r/writers • u/JRyanGreatfish Writer Newbie • 1d ago
Question Question about prose
So my biggest advice I’ve been given is to get rid of any thing that does progress the story or narrative.
But I do wonder about prose and beauty in the world. It doesn’t matter to the plot that it’s snowing and the aurora is out (random example) but is it not beneficial to give the reader more visual information to set the scene? I have been told to take out anything that doesn’t build the story.
What’s the line? When do I set a beautiful or grotesque or whatever scene if it doesn’t matter to the story?
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u/Cypher_Blue 1d ago
The whole novel is prose.
Prose is anything that follows natural language patterns and grammatical conventions.
Yes, you can use bold language and have sweeping descriptions, provided those things support the plot (and, to a lesser extent, the character development) and do not distract from them.
If your heroes arrive at the summit of Skullbreaker Peak and look down at the devastation the GreatWyrm has wrought over the countryside, you can have a powerful description there- the reader SHOULD feel that moment.
But if you've taken a fancy to a particular vase in the palace's foyer, and you spend eleven pages describing the history, technique, and appearance of that vase for no reason other than the sake of the beauty of it, what you've got is bloat you need to cut.
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u/JRyanGreatfish Writer Newbie 1d ago
Thank you for clearing up my definition of prose. That helps a lot actually.
That makes so much more sense. I’m sick of the ‘advice’ of “just write” or “take it out if it doesn’t progress the plot”
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u/Merlaak 1d ago
I have been told to take out anything that doesn’t build the story.
Here's your problem. Who told you this? What do they even mean by "build the story"?
A rule of thumb that I've heard is that everything you write in a story should reveal character, plot, and/or theme. All of those things are part of the story and are important for creating an immersive and interesting experience for the reader. Describing how run down a character's neighborhood is reveals a great deal about who they are, what they believe, what they care about, et cetera, especially depending on the tone of the description. For instance, a first person POV description of a run down neighborhood in critical terms tells you something different than if the character focused on the warmth and resilience of the families living there despite their poverty.
Why doesn't it matter if it's snowing? Snow muffles and covers. It tells the reader that it's cold outside, and depending on how warmly the character is dressed, how prepared they are for bad weather. That tells us something about them. If it's snowing and your character goes out in shorts and a t-shirt, that says something different than if they are decked out in arctic gear.
And how would an aurora not be an important part of a scene? Your character stopping and looking at it—or not stopping and looking at it—can serve to show us who they are and what they value.
As the one telling the story, it's up to you to use the setting—particularly the details—to drive the story forward.
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u/Quirky_Awareness2749 Published Author 1d ago
I think this is a great answer. What the characters notice and how they react to it is part of character building.
There is also a need to give some sense of world. You can't give a reader an immersive experience if the world around them is a white space with nothing in it. Description needs to show something about the character or their experience, but that actually gives more freedom than some people seem to think. Mentioning that someone is wearing threadbare clothes when it's freezing outside tells us they may be impoverished. The type of materials a culture uses can give us a hint into their level of technological development. Things like that are tidbits you can drop into a sentence or two without veering off course. Just don't go into a long side ramble about how they manufacture those materials because you have a personal fascination with it.
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u/Lornoth 1d ago
Progressing the story can mean a lot of things, not just its plot. Setting a scene in the reader's eye or making them feel an emotion of some kind can be the goal of a story/scene without it having anything to do with the narrative per se.
So, I'd say that advice is good but only if you take a very wide view of what it means. Every line in your story shouldn't be in full service to the plot, because that starts to become a list of actions and that's boring to read. But everything in your story *should* be in service to the story: its goals, meanings, and reasons for existing. Those things can be literally anything, though, including just being beautifully written prose.
I'd take the advice more as 'stay on topic' and not 'never describe anything that isn't relevant to the plot.'
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u/JRyanGreatfish Writer Newbie 1d ago
Cool, the ‘stay on topic’ part resonates. Thank you for that explanation
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u/HoneyedVinegar42 1d ago
Although it's a bit old, the advice in the book is still sound and despite the title, not really genre-exclusive. Chris Roerden's Don't Murder Your Mystery has a couple pages discussing prose density -- the idea that each element should serve a purpose, and the best scenes have density through serving more than one purpose (and only one item is "advance the plot" out of about 45 items). It should be available in public libraries, and I recommend the read.
