle with things as I go. That I don’t abide by the “just write it all down and fix it all later” rule. Some things need fixing right away. I don’t believe in rushing through scenes to “get them done.” I’m trying, at all times, to capture the exact imagery or tone of a scene in the moment I write it. The book will need and does get edited later, but it’s very common for me to delete or tweak a sentence immediately upon writing it. Some days the word flow is good and smooth, and I can knock out 2, 3, 4, even 5-thousand words in a couple hours. Other days, those two hours are spent endlessly fiddling with one page until I’m happy with it.

Writing, for me, is a very purposeful exercise. I used to not-so-jokingly say that I was like Horton: I said what I meant and meant what I said. It’s never a matter of “getting the gist across.” Not only do I genuinely enjoy playing around with language, but I think that play, when purposeful, is essential to creating an engaging and dynamic prose-reading experience. Whenever anyone asks about my influences in that regard, I feel a bit full of myself saying that Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe are my two biggest inspirations, but that’s the truth. When Irving described Ichabod as “a scarecrow eloped from a corn field,” that blew my little kid mind. That word “eloped.” It’s so eloquent. Not “a scarecrow who jumped off his stick and went walking around,” but something much cleaner and more evocative. While Poe is considerably darker, and Irving likes his long, early Americana ramblings, both use prose in a way that is richly descriptive and clever. Both can be cheeky; both can spin a metaphor like nobody else, and both can give you goosebumps with their knife-sharp specifics.

Specifics are important: I’m not trying to create a universal moment, but a moment that is so crystal clear as to be easily visualized, and one which, for one or two readers out there, is going to feel painfully true to life. I don’t want to write a general truth, but I’m writing somebody’s truth.

Next time, I’ll talk about editing – proper editing – and proofing, and what goes into finalizing and polishing a book for sale. I’m also going to challenge that weird adage that “all books are terrible until the editor gets hold of them,” so brace yourselves for that.