When you have an idea for a story, you want those characters to reach as many people as you can. I think you normally think of prose as a way of doing that. It fits our time, the culture.
To design is much more than simply to assemble, to order, or even to edit: it is to add value and meaning, to illuminate, to simplify, to clarify, to modify, to dignify, to dramatize, to persuade, and perhaps even to amuse. To design is to transform prose into poetry.
Cormac McCarthy’s language is perfect. He is in my view the greatest living American prose stylist.
I started out as a writer. Poetry and prose and also kind of satirical David Sedaris-esque stuff.
I’ve always liked police-blotter kind of writing, or the writing of a policeman, right to the point and hardboiled. That’s how I see at least the prose elements of scriptwriting.
I read a lot of autobiographical stories, and I write plays and prose. And I play piano and cello. A lot of my downtime is devoted to that.
I find in my poetry and prose the rhythms and imagery of the best – I mean, when I’m at my best – of the good Southern black preachers. The lyricism of the spirituals and the directness of gospel songs and the mystery of blues are in my music or in my poetry and prose, or I missed everything.
‘At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom’ by Amy Hempel showed me the lean quality of prose.
I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn’t until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.
The cool thing about comic books and prose is that if a reader gets confused on page 8, they can backtrack. With films, you sit down in a seat and once the projector starts going you’re stuck for the next two hours. There are no do-overs, rewinding or starting again.
I would rather write poems than prose, any day, any place. Yet each has its own force.
Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.
Ideally, I’d like to write poetry for public performances and prose for a different, more contemplative kind of consumption.
Whatever brief delights it provides, mere strangeness in poetry and prose eventually leaves us cold, especially when we suspect the writer is stretching for effect to avoid the actual life before his eyes.
If geography is prose, maps are iconography.
In terms of graphic versus prose, I could probably do a lecture on that topic. But what stood out most was the difference in pacing the language and resulting scenes. One illustration can do so much for the reader.
I could stifle my voice, or strip it. I know that I could, because we can do anything we put our minds to. I know that I could, but it feels very unnatural for me to strip my prose like that, in part because place is so important to me.
Primarily, I am a prose writer with axes to grind, and the theatre is a good place to do the grinding in. I prefer comedy to ‘serious’ drama because I believe one can get the ax sharper on the comedic stone.
For thousands of years, poetry has been picturing love as a mysterious and tragic power. But when anyone says the same thing in plain prose, and adds that life would be colourless and poor without the great passions, then this is called immorality!
I’m a better polemicist in prose.
No, I can’t write treatments, I think there’s a danger with treatments. That you… you write out your first excitement and enthusiasm in a prose treatment.
I think there’s something quite interesting about the almost tragic quality of a lot of overwrought prose, because it has a much more self-conscious awareness of its own failure to touch the real.
I was probably 21 or 22 years old when I realized the prose that I live by, which is, ‘You get what you give.’ The more good deeds that you could do in your life, the more fulfilling and enriched your life is going to be. I truly believe that.
I am a pretty omnivoracious reader in respect to prose style, but if the prose doesn’t have its own music, if the relationship to the sentence seems unconsidered or superficial, I have a really hard time reading the work.
In prose, leaps of logic can be made while the protagonist thinks about things and arrives at conclusions. Even with voiceover, there’s no real way of having an inner voice without it taking over the entire story.
The poetic prose that most interests me is that of Henri Michaux.
For each detail I include, I throw dozens away. So I guess the first trick is to pick the right details, the most revealing details. Then I think one must simply write quick, clean, bright prose. For me, this means rewriting and rewriting: almost never adding, almost always cutting.
Back in the 1980s, when I was a lowly editorial assistant by day and trying to be a novelist by night, no god reigned so supreme as the god of literary prose.
I find old copies of National Gallery catalogues, which are written in the dryest possible prose, infinitely soothing.
If you have a good story idea, don’t assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.
I think if you write for long enough, you eventually have a problem with everything, because you start figuring out where you could be doing better. But as far back as I can trace, I always wrote clear, grammatical prose.
I’m not as good a prose writer as I’d like to be, but I never aspired to that.
I always think of Ireland as a place for complex ideas and prose. I like Irishness. I like Irish culture and Irish literature.
I don’t feel when I’m writing that I’m drawing from any other writer, but of course I must be. The writers I’ve admired have been not so very different from myself: Evelyn Waugh, for example, that kind of crystalline prose. And I’ve always admired W. Somerset Maugham more than any other writer.
That’s the most amazing thing about writing, whether it’s in prose or comics: that you can create something from nothing, and suddenly they come to life, like they’ve always been there.
The advent of Kindle, the iPad, and other portable reading devices has so far simply resulted in turning analog print into digital print while keeping the same linear prose format.
So I really began as a failed poet – although when I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.
I know my 17-year-old self would read my bourgeois fiction, full of metaphors and rhythmic prose, with a sinking heart.
There are a lot of editorials that have nothing to do with anything like that. But I was just thinking of that sense of prose as being very responsible and perceptive, thoughtful, intimate, and contriving a quote statement.
Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.
Television is much more collaborative in many ways than prose.
A prose writer never sees a reader walk out of a book; for a playwright, it’s another matter. An audience is an invaluable education. In my experience, theatre artists don’t know what they’ve made until they’ve made it.
I’ve always taken the view that works of art are not just things that we enjoy. They can convey truths about the world more vividly and to greater effect than ordinary philosophical prose can because they don’t just deal in ideas but show the emotional reality of them.
When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble.
I think poetry is a fabulous medium to encapsulate thoughts far more precisely than prose.
Eloquence is the poetry of prose.
It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can’t do in prose.
Adverbs lead to overwriting. Try taking them out and reading your prose again to see how it sounds. Simple and less words are more powerful.
In prose, I think you sometimes have to write in very plain language, where every line may not seem to be so important, though in all writing every line is important.
I really don’t have a lot in common with the people who attend the Comic Con. It’s like assuming that all people who write prose are the same.
There’s a half-conscious state you enter when you’re actually generating prose, and you are simply a better writer in that place. In fact it’s the only place where you even are a writer.
I say that glorious prose is a fine and laudable thing, but without an enthralling story, it’s just so much verbal tapioca. Simply put, the best books have both, and the best writers disparage neither.
Why stick to just prose or just music or just newspaper or just video? Why not create new models for information that combine elements of them all?
Rachel Cusk’s books are like pop-up volumes for grown-ups, the prose springing out of the page to bop you neatly between the eyes with its insights.
The process of composition, messing around with paragraphs and trying to make really good prose, is hardwired into my personality.
Prose is all about embellishing and describing.
I don’t journal to ‘be productive.’ I don’t do it to find great ideas or to put down prose I can later publish. The pages aren’t intended for anyone but me. It’s the most cost-effective therapy I’ve ever found.
