I make myself read genre fiction because it's so popular and I feel that I need to know what kind of writing draws people in. The typical scenario has me actually reading about 1/3; for the rest I just read the middle three lines of each page, for the reasons you and C. S. Lewis mention.
But the Tanith Lee passage would have made me stop and savor. Even though it is fictional I have been IRL to that "escalating village" on Crete (and not during tourist season so I could see what it was really like). Lee's clever use of language emphasized how weak my attempts to describe it were.
i do think a lot of readers (at least those i know personally) realize they *should* appreciate precision of language and "good writing." but they often don't know what to look for or how to make those kind of distinctions, maybe because they never had the blessing of good teachers.
like, i heard from folks that "This Is How You Lose the Time War" was lyrical and poetic and beautiful. but i then i read it and found the prose flowery and insipid. still, it's undeniably *different* from the bad writing in trope-heavy fiction, and i wonder if people took this difference as evidence of higher quality. i dunno!
I hate to say it, because I know people love Time War and the writers seem like lovely people…but boy did I have the same reaction to the prose. It’s honestly my go-to example for the overdone and self-conscious style in SFF—definitely not a feature of the tropey-er novels as you said, but it’s endemic in magazine short stories. I’ve been hoping it’s a phase and will burn itself out!
Something you strike on here is that many people are not good at thinking about prose descriptively. I read fantasy and hang out in both real and online spaces with lots of fantasy readers and the general tenor of discussion seems to posit two styles: workmanlike "windowpane prose" and lush, lyrical, multiclause sentence, archaic vocabulary prose. Of course that is reductive. Each element: word choice, sentence structure, the aggregate rhythm of the paragraphs and pages, can be chosen separately. Just read the King James Bible, written in the 17th century and therefore unmistakably archaic, there is a preference for comparatively short declarative sentences joined by the conjunction "and" over the sort of long elegantly cascading Ciceronian sentence that some 19th century novelists might employ. As you say there are plenty of undoubted prose stylists who are quite spare, just as there are those who are maximalists.
As I am hardly the first to note, The Lord of the Rings switches between an early 20th century novelistic style and a more archaicizing style imitative of medieval epics. I wonder if a modern fantasy reader, for whom LOTR is the rare book published before the 1970s that they will read, would regard the prose style as being equally old fashioned throughout.
>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.
Last year, I listened through the whole Narnia series again as audiobooks. If you read them quickly and silently as an adult, they're just decent kids' stories; but at reading-aloud speed, they're _so_ good. It's amazing how much Lewis can evoke with just a few words, and there are paragraphs which do a chapter's worth of work.
I make myself read genre fiction because it's so popular and I feel that I need to know what kind of writing draws people in. The typical scenario has me actually reading about 1/3; for the rest I just read the middle three lines of each page, for the reasons you and C. S. Lewis mention.
But the Tanith Lee passage would have made me stop and savor. Even though it is fictional I have been IRL to that "escalating village" on Crete (and not during tourist season so I could see what it was really like). Lee's clever use of language emphasized how weak my attempts to describe it were.
Something to aspire to! Thank you.
Oooh, Tanith Lee! Have you gotten to Louisa the Poisoner yet? There's some truly wonderful description in that one.
ooh I have not yet! excited!
You continue to put out the best writing on writing! Great breakdown of what makes good prose (and what doesn't).
Aw thanks so much Tom!!! you’re always so kind ❤️
i do think a lot of readers (at least those i know personally) realize they *should* appreciate precision of language and "good writing." but they often don't know what to look for or how to make those kind of distinctions, maybe because they never had the blessing of good teachers.
like, i heard from folks that "This Is How You Lose the Time War" was lyrical and poetic and beautiful. but i then i read it and found the prose flowery and insipid. still, it's undeniably *different* from the bad writing in trope-heavy fiction, and i wonder if people took this difference as evidence of higher quality. i dunno!
I hate to say it, because I know people love Time War and the writers seem like lovely people…but boy did I have the same reaction to the prose. It’s honestly my go-to example for the overdone and self-conscious style in SFF—definitely not a feature of the tropey-er novels as you said, but it’s endemic in magazine short stories. I’ve been hoping it’s a phase and will burn itself out!
Something you strike on here is that many people are not good at thinking about prose descriptively. I read fantasy and hang out in both real and online spaces with lots of fantasy readers and the general tenor of discussion seems to posit two styles: workmanlike "windowpane prose" and lush, lyrical, multiclause sentence, archaic vocabulary prose. Of course that is reductive. Each element: word choice, sentence structure, the aggregate rhythm of the paragraphs and pages, can be chosen separately. Just read the King James Bible, written in the 17th century and therefore unmistakably archaic, there is a preference for comparatively short declarative sentences joined by the conjunction "and" over the sort of long elegantly cascading Ciceronian sentence that some 19th century novelists might employ. As you say there are plenty of undoubted prose stylists who are quite spare, just as there are those who are maximalists.
As I am hardly the first to note, The Lord of the Rings switches between an early 20th century novelistic style and a more archaicizing style imitative of medieval epics. I wonder if a modern fantasy reader, for whom LOTR is the rare book published before the 1970s that they will read, would regard the prose style as being equally old fashioned throughout.
>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.
Last year, I listened through the whole Narnia series again as audiobooks. If you read them quickly and silently as an adult, they're just decent kids' stories; but at reading-aloud speed, they're _so_ good. It's amazing how much Lewis can evoke with just a few words, and there are paragraphs which do a chapter's worth of work.