The Pitfalls of Prose

prose /prəʊz/ noun: written or spoken language in its ordinary form, without metrical structure

For a long time, storytelling and literature was told in the form of a meter, such as Homer’s Iliad or the Old English poem Beowulf or Ovid’s Metamorpheses. Prose was reserved for other kinds of writing: public speeches, court prosecutions, histories, and similar such serious matters. Metrical poetry was metrical primarily because it was sung, but it also limited the avenues of emphasis and was itself a form of emphasis.

For example—and this is indeed a very famous example—take the first line of Homer’s Iliad:

μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος

The first word, μῆνιν, is the accusative form (object of the verb) of the word μῆνις, which means “wrath.” The entire line in correct English, however, must be translated as “sing, goddess, about the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus.” To replicate the emphasis of μῆνις as the very first word of 15,693 lines and one of the most famous epic poems in the world, English would have to twist grammar or even sense:

“Of the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus, sing, goddess.”

Or we might try repetition:

“Wrath, goddess, sing about the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus.”

We could try italics and an em-dash too:

“Sing about wrath, goddess—the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus.”

The Odyssey does something similar in its first two lines:

ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ
πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσεν

In correct English, we might translate it: “Tell me, O Muse, of the man of many twists and turns, who wandered very much after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy.”

But the Greek places emphasis on the first word, ἄνδρα, or “man,” which makes sense since the entire epic is centered around Odysseus, as can be seen in the title “Odyssey,” whereas the Iliad literally means “about Ilion (Troy),” instead of about Achilles himself.

Nearly a thousand years later, Vergil (who had grown up reading Homer’s epics) would begin the first line of his masterpiece The Aeneid, so called because it follows the Trojan hero Aeneas, with these three words:

Arma virumque cano…

“I sing about arms and a man…”

As with Homer, Vergil emphasizes first the accusatives arma, “arms,” in the sense of weaponry, and virum, “man,” before cano, “I sing.” Even the que tacked onto virum, which links that word and the preceding word with “and,” is more subtle than if Vergil had used the Latin et, “and,” in between arma and virum. However, that change would be impossible without accounting for meter. Therefore we see emphasis being created both by word order and the restrictions of metrical rules.

In prose, meter no longer restricts word order and placement and therefore cannot be a tool used to add emphasis. There might be an argument for the fact that as stories ceased to be told in epic poetry, as it had been in Beowulf, for example, (when English still had a flexible word order and therefore could add emphasis through word placement like in Homer and Vergil’s works), the structure of English naturally fell into a more rigid word order, since prose could use other modes of emphasis rather than playing around inside a metrical system. While we could no longer write a poem like Beowulf today because English won’t allow for the same flexible word order, storytellers in the time of Beowulf could not write as we do today because we are not restricted by meter. So as metrical storytelling faded, and prose popularized and took its place, English too lost its metrical shackles, but in consequence, it also lost its ability to emphasize through word placement.

What does this mean for writers of the modern era?

It means that emphasis in prose must be achieved through other, perhaps subtler ways. We can wiggle around with word order to a certain extent, but we risk losing the very sense of the English. Instead, our strongest weapons are voice, style, diction, and tone. All four of these make use of slight manipulations in grammar and syntax, but for the most part, they rely on the kinds of words used and in what manner they are strung together rather than their placement.

When writers struggle to find their “voice” or their distinct “style,” the trouble they are having lies in a misunderstanding about prose writing itself. Writers should worry less about who they might sound like or who they should imitate—like Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness or Hemmingway’s brevity—and instead understand the effect they would like to have on the reader. New writers struggle with the art of prose because they are too focused on their own persona and abilities as a writer and artist than the communication and eventual reception of their work by a reader.

Let’s look at a few examples that clearly show different writing styles and voices, and what effects they produce on the reader.

Nothing need be said; nothing could be said. There it was, all round them. It partook, she felt, carefully helping Mr. Bankes to a specially tender piece, of eternity; as she had already felt about something different once before that afternoon; there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change, and shines out (she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby; so that again tonight she had the feeling she had had once today, already, of peace, of rest. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that endures.

