Following the growing career of Myke Cole has been one of my favorite parts of being a reviewer. His debut novel, the frenetically paced and thought provoking, Control Point was one of the first novels I read in 2012. I was fortunate enough to get an EARC of the sequel, Fortress Frontier and I can honestly say that Myke managed to raise the bar for himself in every way. I'm anxious for the upcoming Breach Zone, and look forward to watching Myke's career continue its rise to the peaks of the genre. I considered it a coup, when Myke agreed to be a part of this series. Little did I know that his installment would provide me with some of the best writing advice I've gotten to date. I hope you find it as useful as I did.
Prose is defined as, “The ordinary
form of spoken or written language, without metrical structure, as
distinguished from poetry or verse.” What that really means is, “Anything in
the book that isn’t poetry or verse.” But when I’m sitting in the lobby of the
World Fantasy Con hotel chewing the fat about an author’s “prose style,” I’m
usually thinking of all the words that aren’t dialogue.
Dialogue, by definition, is
prose and I admit to butchering the definition beyond all recognition, but this
is my guest post, so lock it up.
So, ahem. Here’s my point: When you
take the dialogue (and poetry and verse) out of a novel, you’re still left with
a lot of words. Prose (as I define it) is really, really important. You don’t
want to get it wrong. You don’t want your prose to drag, or to be unclear, or
to be so sparse that the reader misses key details and loses track of the
story. You don’t want to ramble, and you don’t want to short your audience.
Neither purple nor beige, folks. This porridge must be just right.
Well, good news: There are a few
well-known, clear and easy to follow rules on how to write effective prose in
fantasy and science-fiction. If you stick to them, you are guaranteed to write
prose that sings and leaves your reader begging for more.
HAHAHAHAHA! *gasp* Hahahahah! *sniff* Ha . . . heh . . . Sorry. Couldn’t breath for a
sec there. Man, that’s funny.
So, yeah. There are no rules. What
makes prose effective is completely subjective, and different writers pull it
off in different ways. It’s a huge topic, and it’s easier to tackle when you
boil it down to opposing extremes. I started this with a false definition, and
now I’ll extend it with a false dichotomy. George R.R. Martin set up the
Gardener vs. Architect opposition in novel planning, and I’ll take a page from
his book and set up my own: Stylist vs. Economist.
Stylists: China Mieville and J.R.R. Tolkien
For Stylists, the prose is, in and
of itself, part of the appeal of the novel. While prose is not poetry, the
prose has a lot of the same appeal. It is sonorous, lyrical, evocative. The
words serve to carry the plot and characters, but they do so in a way that is
beautiful and elegiac in its own right. Stylists bring as much pleasure to the
reader from the quality of the prose as they do from the story itself.
The best example I can think of
here is China Mieville, author of several novels, including one of my favorite
fantasies of all time: The Scar. Let
me show you what I mean. Here’s a quote from Mieville’s Perdido Street Station:
“Its substance was known to me. The
crawling infinity of colours, the chaos of textures that went into each strand
of that eternally complex tapestry…each one resonated under the step of the
dancing mad god, vibrating and sending little echoes of bravery, or hunger, or
architecture, or argument, or cabbage or murder or concrete across the aether.
The weft of starlings’ motivations connected to the thick, sticky strand of a
young thief’s laugh. The fibres stretched taut and glued themselves solidly to
a third line, its silk made from the angles of seven flying buttresses to a
cathedral roof. The plait disappeared into the enormity of possible spaces.”
I can read that passage over and
over again. Even without knowing anything else about the book, the word choice,
cadence and arrangement are so transporting that the prose itself carries me
along.
When done wrong, Stylists distract
from the narrative, pull their readers out of the story and annoy them. I’ve
heard many readers complain that Tolkien takes paragraphs to describe the side
of a hill or the surface of a leaf, when all they want to know is what’s
happening next. But done right, as I believe Mieville does, Stylists add a
layer of drama and resonance to their story that makes for a more effective
reading experience.
Economists: Peter V. Brett and . . . well . . . me
Peter V. Brett has a great
expression: “All mules must haul wood.” Your mules are your words, and every
single one of them needs to be working to either advance the plot or develop
characters, ruthlessly pushing the narrative forward. The Economist viciously
prunes their prose, weighing and judging every word, working hard to ensure
there is no trace of excess that could potentially slow the story. The goal is
a tight, fast-paced tale that aims to catch readers up and hold them.
Economists seek to write “page-turners” that will keep you up long past bedtime
on school nights.
Look at this tight description of a
landscape from Peter V. Brett’s The
Warded Man:
“He walked for hours more,
eventually leaving the trees behind and entering grassland: wide, lush fields
untouched by plow or grazing. He crested a hilltop, breathing deeply of the
fresh, untainted air. There was a large boulder jutting out of the ground, and
Arlen scrambled atop it, looking out at a wide world that had always been
beyond his reach.”
No extra details. The description
builds the world (undeveloped by mankind, forest giving over to grassland) and
furthers the character (breaking free into a wider world he longed to
see). Short. Tight.
For the Economist the story, and
not the delivery mechanism (the tenor of the words), are what’s important, and
they go to great lengths to ensure that nothing gets in its way. Economists may
leave out description when they feel it’s not necessary. I don’t spend a lot of
time describing camouflage patterns, or a gun, or the color of lightning. I
know that the vast majority of my readers already know what these things look
like. If I just say that they exist in the story, I can leave it up to the
reader to fill in the descriptive details, saving valuable space and time and
making the story move faster.
There’s no judgment here in this
admittedly false dichotomy. I am a huge Peter V. Brett and China Mieville fan. The experience I take away from their respective
work is profoundly different. I go to Mieville for haunting, resonant
experiences. The story is still fantastic, but I enjoy the delivery every bit
as much as the plot and characters. I go to Brett for a pulse-pounding narrative
that gets right to the point and stays there, page after page, until I’ve
finished the book in a stretch of sleepless hours.
The important thing is to find a
prose style that works for you, somewhere on the contiuum that exists between
these two poles I’ve framed for the sake of argument. Once you have, you’ll
have found your “voice,” as writers call it: the rhythm of words on the page
that is distinctly you. Once you’ve honed that voice, your readers will
recognize it, associate it with your name, and if you keep developing your
craft, it will bring them back to your books again and again.
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