The more I write, and the more I read, the more I get sensitive to prose. And I think there are two things that need to be balanced: One, a lot of readers ignore prose and a lot of readers want transparent prose, or (insert popular thriller writer here) wouldn't sell as well as he does. And two, even for readers who ignore prose, even for readers who want transparent prose, getting the sequencing of action right, getting the details right, getting the rhythm right, and especially knowing what to leave in and what to leave out, can have a tremendous effect even at a subconscious level.
It's about having a believable and interesting voice. I say that as a YA writer, and I know "voice" is such a huge buzzword in YA, but if I don't get the sense that there's a real human being in there somewhere, I don't care about how compelling the plot is. And if I have a good sense of the character's voice -- that's the basis for what feels intuitively right in terms of plot and character and theme.
I think that literary fiction needs to have prose that works harder. If it's an adventure story, a thriller, lots of fantasy and science fiction, then your themes and motifs and character arcs are going to come through mostly through the events of the plot. In literary fiction, often that doesn't happen, and you can have very intense character moments going on that are hinted at in subtext, and that can easily get either too obvious or too subtle unless the prose is working very hard.
Robert Olen Butler's "From Where You Dream" is not a book I wholeheartedly recommend -- in particular, he's pretty contemptuous of genre fiction, and I suspect you'd find it in large part pretentious and overdone -- but that's the book that sort of kicked me in the teeth in terms of thinking hard about what you can do with prose alone. And also John Garner's books on writing fiction, though those are perhaps even more pretentious.
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It's about having a believable and interesting voice. I say that as a YA writer, and I know "voice" is such a huge buzzword in YA, but if I don't get the sense that there's a real human being in there somewhere, I don't care about how compelling the plot is. And if I have a good sense of the character's voice -- that's the basis for what feels intuitively right in terms of plot and character and theme.
I think that literary fiction needs to have prose that works harder. If it's an adventure story, a thriller, lots of fantasy and science fiction, then your themes and motifs and character arcs are going to come through mostly through the events of the plot. In literary fiction, often that doesn't happen, and you can have very intense character moments going on that are hinted at in subtext, and that can easily get either too obvious or too subtle unless the prose is working very hard.
Robert Olen Butler's "From Where You Dream" is not a book I wholeheartedly recommend -- in particular, he's pretty contemptuous of genre fiction, and I suspect you'd find it in large part pretentious and overdone -- but that's the book that sort of kicked me in the teeth in terms of thinking hard about what you can do with prose alone. And also John Garner's books on writing fiction, though those are perhaps even more pretentious.