This passage comes from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. To break it down, we begin with the first line. We see a repetition of nothing..be said; nothing…be said. But the structure of the sentence also mirrors the next sentence, which has a quieter pause induced by a comma. Still, the prose ebbs and flows from one part; then the second part; one part, to the second part. The third sentence continues for a very long time, showing off Woolf’s well-known stream-of-consciousness, which she breaks up very cleverly. In the middle of the character’s thoughts, she serves another character food, emphasizing through her curious prose style that what “partook…of eternity” may very well be the most simple act of serving another person food at the dinner table, whose action returns the character, and ourselves, to daily life rather than focusing on airy, metaphysical reality.

Woolf builds up this sentence with semicolons and choppy commas, so that the stream-of-consciousness does not read as a run-on sentence, but, rather, follows a rhythm, much like a running brook, that is pleasant to watch tripping and meandering across large rocks and small stones. In this sentence again she breaks up the inner monologue with a parenthesis of mundane action, “(she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected lights),” which not only acts as a relief from the long, meandering sentence, but it mirrors the inner monologue with its diction, for just before the parenthesis, the character imagines that “something…shines out” which is “immune from change,” and as if to show us an example of this, points us to the familiar scene of light shining through a window which all of us has experienced.

But let us turn now to another writer who will read quite differently from Woolf.

“Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond.”

This is from Ernest Hemmingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. His rather short, punchy sentences and simple, yet powerful word choice produce the prose style Hemmingway is famous for. He is not concerned with his repetition of “living was…” which ultimately adds to his style and communicates the point of this passage, which is that living is something ultimately simple and tied to basic nature. His diction, too, is unconcerned with flowery, unnecessary language: field, grain, wind, hill, hawk, sky, water, dust, horse, leg, valley, stream, tree… These words are not fancy, long, intellectual words but common and whole, and they are all the more powerful because they are ancient words, eternal words, and they paint the scene with broad, bold brushstrokes unconcerned with the finer details because he trusts in the readers to see the horse, the field, the valley, and the tree themselves.

He will not tease out the field any further than the grain blowing in the wind, but the image is there instantly in less than ten words at a time, because that is also the meaning inherent in the words, that life is in the mundane, in the elements of Nature. Economical language, one might say, or just as easily truthful, at the heart of things, and not reinventing the wheel, which can come as a relief to readers who might wish to be told a story without too much fluff and which canters on at a swift, clean pace.

On the opposite spectrum of this prose style, one may stumble upon this passage:

“One realises, with horror, that the race of men is almost extinct in Europe. Only Christ-like heroes and woman-worshipping Don Juans, and rabid equality-mongrels. The old, hardy, indomitable male is gone. His fierce singleness is quenched. The last sparks are dying out in Sardinia and Spain. Nothing left but the herd-proletariat and the herd-equality mongrelism, and the wistful poisonous self-sacrificial cultured soul. How detestable…”

That’s D.H. Lawrence in his travel writing Sea and Sardinia, which is an example of his prose at its most stylized (he can wield a quick witticism and punchy dialogue as good as any of the great masters, but for the purpose of this essay I will show off his more artistic language).

We can see in this passage D.H. Lawrence’s love of hyphenated words to create more complex, or even new, words. We have Christ-like, woman-worshipping, equality-mongrels, herd-proletariat, herd-equality, and self-sacrificial. He even tosses about equality and herd again but in different combinations. This causes the effect of a conglomerated, hyper-intellectual world lived mainly in words, in personal consciousnesses, and lofty, metaphorical spaces such as societies and genders and religions and souls. Yet Lawrence is masterful with his vocabulary and his ability to contrast the long, convoluted words with a strong, simple metaphor, as in “His fierce singleness is quenched.” We feel that statement about the male, bare and brutal, in the very depths of our soul, so that whatever else Lawrence had tangled and confused in other words, the core of his sentiments lies in this sentence.

