Prose Practice!

Why has the Yabanverse suddenly come to life after nearly a decade of teases, commissions, and that thing Future Authors™ do where they go around the internet harassing people with their grand worldbuilding and concepts?

Simply put: I wanted to write the best possible version of Babylon Today, so I accepted a dare to write Shadow X Ghost, and then I realized Shadow X Ghost deserved better than the sloppy start I gave it and understood at last that I needed to take a step back and learn prosecraft on a deeper level. The Yabanverse was sitting there all pretty and unhandled, begging me to notice it for once, flashing its towel, screaming at me to just do anything at all for once, so why not give it a go? Dive into the S-tier prose masters to see how they do it. Nabokov, McCarthy, Le Guin, Morrison, Melville, Poe, Adams, Pratchett, and Joyce were my first choices for testing how well I could convey ideas with language, and it was reading Nabokov— transcribing more accurately, writing along as I read it, three times over— that the secret to it mastering “prose porn” finally became clear.

I’ve long been told I can create pretty, ornate descriptive passages. I grew up as That Kid, the one everyone lauded as a great writer because I wrote things, and yet always knew whatever it was I scribbled was fairly lousy by professional standards. Purple prose, they call it. Why not amplify poetic turns of phrase or highbrow references? The best prose is poetic, you know. S-tier and S+-tier prose is more like a fusion of prose and meter.

Right?

Read a page of McCarthy and Hemingway, you get a whole lotta violent unpoetic scourging of language, and you love every word of it.

Poetry can amplify prose, sure, but more often than not, it just gets in the way.

When all else fails, just be “real.” Be punchy, raw, Honest™. Describe a rose as being nature’s equivalent of taking a shit in reverse. Mention God a bunch. Swear a bunch more. Describe everything all sex-like, and then pose like peak-era Brad Pitt like you’ve just given God a knuckle sandwich to the balls and dropped a shitty rose on his unconscious face, you’re so goddamn good at this.

Okay, you’ve successfully sounded like the neighborhood’s most obnoxious Not!Palahniuk, drunk on lead-gasoline and coffee and aggro’ing the neighbors with your slam poem version of Catcher in the Rye.

No, that’s not going to get you very far.

Well how does Nabokov do it? Nabokov and Joyce might very well be the most obscenely unnaturally talented prose-masters, and I’m aiming for the king, so why not break down Nabokov some more? Let’s look at how he’s describing things. Wow, so amazing. So ornate! So obtuse! So….

…. not actually that exceptional? Third pass through, the language is showing off, sure, but I can actually follow it easily once I pay attention. Nothing ever feels like magic, but everything feels like something, a very particular something, trying to seduce me. So why then is it so impossible to recreate when all the pieces fit otherwise?

So then you try copy-pasting some descriptions from Lolita and Pale Fire to your own story, thinking that, for a brief moment, your story now reaches Nabokov’s level. Because you just cut a piece of him off.

Well, that works about as well as scraping off skin flakes from a master chef and serving them in your new dish and claiming you’ve achieved their level.

Actually, something is starting to become clearer. Those Nabokovian passages don’t fit at all, do they? If anything, they feel more like purple prose now, which is what the hack-frauds always accuse Nabokov of being when they only read dialog and have to wade a few dozen pages before they find a particular pair of squiggles that grants them permission to begin reading.

Indeed, I noticed that if anything, transplanting S+ and S-tier passages to unfitting books just makes both worse.

And that’s when it clicked.

Control!

That’s what the masters have. That’s why Hemingway and Le Guin are in that tier of mastery when they are nowhere near as arrogant with their image-painting skills.

You might be adult enough to say “I don’t use thesauruses to write descriptive passages” and you might be daring enough to describe a kindergarten class like Epstein would for some ‘edgy’ symbolism that everyone will thank you for not writing, you might even decide that you don’t want to risk the humiliation of being laughed at for writing this month’s Bulwer-Lytton Prize winner so you go full beige instead.

But if you have any level of actual control of language, it doesn’t matter how flowery or dead your prose is; it always reaches a higher level.

The more you control language, the more simply every other lesson flows and, ultimately, the more consciously you can break the rules.

Reading through Lolita again, what I realized— how impossible it was to plagiarize it; almost any given passage in any other book would feel out of place (sans the necessary connective tissue, and even then sometimes).

Reading through Ishiguro and Plath, I started understanding quickly the difference between making a flowery and “well-written” sentence vs one that felt controlled in relation to everything else. I’ve long known to avoid purple prose, but until recently I never understood why or, sometimes, why not.

Also explained why Blood Meridian is such strong writing when it seems to break half the rules you learn in any writing workshop. It’s like Picasso making an abstract bug-eyed portrait vs you at 15 drawing stiff front-facing pseudo-anime, like Led Zeppelin playing a sloppy jam track vs a garage stoner rock group that’s not keeping time correctly: once you know how to control the rhythm and language, then you can start knowing how to have fun breaking it to achieve a certain effect. All of a sudden, you start realizing that spending $30 words on 50¢ scenes isn’t the same as making a 50¢ scene worth $30.

