For us writers, prose is written language without metrical structure (in contrast to poetry). It’s your writing. Prose is not the story itself, but the vessel that transmits the story.
Prose is the first thing someone sees when they look at your writing. You can have the most brilliant and intricately thought-out plot with amazing characters and settings, but if your prose is straight dirt, that’s going to handicap your readership. If a reader doesn’t like your prose or can't understand it, they’ll more than likely stop reading. Your prose makes a crucial first impression.
The most basic elements of prose are TENSE and VIEWPOINTS. We had a discussion on viewpoints a few weeks back if you want to check it out. If you don’t know what tense is, or what the different types of tense are, do some research. Trust me, this is all really important.
Your tense and viewpoint need to be spot on. They’re the bare essentials of prose.
If you try to write a story in a past-progressive tense, but then use the sentence “He walks over to the tree…” guess what? Something’s wrong and you need to fix it. A good writer should reach a point where correct tense and viewpoint come instinctually.
Beyond tense and viewpoint, there are three other major components of prose: dialogue, description, and blocking.
DIALOGUE is speech (or thought) that is physically produced by characters.
Ex: “I told you to never come back!”
DESCRIPTION is when you present information about people, places, objects or actions in the world.
Ex: Her hair was drenched in cold rainwater.
BLOCKING is when you tell the reader where the characters are, where the scenery is, and how these things are interacting.
Ex: John stood in the doorway, looking down at Amber.
These three components combine to create EXPOSITION, which serves to answer questions that the reader is asking.
In other words, you want to provide exposition in the order that readers will inevitably ask certain questions. (Where is he standing? In the garden. What is he doing? Digging a hole in the dirt. Why is he doing that? To bury the body.) The needs of a story should dictate what actually needs to be shown or explained.
You want to strike a good balance between dialogue, description, and blocking. Well-written exposition can go a long way to making your story more readable.
Generally you want to make every element of your prose do double or triple duty. Don’t just describe a scene, for instance – describe how your character reacts to the scene or how it makes them feel. Develop character, advance the action, give contextual clues, reference past or future events, do multiple things at a time! This will serve to make your writing richer.
One last concept I’d like to share is the Pyramid of Abstraction (just picture a pyramid in your head for this). You have your foundation at the very bottom of the pyramid – concrete details, things that the reader will understand easily. From there, you can build up to more abstract thoughts or ideas.
Here’s an example: you show a character walking into a building. The character hears a dripping sound and notices that there’s a pipe leaking from the ceiling. He can see reflections in the puddle of water that’s gathered on the floor and thinks to himself, “I really need to fix that thing already.” You mention he’s known about the leak for days. This detail says something about the character, who just so happens to be a plumber.
By starting with the image of the dripping water and the puddle, you establish something concrete. This then transitions into the character’s thoughts, which are more abstract. If you’re going to present abstract information, you should try to have something concrete as the foundation for it.
Dialogue is very abstract. When I want to do a back-and-forth conversation between characters, I usually start by establishing concrete details – what the setting is, what the characters are doing, etc. After that, I’ll begin some dialogue and break it up with beats.* If the conversation starts getting serious or intense, I’ll gradually reduce the number of beats between pieces of dialogue, until it’s just line after line of continuous dialogue. Fewer beats means faster dialogue. I can purposefully increase the tempo of a conversation by manipulating what details get mentioned and when.
*Beats are little descriptions in the story that say things like “He walked to the other side of the room.”
That’s about all I’ve got for now. There are plenty of other topics like adjective/adverb use, so feel free to bring up whatever stuff I didn’t cover here.
For us writers, prose is written language without metrical structure (in contrast to poetry). It’s your writing. Prose is not the story itself, but the vessel that transmits the story.
Prose is the first thing someone sees when they look at your writing. You can have the most brilliant and intricately thought-out plot with amazing characters and settings, but if your prose is straight dirt, that’s going to handicap your readership. If a reader doesn’t like your prose or can't understand it, they’ll more than likely stop reading. Your prose makes a crucial first impression.
The most basic elements of prose are TENSE and VIEWPOINTS. We had a discussion on viewpoints a few weeks back if you want to check it out. If you don’t know what tense is, or what the different types of tense are, do some research. Trust me, this is all really important.
Your tense and viewpoint need to be spot on. They’re the bare essentials of prose.
If you try to write a story in a past-progressive tense, but then use the sentence “He walks over to the tree…” guess what? Something’s wrong and you need to fix it. A good writer should reach a point where correct tense and viewpoint come instinctually.
Beyond tense and viewpoint, there are three other major components of prose: dialogue, description, and blocking.
DIALOGUE is speech (or thought) that is physically produced by characters.
Ex: “I told you to never come back!”
DESCRIPTION is when you present information about people, places, objects or actions in the world.
Ex: Her hair was drenched in cold rainwater.
BLOCKING is when you tell the reader where the characters are, where the scenery is, and how these things are interacting.
Ex: John stood in the doorway, looking down at Amber.
These three components combine to create EXPOSITION, which serves to answer questions that the reader is asking.
In other words, you want to provide exposition in the order that readers will inevitably ask certain questions. (Where is he standing? In the garden. What is he doing? Digging a hole in the dirt. Why is he doing that? To bury the body.) The needs of a story should dictate what actually needs to be shown or explained.
You want to strike a good balance between dialogue, description, and blocking. Well-written exposition can go a long way to making your story more readable.
Generally you want to make every element of your prose do double or triple duty. Don’t just describe a scene, for instance – describe how your character reacts to the scene or how it makes them feel. Develop character, advance the action, give contextual clues, reference past or future events, do multiple things at a time! This will serve to make your writing richer.
One last concept I’d like to share is the Pyramid of Abstraction (just picture a pyramid in your head for this). You have your foundation at the very bottom of the pyramid – concrete details, things that the reader will understand easily. From there, you can build up to more abstract thoughts or ideas.
Here’s an example: you show a character walking into a building. The character hears a dripping sound and notices that there’s a pipe leaking from the ceiling. He can see reflections in the puddle of water that’s gathered on the floor and thinks to himself, “I really need to fix that thing already.” You mention he’s known about the leak for days. This detail says something about the character, who just so happens to be a plumber.
By starting with the image of the dripping water and the puddle, you establish something concrete. This then transitions into the character’s thoughts, which are more abstract. If you’re going to present abstract information, you should try to have something concrete as the foundation for it.
Dialogue is very abstract. When I want to do a back-and-forth conversation between characters, I usually start by establishing concrete details – what the setting is, what the characters are doing, etc. After that, I’ll begin some dialogue and break it up with beats.* If the conversation starts getting serious or intense, I’ll gradually reduce the number of beats between pieces of dialogue, until it’s just line after line of continuous dialogue. Fewer beats means faster dialogue. I can purposefully increase the tempo of a conversation by manipulating what details get mentioned and when.
*Beats are little descriptions in the story that say things like “He walked to the other side of the room.”
That’s about all I’ve got for now. There are plenty of other topics like adjective/adverb use, so feel free to bring up whatever stuff I didn’t cover here.
Experimenting prose has been fun, but it can be bloody difficult. 