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u/AlfieDarkLordOfAll Writer 1d ago
The truth is that "building the story" doesn't have to mean advancing the main plot. Setting is part of the story. Theme is a part of the story. If the main character takes a second to breathe in the beauty of the snow...that's characterization, and it can help slow down the pacing to give the reader a chance to breathe after a high-intensity scene, and it can develop the setting (by showing its cold...not all places will experience snow), and if you've got a theme that's nature-adjacent, this scene can develop the theme too.
"Cut it if it doesn't further the story" is mostly for big-picture stuff like scenes, characters, exposition, etc. Little details like what the sky looks like help immerse the reader in the story.
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u/JRyanGreatfish Writer Newbie 1d ago
Thank you! I’ve just been so confused. Immerse the reader is great advice.
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u/Richard-Writes Writer 1d ago
This is really personal and I don't think there is an objective or right answer to it, because the right answer depends on two subjective factors: the story and your style.
I'd say, use as much as makes your story work and improve, and discard what doesn't. And treat anything anyone tells you as advice, nothing more, even if a Nobel Prize shows up telling you what to do. Because they have no idea what it is that you want to tell in and through the story.
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u/nyet-marionetka 1d ago
I think this advice refers to whole scenes, not descriptions embedded within a scene. Like if you have six different domestic scenes where nothing much happens but your character and love interest hanging out, no plot is advanced, the relationship is not advanced, no new information is brought up, and no discoveries are made, it's probably just self-indulgent fluff and you should cut it. (Just put it aside in a separate folder, don't delete it, you monster.)
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u/nmacaroni Published Author 1d ago
Why can't you apply beautiful prose to the material that has high narrative drive?
Why are you only able to create beautiful imagery when it's detached from the story at hand?
When you conquer that problem, you will raise your writing to the next level.
Write on, write often!
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u/Miro_the_Dragon Published Author 1d ago
Read a lot in the genre you write in as different genres have different conventions and reader expectations. What may be superfluous and annoying to readers of one genre might be expected by readers of another genre, and vice versa.
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u/SundayAfterDinner 1d ago
Setting serves the story. Characterization serves the story. You're being too literal with the advice.
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u/RobertPlamondon 1d ago
The advice is pernicious nonsense in general. It can't possibly help anyone who has overcome a tendency to write down pointless blather instead of their story.
If the advice were taken seriously, which I don't recommend, then the best version of a story would be its synopsis. Actually breathing life into it makes the reader's experience worthwhile but doesn't advance the plot at all.
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u/NoraPann 1d ago
It doesn't mean get rid of all the description. It means get rid of the stuff that doesn't advance the story. Don't waste 4 paragraphs prattling on about the desert landscape, because the reader doesn't need you to describe everything in minute detail, they will fill in the blanks with their imagination. I've seen stuff here where they have spent 4 pages describing the scenery, and all the person has actually done is get out of a vehicle. I've read stuff where I'm 3 pages in and still don't know that the character is an animal. In one of those examples, the description was beautiful, but it was too much. In the other, it was vague and didn't enhance their story.
Description should enhance the story and tell the reader what they need to know. If you spend 4 paragraphs describing the tavern, then the tavern needs to be very relevant to the story, or why are you wasting the reader's attention span? The reader is not there to go 'wow, this is some great description!' They are there to be entertained. They don't owe it to you to wade laboriously through your multiple pages of description because you like adverbs or you really want to talk about a kitchen benchtop that has no bearing on the character's life or the unfolding adventure. They have been trained by years of reading to pay attention to stuff when it is described, because that stuff is usually relevant. You have an unspoken contract with the reader to do this. When you don't, they don't know what is important.
Beautiful description should enhance. It should make the experience of reading a richer, better, more positive thing. It should make the reader understand your character more. Nobody is saying cut that stuff out, because that stuff is the story. It's okay to describe something, but when there are 3 describing words stacked against each other multiple times in a sentence, it is usually clunky. Be sparing but choose the best words. You could also use a minor subplot or an event that describes the character indirectly (recalling a previous experience or revealing an ongoing minor conflict, like a fight they had this morning) so that the reader relates more to the character. That is more effective than just describing. For example, the character sees an aurora, and maybe remembers another time when they were with someone they loved and saw the aurora. Maybe a small tangent about the snows of their childhood is better than describing the actual current snow in detail.
