Least you think I’m picking exceptionally bad examples, I’ll note the last came through my feed as evidence that Sanderson “is so freaking good” at writing prose:Įveryone will have their own ideas of what constitutes good prose. I’ll add I’m a big Stephen King fan and think he’s capable of very lovely prose, but the above is a good example of how “visible” his writing can be despite his reputation for being “workmanlike” or “invisible.”) I’m merely pointing out that popular fiction is filled with writing that is visible in the exact ways that “invisible prose” fans claim to dislike. Now, I’m not arguing these are all bad sentences per se. The monsters almost seemed to blend and shift together, one enormous dark force of howling, miasmic hatred as thick as the air-which seemed to hold in the heat and the humidity, like a merchant hoarding fine rugs.
LYRICAL WRITING STYLE SKIN
My skin buzzes, like my blood is made of iron fillings and his eyes are magnets sweeping over them. One from the eyebrow, one from the lip, another at the nose, one from the cheek. It’s as if seven fisherman have cast their hooks into her from different directions and they’re all pulling at once. Her expression is one Luca has never seen before, and he fears it might be permanent. Deep, confident, and a little bit like butter.ĭan’s heart took an enormous leap in his chest and his head gave a sudden terrific whammo, as if Thor had swung his hammer in there. Voices should stop at the ears, but sometimes-not very often at all, actually-a voice will penetrate past my ears and reverberate straight down through my body. Consider some random examples from bestselling novels across different genres: Because the very things that are supposed to make your prose "too visible”-elaborate metaphors, adjectives and adverbs, long sentences, a strong narrator voice, etc.-are all present in bestselling commercial fiction books. Or remember them.Īnd yet I don’t think this fully explains it. They’re still haircuts and outfits, of course.
There is certainly prose that hews closely to generic writing we might experience outside of fiction-a standard that changes from time to time, location to location, milieu to milieu-and thus feels “neutral.” It’s perhaps similar to how certain haircuts or outfits draw less attention than others on the street in a given time and place. It seems akin to saying “a listener shouldn’t hear the notes in a song” or “no one should notice the colors in your painting.” What does it even mean? In the most literal sense, a story is nothing except its sentences. “Just give the reader the story ,” these people say. The reader should gaze through the glass without noticing its existence. One metaphor I’ve heard is that prose should be a well-Windexed window.
The former is what’s “actually popular with readers” and the latter is “literary masturbation.” A writer getting off on their own cleverness. Often this is tied to claims that popular, commercial fiction is in truth better written than stylistic or lyrical prose that the snooty ivory tower elites allegedly enjoy. I’ve often encountered people who praise “invisible prose” as the aesthetic ideal. The discourse did come around to something I’ve long thought about: the concept of “ invisible prose. I find his ideas about “ Hard Magic ” antithetical to what I enjoy in fantasy-magic should be weird and magical I say-but to each their own. I don’t have an opinion about Sanderson’s novels as I’ve never read them. Much of the article, which wasn’t terribly well-written imho, focuses on Sanderson’s boring prose. If you’re on social media, you’ve seen the ripples of discourse from the snarky Wired profile of popular fantasy writer Brandon Sanderson.
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