what does "good" prose look like?

a follow-up

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I thought Neil Gaiman wasn’t very good at descriptive prose (a fact which is unrelated to his disqualifying ethical failings.) I want to follow up on this, not to discuss Neil Gaiman any further—who I think is done and dusted as a literary subject—but because I think it’s important to be clear about what we mean when we describe some prose as “good” and other prose as “bad.” I think this is especially important in genre fiction, which has historically suffered from readers and writers who are content with dull and cliched language (or else purple and ridiculous language). Of course genre fiction has also been home to a large number of really gifted prose stylists, and in fact I want to start off with one of them: the underrated genius Tanith Lee. Here’s a paragraph near the beginning of her short story “The Gorgon,” which opens on the fictional Greek island of Daphaeu:

Daphaeu itself (or more correctly herself, for she was a female country, voluptuous and cruel by turns in the true antique fashion of the Goddess), was hardly enormous. A couple of roads, a tangle of sheep tracks, a precarious, escalating village, rocks and hillsides thatched by blistered grass. All of which overhung an extraordinary sea, unlike any sea which I have encountered elsewhere in Greece. Water which might be mistaken for blueness from a distance, but which, from the harbour, or the multitude of caves and coves that undermined the island, revealed itself a clear and succulent green, like milky limes, or the bottle glass of certain spirits.

What is this paragraph doing? Everything. It’s establishing, of course, the basic physical scene: but not in the same way that a lot of genre and bare-bones literary fiction does so these days, via the prose equivalent of a tracking shot. Those kinds of books are so devoted to “showing” rather than “telling” that they show us a setting from the point of view of an ordinary camera, as if the writer was simply describing a hoped-for TV show adaptation of their book rather than writing the book itself. Lee is doing a sort of tracking shot here, but thoroughly in the voice of her narrator: he is summing up in words what he saw over a period of time. And we know quite a bit about him immediately. We know he’s spent some time in Greece, that he’s well-educated, and that he has a Thing about women which he can’t help bring up literally immediately while also hiding it behind a classical reference. He’s fascinated by difference (that clear and succulent green of the unusual water) and simultaneously afraid of it and its power over him (the undermined island, the green glass like liquor bottles). This is the exact thematic line that the story itself will follow. None of Lee’s word choices here are random or accidental: in the hands of a master prose stylist, a story is alive and deliberate in every word.

And some of these words are startling, not what the reader was expecting to hear: they are the conceptual version of a slant rhyme. Take “precarious, escalating village” —escalating? How can a village escalate? I’m only about a tenth of the way through my Tanith Lee Completionism Quest, but I’ve already noticed that Lee loves to use verbs (or words more commonly used as verbs) as adjectives. In the context of this sentence, Lee appears to mean that the village is located on uneven ground, and rises, but she chose the specific word “escalating” because it’s immediate, weird, and unnerving, and her narrator is unnerved even as he’s trying to hide behind his supposed expertise as a foreign traveler in the Greek islands. Later in the story, the narrator will describe the green ocean as “smashed emerald water”: another use of a word (“smash”) that’s usually a verb in place of an adjective, and another indirect yet indescribably vivid image. The ocean does indeed at times look like a smashed gemstone. But more importantly, the narrator is noticing this because the greenness of the ocean continues to bother him. He’s not an impersonal camera in the hands of an indifferent director. His field of vision belongs to him alone.

To a certain kind of reader, however, these unexpected word choices and narrative decisions are just objects standing in the way of the plot. In fact literary thoughtfulness is perceived as a detriment. Some readers are, I think, so insecure—possibly because they were traumatized by a bad high school English class—that any unusual prose reads to them as a personal insult, a kind of mocking “ha ha you don’t get it.” Having to work at all to understand what they’re reading means they didn’t understand it immediately, which must mean they’re stupid. I am sorry for people who feel this way, and I hope they realize that they probably aren’t being judged by anyone except their memories. It’s a joy to be surprised by language, not an exploitable vulnerability.

Other readers, however, are motivated less by insecurity and more by impatience. They want to get to the damn point already. The point, of course, is already located in the words if they bothered to read them carefully, but they don’t because they’re not interested in the words. They want to get to the meat of the content. People like this often describe themselves as “avid readers,” and by this they usually mean that they like to blur through books as fast as possible.¹ I wish I could say this is a purely modern and therefore temporary phenomenon, but C.S. Lewis described literally these exact same kinds of “unliterary readers” in his 1961 book-length essay An Experiment in Criticism:

As the unmusical listener wants only the Tune, so the unliterary reader wants only the Event. The one ignores nearly all the sounds the orchestra is actually making; he wants to hum the tune. The other ignores nearly all that the words before him are doing; he wants to know what happens next.²

An unliterary reader doesn’t really “read” and isn’t really interested in language: it’s part of why these people tend to read so fast, and why they seek out trope-heavy books. They are reading for the tropes, to get from one to the other as fast as possible, for the nodding satisfaction of them. Formulaic genre fiction or algorithmically-generated Amazon novels (whether written by a human imitating an AI, or an AI edited by an overworked human) are perfectly suited to this sort of reader. An LLM, by definition, is a technology that puts words in their most cliched places, right where the reader would statistically expect to see them. LLMs are incapable of the strange, artistic, illuminating choice, except maybe once in a while by accident. They can’t reliably generate the conceptual slant rhyme.

Speaking of statistically likely places to see certain words, this is about where, in any argument about readers and reading, it’s customary to ask if this is a real problem, if the people who like easy cliched prose can just be allowed to enjoy things, if we can let a thousand flowers bloom. I don’t really have a problem with people enjoying books that are uninteresting to me: not everybody likes the same things. But bad prose doesn’t magically transform into good prose just because you happen to like it. If it’s meant to be mentally skipped by an inattentive reader, then it’s simply bad writing and that’s it. I have loved many books written in bad prose—paging Sarah J. Maas—but even Maas is capable of surprising me from time to time. In one of the Court books, Rhys’ dead mother is described as having a “soft and fiery” personality—a lovely and evocative combination of adjectives, which has stuck in my head for good reason. A lot of prose that looks bad on the surface, relying mostly on silly, clunky words and tropes, might be quietly skillful at other important elements like pacing and mystery and expression of character through dialogue. Nonetheless, it’s always better if a writer’s individual word choices are deliberate and thoughtful throughout, rather than just once in a while.

That being said, a lot of really terrible literary novels and literary-genre crossovers wildly overemphasize their word choices. The passage from “The Gorgon” above is quite sparing compared to some overstuffed novels I’ve read where every single word tries to surprise, like poetry, and every sentence stops midway to admire itself. But a different reader might be genuinely moved by prose that I find overdone and try-hardy; they might find the writers I love best (Tanith Lee, Ursula K. Le Guin, etc.) too spare and too cold. There really is room to disagree, and there’s no objectivity in taste. But if writers want to be called “good,” then they do need to try; and above all try to be good at actual prose writing, not at using the laziest words for their least imaginative readers.

1. For an example, read the angry comments on this negative review of romantasy tropefest The Fourth Wing.

2. There’s an immensely cute moment in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe where Peter’s voice is described as “sounding tired and pale in the darkness” and Lewis immediately cuts in with a parenthetical “(I hope you know what I mean by a voice sounding pale.)” Lewis wants to be sure that his readers—presumably young people—aren’t skipping over or scared off by his use of an unusual, conceptually slant-rhymed adjective. This line has also stuck in my head forever. Great sentences seem to take up important space in my brain: I do not know where my keys and shoes are, ever.