124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.

Broken down, that’s just “A house was haunted.” But saying it like that feels like vandalism. That’s what I’ve come away with: bad prose can be summarized and you go “Why didn’t you just write this instead? The summary is better.” Good prose can be summarized and you go “Oh, what an image you’ve made out this, very evocative!” Great prose can be summarized and you go “That’s doing the original line a disservice (or, conversely, it can’t be summarized, it is itself).”

Writing workshops/threads/feedback that I now understand more deeply just by reading a bit more:

“Vary sentence length and don’t use long sentences” often means “you cannot control long sentences yet.”

“Don’t use purple prose” often means “your heightened language has no job and is abstract description for the sake of it.”

“Don’t use adverbs” often means “you keep using adverbs to patch weak verbs and weak dialogue.”

“Show, don’t tell” often means “your exposition has no dramatic pressure.”

Then you read the A-tier and S-tier prose writers and they may disobey all the first clauses because they understand the nuance of the second ones.

Contrasting, this passage:

I have reserved for the conclusion of my “Annabel” phase the account of our unsuccessful first tryst. One night, she managed to deceive the vicious vigilance of her family. In a nervous and slender-leaved mimosa grove at the back of their villa we found a perch on the ruins of a low stone wall. Through the darkness and the tender trees we could see the arabesques of lighted windows which, touched up by the colored inks of sensitive memory, appear to me now like playing cards–presumably because a bridge game was keeping the enemy busy. She trembled and twitched as I kissed the corner of her parted lips and the hot lobe of her ear. A cluster of stars palely glowed above us, between the silhouettes of long thin leaves; that vibrant sky seemed as naked as she was under her light frock. I saw her face in the sky, strangely distinct, as if it emitted a faint radiance of its own. Her legs, her lovely live legs, were not too close together, and when my hand located what it sought, a dreamy and eerie expression, half-pleasure, half-pain, came over those childish features. She sat a little higher than I, and whenever in her solitary ecstasy she was led to kiss me, her head would bend with a sleepy, soft, drooping movement that was almost woeful, and her bare knees caught and compressed my wrist, and slackened again; and her quivering mouth, distorted by the acridity of some mysterious potion, with a sibilant intake of breath came near to my face. She would try to relieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against mine; then my darling would draw away with a nervous toss of her hair, and then again come darkly near and let me feed on her open mouth, while with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my entrails, I have her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion.

It’s funny how this is so ornate as to be purple in surface appearance, yet it’s actually extremely clear what’s happening. Humbert is dressing up “We kissed, I touched her cunt, she grabbed my cock” in the most flowery prose he could because of course he would, he’s describing his first tryst with his most beloved doomed love. I mean no disrespect to Jim Theis, the dude could have been great if he had kept up writing because he WAS only 16 years old when he wrote Eye of Argon, but I can’t help but think how he’d write this passage

Under the stygian abyssal expanses of the ink-hued duskfall, the willing wenchlet of growling Humbert’s passions ignited the rich slut’s juvenile manhood’s violent childbearing gland as his chubby grasping phalangic tentacles squirmed and rippled along the vile heiress’s mountainous thighs. Beyond the verdant emerald green border of the gasping night’s garden, viperous wenches in shimmering jewels and men clad in black tweed suits that rolled along their blubbering masses until they apepared more like fat undulating pigs in expensive threaded tuxedos played ignoramus games of printed rectangular cards against the wooden table while Humbert and his willing wench copulated innocently with gentle touches.

Great writers know how to use appositives and polysyndetons expertly, he keeps the subject clear and only obscures it to make a point

Purple prose gets in the way of itself by forgetting to actually ground the writing in concrete details and logic. But as long as it sounds fancy, some won’t mind or thinks it sounds highbrow and literary when in reality it’s just unclear and confusing. That’s why writing workshops’ 101 typically says to strip everything out, since the actual wisdom is to make sure the sentences serve the scene and keep the action clear, rather than drowning it in adjectives, commas, em-dashes, questions, and whatnot to seem more intelligent than it actually is— like I’m doing right now!

Dickens, Adams, the lot of them knew to keep concrete facts, tangible reactions, and clear framing center to every scene, and ornament it with a certain cadence and ornateness only when it could afford it.

A lesser writer gets too caught up in abstract metaphors and confusing or unfitting personification in ways that might be beautiful in isolation, but added up, doesn’t make any meaningful image

Control of language is how the masters managed to do what they did.
Why bother with this? Because I realized that if I could reach the A+ and S-tier of prose writing, there’s literally no story I can’t write; nothing is beyond realization.

C-tier writing is perfectly fine by design, but when it comes to the pretty scenes and ideas, a lack of control quickly devolves into purple prose or forced writing.

The Makai-Ichi Budokai arc was an accidental final exam. I’m not going to pretend it’s at that level, because it probably isn’t, but it was my first serious attempt at trying to maintain a strong level of control throughout. Let’s see if I succeeded in any reasonable regard….