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  • SleepwalkingMK replied to the topic Topic #12: Prose in the forum Annual Theme Discussion 7 years, 10 months ago

    This is such an interesting topic, because I see a lot lacking in the quality of prose today, my own writing, included. But I’m thinking of a few techniques:

    Varying sentence length is a really great tool, like @law0413 said. I’ve also found that, when in a character’s head who is experiencing a really strong emotion, like anger, short, maybe even one-word sentences help convey that.

    I like to use repetition. Repetition of a single word or phrase at the beginning of a sentence especially. It helps build up whatever emotion you’re trying to get across to the reader.

    Also, I sometimes like diverging from standard grammar. In creative writing, the sentences don’t all need a subject and verb, or an “and” separating several verbs.

    Some authors write prose that sounds like poetry. Joseph Conrad is an example. In his story The Lagoon, one character is telling another character about how he escaped with a girl from a different class (which aroused the anger of the people in the system in which they lived), and so cost his brother’s life, while the girl now lies dying. Conrad interrupts this narrative with this:

    “A murmur powerful and gentle, a murmur vast and faint; the murmur of trembling leaves, of stirring boughs, ran through the tangled depths of the forests, ran over the starry smoothness of the lagoon, and the water between the piles lapped the slimy timber once with a sudden splash. A breath of warm air touched the two men’s faces and passed on with a mournful sound–a breath loud and short like an uneasy sigh.”

    Just two sentences, but Conrad builds into the mood by describing the “murmur” in the water, not just with his word choice, but also with the rhythm of sentences. The sentences contrast the character’s narrative about his escape, where everything was in a hurry, and the stakes were so high, by being long, drawn-out, but steady with one- or two-syllable words, evoking a kind of still sadness in the reader, not an excited/anguished feeling he had a moment before during the narrative. These sentences sound like what they are describing – a little ripple moving across a lake. If Conrad had put periods in the first sentence where there are commas, it would have sounded entirely different, and faster, which is the opposite of his desired effect.

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