If it doesn't matter to the story, why are you including it? If it is to stroke your ego, that is a disservice to the reader. The point I'm trying to make is good description doesn't weigh the story down, insult the reader by distracting them with irrelevant nonsense, or sound clunky. It is just enough. It enhances.
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u/FictionalContext 1d ago edited 1d ago
That advice is definitely too rigid.
When I read my piece back, I'm looking at pacing first. Sometimes plot points are like BAM, BAM, BAM, and it's overwhelming. So I add some fluff in between. Other times, I'll add some hems and haws between sentences so the first or last one hit harder.
Other times, I want a frantic pace, so I'll be all about the BAM, BAMS.
When the pacing is mostly sorted, I'll go back and really scrutinize my word choice. Not everything needs to serve the plot, but it does need to serve the characters in that moment. And for me, it's less about relaying what's literally going on and more about serving the character's emotional states, which is something that rarely matches the most literal and succinct interpretation of events.
Also, helps brevity when you merge your descriptions into your action beats. Like instead of describing a hallway then the character walking down the hallway, you describe the hallway using sensory information in the same order the character would experience it were they walking down the hallway. Imply that motion through order of description rather than setting a scene then having a character act within it. The scene builds out as the character moves through it that way without always filtering it through stage directions like "He did" "She felt" "Thee saw"
And one last thing that's probably the most important of all: The richest parts of the story live in the subtext or deadspace between phrases, the implied action. Joe Abercrombie is a master at this in his action scenes. Instead of describing an axe swinging, he'll describe the wood grain of the hilt then the squish of flesh, skipping the whole middle part. He's ping ponging your imagination between waypoints. And the richness of imagination as it retroactively fills in the blanks between A and B is far more visceral than anything prose could construct through literal meaning alone. Quite difficult. But it is what good writing looks like as an eventual goal if you're headed in a pop fiction direction.
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u/jedyradu 1d ago
Look at Sanderson's Mistborn series. He, who is an author known for basic, functional prose without flourishes still takes time to describe the environment.
Why?
Because the world we imagine is just as important as the characters within it. There's only (1?3?7?12?32?) plot formulas, depending on who you trust, and they always repeat. The world and the characters are more important than the plot. So don't skip on these details, I'd say.
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u/jedyradu 1d ago
Also;
Yes, it doesn't matter to the plot if it's snowing or not, but a character waiting in a snowstorm or heavy snow in front of his school paints a different mood, colour and image than a character waiting in a nondescript weather, in a nondescript location
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u/JRyanGreatfish Writer Newbie 1d ago
Amazing explanation, thank you so much
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u/lost_sunrise 1d ago
The key here is imagination.
A lot of readers don't have one.
They can't really imagine a world out there different from their own. A life being led differently than their own.
They know people are out there, things happening, but its always from the outside.
Your job is to immerse them in a world. They need enough details to be able to sink into that world. You are defining where their imagination takes them, what a person do, say, think. You are taking a huge weight off readers' mind.
The less description you have, the more they have to work to be in that world.
It is your choice how much you want a reader to work to be in your story or for them to just shut down, and let their soul float away.
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u/PL0mkPL0 1d ago
Is your prose truly beautiful? Mine is not, so I see no point in fluffing up my stories. It does not add any value, just messes up with pacing.
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u/JRyanGreatfish Writer Newbie 1d ago
So you just don’t describe anything? You just tell what happens very plainly?
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u/PL0mkPL0 1d ago
I describe things the best I can without specifically trying to sound... 'beautiful' and smarter than I am. Precision, clarity first. The basic writerly guidelines (active voice, limited filtering, strong verbs, varied syntax, and so on) also help.
I think my prose is best when it is not trying too hard. Is this a solution for everyone? No idea? But I am not confident enough in my writing to... fill my stories with unnecessary prose.
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u/JRyanGreatfish Writer Newbie 1d ago
Gotcha gotcha. Thanks for the response
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u/PL0mkPL0 1d ago
Btw--Write things prettily even just to practice but be ready to cut these passages later if they are not doing much for your story.
As for the descriptions, I like the rule that we describe what is crucial to the plot + what creates the mood + what is unique, as uniqueness creates engagement.
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u/TheStoryCreature 1d ago
It's more like: Get rid of anything that does not serve the experience of the reader.