What makes good prose? I wish I knew, because then I’d be rich. But I think it’s largely one of those subjective things, something different for different people. Still, I believe there are some constants. We can easily point to something and say, “That’s bad.” In most cases, what’s “bad” won’t even be up for debate. Defining “good”, on the other hand, is tricky, but let’s see what we can do.
Setup work
I don’t claim to be a great writer. I’m good at best, probably closer to mediocre. I do, however, think I write above-average prose. By that, I mean the actual words themselves, the sentence and paragraph structure. The skeletal structure of a book, if you will, where the story itself is the meat and flesh.
Good prose is in the eye of the beholder, so it may sound a bit biased for me to say that my prose is good. It’s a bit of the Dunning-Kruger effect: people tend to see themselves as better than they really are. But hear me out.
I recently read The Bands of Mourning by Brandon Sanderson. Now, Sanderson is one of my favorite authors, and he’s practically a legend when it comes to writing quantity, but this book really left something to be desired in the prose department. It’s a great story, although it comes off the rails a bit towards the end, and the worldbuilding is (as always for this author) top-notch.
Yet as I read it, I found myself wincing more than once at the prose. It’s clunky, jarring, and I can’t blame that all on necessity. See, I believe there is a time and place even for poor grammar. (Usually, that works best in dialogue, and I’m not afraid to write, for example, “me and him” when that’s what a character would likely say.) But this went beyond that. For a fairly long stretch in the prologue, it was like the author forgot how to use pronouns. Sentences were written in such a way as to be confusing, ambiguous. The whole thing read like something I would have written in school.
For the first time in the five years I’ve been serious about my writing, I couldn’t not compare a professional creation to my own, and I found the pro wanting. It was an odd feeling, though not one of pride. I’m most certainly not saying I’m a better writer than Brandon Sanderson. But I do find it strange how big this particular difference in quality was. Remember, I’m a self-published author. I can’t afford a dedicated editor. And yet I couldn’t help but think I was doing better.
Like a river
It took some time, but I finally figured out where this all came from. And that goes back to what I feel is one of the hallmarks of my writing style. I don’t go in for convoluted phrasing, a vast vocabulary, or anything like that. No, I place the greatest emphasis on flow.
Flow, as I define it (I’m not even sure it’s a real thing, much less something with an actual definition), is a kind of phrase-level rhythm. Writing flows if one phrase or sentence leads naturally and seamlessly into the next. For me, good flow realizes as an almost hypnotic quality. If I lose track of time while reading, then here’s a story with good flow. Story, characters, and worldbuilding all matter more, of course, but I find it easier to lose myself in a river of prose than jagged phrasal peaks.
Part of good flow is about making connections. That’s why I use a lot of compound and complex sentences for exposition, with dependent clauses and conjunctions everywhere. I also tend to digress, resulting in probably too many dashes, but even those fit in the flow, and I think a dashed-off (or parenthesized) phrase is better than an extra sentence that distracts from the main point I’m making.
Literary devices like alliteration and parallelism, both of which I use heavily, fit into the flow almost without even trying. Alliteration and assonance, for example, are like a pounding beat. Done properly, they don’t interrupt the flow, but enhance it. Similarly, parallelism has its own repetition, which I find to work a bit like a feedback loop: the flow only grows stronger until it’s finally released.
Changing the beat
Once I’ve set the flow for a story, changing up the rhythm has an immediate effect. The desired effect, at that. Short, clipped sentences indicate action, tension. Long, meandering thoughts are for introspection and reflection. And so on from there. That’s more of a general thing, but it’s a more noticeable shift when I’ve spent so long working on a flowing narrative.
But I still keep the elements of the flow, even when the beat changes. A key to good writing, I think, is nailing down when to change your narrator’s “voice”. It’s like when I write child characters, or the native characters in my Otherworld setting. There, although the flow itself remains, its nature changes. That provides a dramatic shift purely out of contrast, so you know that this character has a different way of thinking, of looking at the world. Maybe a child won’t go in for long stretches of pure thought—they’d get distracted halfway through—but they’ll have other ways of keeping this virtual beat.
By doing things this way, I’ve even made some parts of the editing process easier. I know when to rewrite a phrase, sentence, paragraph, or utterance if it stands out by virtue of its lack of flow. Like a wrong note or botched line, poor prose becomes obvious by its poor fit. Smoothing out those rough edges leaves me with something coherent, connected. Maybe not good, but I didn’t claim I was that.
Opinions
All this is my own opinion. It’s not even an educated opinion, either, as I’ve never taken a formal writing class. Instead, I come by my opinions through thought, reasoning, and study. I can point to a work I’ve read and tell you how I feel about its prose, even if I may not use proper terminology to do so.
Of course, my opinion may not be the right one. It probably isn’t the right one for you. Still, I encourage you to consider what I’m saying. Think about how your own writing flows. Good prose, I have found, feels like floating down a river, or drifting at sea, or even just falling asleep. On the other hand, poor prose constantly jerks me awake, out of the moment and into reality. Maybe your feelings are different, but you won’t know until you find them.