I love poetical language in prose. My favorite books not
only tell a decent story, but they tell it in heightened prose, either sheer
and lovely or powerful and evocative. There is a music to the best prose.
“The old man has been ravened from within. That blind and
greedy stare of his, that caved-in look, and the mouth working, reveal who now
inhabits him, who now stares out. I nod to Death in passing, aware of the sound
of my own feet upon my path. The ancient is lost in a shadow world, and gives
no sign.” (Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard)
Most of the time when I write, I strive for the same thing.
I not only want to tell the story, I want the prose to sing as the tale goes
along. However, I just finished a story where I made no particular effort to
get the prose to sing. There’s relatively little description. I minimized
metaphors and similes. There’s a lot of dialogue. And I found out something:
Constructing poetical prose takes an immense amount of time
and work. At least for me. On the days when I worked on this latest story, the
word count expanded dramatically above my usual average. And the writing was
just…easier. It made me think of another writer whose work I have greatly
admired:
Ray Bradbury was a big influence on my writing,
particularly, I think, on my desire to write poetically. Bradbury’s early stuff
is just so incredibly beautiful that I am often left in awe. Some of the stuff
he wrote in much later years doesn’t have the same zing and zest to me. I
wonder if he noticed too that it takes a lot of effort to create poetry in
prose. Did he finally get tired of the effort? Or did he just decide that a
change in tone was due?
I don’t think my discovery is going to revolutionize my own
writing. At least not yet. But I will be paying close attention to how this
current story gets received by readers. Do readers really care about beautiful
prose? Do some of them actually find it distracting? I know story is king, but
shouldn’t the king be adorned? Or is it
better for the king to have no clothes?
What say you?
