thoughts on clean prose

[arundels]

I sometimes get questions on retrospring about writing, or fandom, or other things that I have a lot of thoughts on, and I think, hey I should archive this on dreamwidth. And then I don't. In the interests of not being like that anymore, I'm going to try doing the archiving thing immediately! So here is a cleaned-up version of an answer that I gave to someone asking about writing clean, rhythmic prose.

Q: hi!!! your prose is so lovely. your sentences flow so cleanly and have rlly good rhythm. how’d you learn to write like that? do you have book recs for equally clean prose?

 

I don't think I really actively learned to write in any particular way, but over the years I have both read and written a lot of words, and developed my own style out of that. It sounds like such trite advice, but I really do think that the best way to learn to write is to (a) read a lot and (b) write a lot. Fanfic for me has been a great outlet for honing my skills, because you have so much freedom to experiment with different styles, tones, voices, genres, etc. I've also been writing fanfic in various forms for almost 20 years now... It helps that I really love reading/writing and so I've happily invested a lot of time and energy into it without it feeling like a chore!

Focusing on how to write clean prose, my best answer is to ask yourself (when editing): "what is this sentence adding, and can I express the same thing in a more succinct way"? That doesn't mean only in terms of adding plot/exposition, but also character, theme, mood, atmosphere, etc. But each sentence should be actively Doing Something that you, the author, don't think can be conveyed otherwise.

It's also about finding very precise words to express what you're trying to say - which doesn't mean, pull out a thesaurus to find big words for the sake of it. But sometimes I find myself talking in circles because I'm struggling to accurately express something, and when I find the right word it can cut through all that noise. Instead of giving yourself the easy way out of writing around what you're trying to say, try and figure out how to say that in the fewest and most incisive words possible.

And a lot of the time clean prose comes down to letting things stay unsaid. you need to trust your readers to draw inferences from the clues you are putting down - but also to accept that not everyone will come to the same conclusions as you intended! Leave enough room for your writing to breathe, and you will find that in the negative space all manner of wonderful interpretations may bloom. Don't let your desire to explain everything that is in your head clutter up your writing.
 

Clean prose and rhythmic prose also often go hand in hand - to me prose often feels cleaner when the words have a musicality to them, like poetry. where everything feels very intentional and harmonious. This comes down to reading your words out loud - or at least "out loud" in your head, in a way that you can "hear". Not just processing the meaning of the words but the sounds of them, and the cadence of the sentences, the rise and flow of pitch, the speeding up and the slowing down and the fits and the starts. See how that sentence started to pick up pace towards the end because I dropped all commas? To me there's no real right way to do this, but there needs to be intentionality - being conscious of how your writing sounds. Over time you'll develop your own preferences for how to use the music of words to convey deeper meanings, and this is something that I'm still working on. But being able to hear it, and to manipulate it, to me is step one.

Finally I have some author recs!

• One of my favourite writers, in large part because of how clean and subtle his prose is, is Kazuo Ishiguro. "Remains of the Day" is an absolutely phenomenal book, but it can be divisive; "Never Let Me Go" is much more accessible; "An Artist of the Floating World" is also lovely.


• For short stories, Raymond Carver is my absolute go-to; sometimes when my writing feels sludgey I will pull out one of his short story collections and just flip through for inspiration. "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" is an absolute classic.


• A recent fave is "Orbital" by Samantha Harvey, which is a real love letter to space writing for the sci-fi nerds out there!


• I also like Han Kang's novels translated by Deborah Smith, particularly "The Vegetarian", though "Human Acts" is perhaps more accessible.

 

One of the best ways to train your ability to identify, replicate and then independently create this sort of crisp prose, though, is poetry. My literature teacher once said to me (which apparently is a quote attributed to Coleridge) that prose is words in their best order, and poetry is the best words in their best order. Developing an appreciation for poetry will really hone your instincts for the way language sounds, what it means to be razor-sharp with word choice, and how to pare away all the unnecessary fluff to get at the core of the matter.

It is hard to recommend where to start with poetry because there is so much out there and it is really so personal, but some of my favourite poets (and ones whose bodies of work I know pretty well, beyond just isolated poems) are: Carol Ann Duffy, Philip Larkin, John Donne, Sylvia Plath... Not to mention Shakespeare (one thing about me is I am a Shakespeare lover!!).

Original answer on retrospring: here

Comments

[bluerthanbluets]

ohhhh i loved reading this! i do agree with this ask re your prose. there's a precise but still enjoyable flow in your writing that's quite hard to achieve!!! and the advice you give here are all extremely useful and very cool. like when i was starting out writing, my favorites skewed towards fictionists with highly ornate and weird language (lorrie moore) and sometimes when i read back on my old works (not fic) i can still pinpoint lines that i know emerged out of my desire to sound like her LOL but i also ended up liking simpler more straightforward writers like alice munro-- and like you pointed out, raymond carver! and i interpreted their style first as a challenge, like can i write like this? but later on i found it more gratifying when i managed to pull it off!

also agree with the last part on poetry. i recently got into reading marie howe and her collection, what the living do is one stark, crystalline image after another. my favorite is this one titled how some of it happened [LINK] the weight is there, although it is just so simple.

hehehehe sorry for yapping i enjoyed this and responding to this post!

[arundels]

thank you love! sorry this reply is sooo late. tbh I do not feel like my prose is really that clean (can't resist a bit of flowery language hehe) but I do really care about the melody and flow of my writing, and also the precision of the words, so I really appreciate you pointing that out :) I think your writing is really clean and crisp and I can see the munro/carver influence so much!

I also love the idea of approaching style as a challenge, I think that's one of the things I love about fanfic, the ability to experiment with different styles (and themes, plots, settings, etc) by looking at something you like and thinking, let me try and emulate this in a short, self-contained thing.

that poem is so striking... I see exactly what you mean about those stark, clear images. it is such a skill to identify the tangible, visible scenes that connect to communicate the deeper themes that you want to convey. that's a big part of what we call "clean" writing, I think. being able to describing the way things are, and use that to draw out the way things feel, without ever needing to explain it. ahhhh

thank you for yapping I love it so much!! sorry it took me 1000 years to reply lol I do not monitor dw as much as I should or want to <3