We might look at another passage of D.H. Lawrence in the novel Aaron’s Rod, which is fiction, but still more stylized than his more famous novels Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Women in Love, and which I show, again, to emphasize his most stylized prose:

“No, you're not. But you've a love-urge. And perhaps on the recoil just now. But listen to me. It's no good thinking the love-urge is the one and only. Niente! You can whoosh if you like, and get excited and carried away loving a woman, or humanity, or God. Swoop away in the love direction till you lose yourself. But that's where you're had. You can't lose yourself. You can try. But you might just as well try to swallow yourself. You'll only bite your fingers off in the attempt. You can't lose yourself, neither in woman nor humanity nor in God. You've always got yourself on your hands in the end: and a very raw and jaded and humiliated and nervous-neurasthenic self it is, too, in the end. A very nasty thing to wake up to is one's own raw self after an excessive love-whoosh. Look even at President Wilson: he love-whooshed for humanity, and found in the end he'd only got a very sorry self on his hands.”

Again, we see the use of hyphenation in love-urge and nervous-neurasthenic and love-whoosh, the last of which is used as a verb, love-whooshed, in a rather comical way. This is actually an example of Lawrence’s dialogue too, also at its most stylized, when one can feel his own psychological dominance over the prose. In other words, Lawrence is using a character to explore themes and ideas that he himself is interested in, such as the newly-coined concept of a love-urge. Yet unlike the passage before, the diction in this dialogue is rougher, and more colloquial.

He also is more free with his sentence structure, overflowing with and’s, colons, commas, and fun, very tangible metaphors using words like swoop, whoosh, swallow, and bite. Also peculiar to Lawrence’s prose is an elaboration of themes, as we saw in the previous passage, where certain words and phrases are built upon each other, swapping word order to elucidate nuanced meanings, and reiterating the same claims in different ways to truly trap the sentiment he is describing. You can’t lose yourself. You can try. But you might as well try to swallow yourself. You’ll only bite your fingers off in the attempt. You can’t lose yourself, neither in woman nor humanity nor in God. At its core, Lawrence is claiming that you can’t lose yourself, but he builds up the claim, as one might in real conversation, fumbling in the dark for different ways to say the same thing.

Now I think it is relevant to turn to dialogue. Dialogue offers a window into other character’s thoughts and personalities, and greatly influences the voice and style of prose. For example, a writer can have dialogue written in dialect or with certain archaisms to express the time period and places it was written about, as Sir Walter Scott does here in Old Mortality:

"So ye're no thinking to let us in, Mr Halliday? Weel, weel; gude e'en to you--ye hae seen the last o' me, and o' this bonny die too," said Jenny, holding between her finger and thumb a splendid silver dollar.

"Give him gold, give him gold," whispered the agitated young lady.

"Silver's e'en ower gude for the like o' him," replied Jenny, "that disna care for the blink o' a bonny lassie's ee--and what's waur, he wad think there was something mair in't than a kinswoman o' mine. My certy! siller's no sae plenty wi' us, let alane gowd." Having addressed this advice aside to her mistress, she raised her voice, and said, "My cousin winna stay ony langer, Mr Halliday; sae, if ye please, gude e'en t'ye."

"Halt a bit, halt a bit," said the trooper; "rein up and parley, Jenny. If I let your kinswoman in to speak to my prisoner, you must stay here and keep me company till she come out again, and then we'll all be well pleased you know.”

In this case, Jenny’s dialogue is hardly legible to us now unless you really sound it out, but it distinguishes Jenny’s socio-economic position in comparison to the trooper. Sir Walter Scott was also interested in Scottish history, culture, and language, and its relationship to British history, so that he chooses to emphasize this difference in his dialogue. In other ways, dialogue can also shake up description and inner-monologue with wit, or it can be used—as seen with D.H. Lawrence—to communicate certain thematic ideas—or both, as seen in this clever passage of dialogue:

“The husbands of very beautiful women belong to the criminal classes,” said Lord Henry, sipping his wine.

Lady Narborough hit him with her fan. “Lord Henry, I am not at all surprised that the world says that you are extremely wicked.”

“But what world says that?” asked Lord Henry, elevating his eyebrows. “It can only be the next world. This world and I are on excellent terms.”

“Everybody I know says you are very wicked,” cried the old lady, shaking her head.

Lord Henry looked serious for some moments. “It is perfectly monstrous,” he said, at last, “the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one’s back that are absolutely and entirely true.”

This is from Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray. Wilde, in my opinion, is the master of dialogue, and he shows just how wonderful it reads, and how much it can communicate in a scene with very few words. Take this quick-witted exchange from the same book and in fact the same conversation:

She shook her head. “I believe in the race,” she cried.

“It represents the survival of the pushing.”

“It has development.”

“Decay fascinates me more.”

“What of Art?” she asked.

“It is a malady.”

“Love?”

“An illusion.”

“Religion?”

“The fashionable substitute for Belief.”

“You are a sceptic.”

“Never! Scepticism is the beginning of Faith.”

“What are you?”

“To define is to limit.”

While dialogue might be the trickiest tool to use, when wielded with skill, it can outperform description, which even at its finest often is too cumbersome with words and either too filled or too empty of dynamic meaning. Dialogue, after all, shares something much more human than description, and can communicate the subtle emotions and thoughts that are hidden in real human speech.

The last great master of prose I will to turn to is J.R.R. Tolkien, whose renown as a fantasy author often causes a prejudice to form as to the quality of his prose. But Tolkien is a writer who, as a student of the ancient epic poets who wrote the Iliad and Beowulf, was keenly aware of style and voice as the methods of emphasis, instead of the metrical emphasis of epic poetry, and valued how prose writing sounded out loud too. He was able to vary his prose to create a desired atmosphere for the reader, was a real stickler in regard to diction and tone, and was said to have often labored over one single word, so that nothing in his writing was ever superfluous or unheeded (even when some readers might claim it reads that way as they push through some of his heavier landscape descriptions).

For example, in his children’s book The Hobbit, Tolkien begins with this famous line:

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.”

At once it sets the tone as playful and fanciful, but also taking those fanciful qualities seriously, as children do, but from the perspective of an adult, which even more so affirms the topic of hobbits. His diction is plain and unassuming, and also direct. There is nothing superfluous about it, but there is a casualness and warmth in the style that suggests a father sitting around the fire with his children, beginning a beloved bedtime story.

Tolkien also uses much more colloquial dialogue in The Hobbit than in his other works, and they suggest an English-countryside kind of humor, as seen in this delightful exchange:

“Good Morning!" said Bilbo, and he meant it. The sun was shining, and the grass was very green. But Gandalf looked at him from under long bushy eyebrows that stuck out further than the brim of his shady hat.

"What do you mean?" he said. "Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?"

"All of them at once," said Bilbo. "And a very fine morning for a pipe of tobacco out of doors, into the bargain.”

...

"Good morning!" he said at last. "We don't want any adventures here, thank you! You might try over The Hill or across The Water." By this he meant that the conversation was at an end.

"What a lot of things you do use Good morning for!" said Gandalf. "Now you mean that you want to get rid of me, and that it won't be good till I move off.”

This funny exchange is crucial to The Hobbit’s balance of levity and gravity of the situation, which in this instance is a conversation between a hobbit and a wizard—two very fantastical creatures—and must at the same time communicate a certain familiarity with the reader. Nevertheless, we are amused, and through this conversation, we can glimpse the prideful, pompous attitude of Bilbo, who likes comfortable things and dislikes adventures, which contrasts Gandalf’s wise, witty, often word-playing self, who is at once amused and frustrated with little Bilbo.

In The Lord of the Rings, however, Tolkien chose to write in a higher style, evoking an ancient history, still legible to the modern reader but with the strange, misty air of a faraway past when dragons and dwarves and magic still existed, and legends were lived rather than sung about. While some of that familiar warmth still surrounds descriptions of the hobbits, who also speak more colloquially, the introduction of Elves and high kings also shapes much of the descriptions to sound more like recountings of long-lost history, as seen in this passage about the reforging of the Sword of Elendil:

“The Sword of Elendil was forged anew by Elvish smiths, and on its blade was traced a device of seven stars set between the crescent Moon and the rayed Sun, and about them was written many runes; for Aragorn son of Arathorn was going to war upon the marches of Mordor. Very bright was that sword when it was made whole again; the light of the sun shone redly in it, and the light of the moon shone cold, and its edge was hard and keen. And Aragorn gave it a new name and called it Andúril, Flame of the West.”

We see archaisms scattered throughout, such as anew and redly. Even grammar leans more archaic: going to war upon and the past tense shone instead of shined. The word marches used in marches of Mordor is not talking about an army marching but rather the noun which refers to an area of land on the border between two countries or territories, especially between England and Wales, which should come as no surprise since Tolkien himself was very fond of Welsh and Welsh history. He also studied many ancient languages and was able to skillfully manipulate grammatical structure, so that clauses begin not with the subject of the verb, but can be written Very bright was that sword or about them was written many runes or on its blade was traced without losing the sense of the English. Even the use of for instead of because in for Aragorn son of Arathorn was going to war creates a special linguistic atmosphere.

We see again this use of archaic language in the dialogue, not so much of the hobbits or even of Gandalf, who speaks loftily but also with the aim to be understood by all, but rather by the Rohirrim, the Horse Riders of Rohan, who were meant to resemble a very ancient Germanic people, and who therefore speak in a much older English, as we hear in the speech of Éowyn, disguised as a male swordsman named Dernhelm, when she reveals her identity while facing the Witch King of Angmar, who says to her:

“Hinder me? Thou fool. No living man may hinder me!"

Then Merry heard in all sounds of the hour the strangest. It seemed that Dernhelm laughed, and the clear voice was like the ring of steel.

"But no living man am I! You are looking upon a woman. Éowyn am I, Eomund's daughter. You stand between me and my lord and kin. Begone, if you be not deathless! For living or dark undead, I will smite you, if you touch him.”

It is clear that this world is not our modern world, but one that lies very far back in history, and this can be seen in the diction of words such as hinder, thou, fool, steel, lord and kin, begone, deathless, undead, and smite, but also in the grammar of But no living man am I and Éowyn am I, which completely switches the subject-verb-object order, and Begone, if you be not deathless! which still reads so fluidly and clearly that one cannot help longing for the time when we once spoke like this.

But Tolkien has yet more range than this. In his Silmarillion, which recounts the history of Middle-earth from the very beginning of time to the end, starts with an even more stylized prose evoking religious texts:

“There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made. And he spoke to them, propounding to them themes of music; and they sang before him, and he was glad. But for a long while they sang only each alone, or but few together, while the rest hearkened; for each comprehended only that part of the mind of Ilúvatar from which he came, and in the understanding of their brethren they grew but slowly. Yet ever as they listened they came to deeper understanding, and increased in unison and harmony.”

At surface level, this may not seem far from The Lord of the Rings, but Tolkien makes subtle changes to the language that gives his prose another tone altogether. For example, the cluster of words only each alone or but few together or they grew but slowly are not only archaic but austere, especially coupled with words like offspring, hearkened, and brethren, and evoke the language of Genesis in the Old Testament. Even the use of and at the beginning of the second through fifth clauses is reminiscent of religious texts, especially the New Testament in Ancient Greek, which likes to link logical phrases with καί, or “and,” thus also increasing its lyrical, even melodic nature, like a hymn that might be sung for worship.

To conclude this essay on the pitfalls of prose, I would like to emphasize that I am not showing these examples of different prose to suggest that writers imitate them. Quite the contrary, since these authors are known for their prose because they are unique, not imitating others but using language to communicate new and different shades of meaning to the reader. But all of these great masters have this in common: they understand exactly how their writing will affect the reader. They understand prose at an intimate level, so that not one single word can be caught astray or unneeded, not one single phrase is thoughtless or unnecessary, but rather they are tools used to paint images in the reader’s mind, to stir their heart with emotion, and to bring the story to life.

When new writers begin traversing the expansive, pitfall-riddled plains of prose, I urge them not to trip over their own ego, their own pride, but to think of the reader, the relationship they are creating with another person, and allow the words to act as bridges, as brushstrokes, that build and build upon each other until they tell a story, and at bottom all stories are quite simple, for they are all ultimately about what it means to be human, and, if you think about it, merely the act of telling a story is as human as it gets.