The Magic of Excellent Prose

In the midst of learning how to be a book coach, I have begun to wonder if I know what makes a book good. Most of what I will be doing is big-picture stuff: helping the client understand her main character’s motivations and create a plot that makes sense and ends satisfactorily; keeping her on track with the main point of the story, and things like that.

A book coach is also expected to point out weaknesses in the client’s prose and suggest ways to improve. Author Accelerator offers a very helpful Hierarchy of Editorial Concerns, based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Very basic elements, like plot and setting, are on the bottom tier, and prose style doesn’t even show up till you’re four rungs up the ladder. Writers are to be reminded to show, not tell, and to make their prose tight. They are told not to get bogged down in exposition and description. Readers these days, it is thought, have short attention spans and a seventh grade reading level.

In the midst of all this analyzing of basic story elements, I’m beginning to miss the magic of excellent prose. So I stopped for a while to see if I could get that ol’ magic back by simply reading beautiful prose.

I picked up two books: Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), and Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair (1951).

Read this, from Tess:

“The outskirt of the garden in which Tess found herself had been left uncultivated for some years, and was now damp and rank with juicy grass which sent up mists of pollen at a touch; and with tall blooming weeds emitting offensive smells—weeds whose red and yellow and purple hues formed a polychrome as dazzling as that of cultivated flowers. She went stealthily as a cat through this profusion of growth, gathering cuckoo-spittle on her skirts, cracking snails that were underfoot, staining her hands with thistle-milk and slug-slime, and rubbing off upon her naked arms sticky blights which, though snow-white on the apple-tree trunks, made madder stains on her skin.”

Now this, from The End of the Affair:

“The gulls flew low over the barges and the shot-tower stood black in the winter light among the ruined warehouses. The man who fed the sparrows had gone and the woman with the brown-paper parcel, the fruit-sellers cried like animals in the dusk outside the station. It was as if the shutters were going up on the whole world; soon we should all of us be abandoned to our own devices.”

I loved reading both of these. I am interested in the characters. I want to keep reading to find out what happens to them. And I like these descriptions along the way. If reading a book is like a journey, perhaps there are some of us who don’t want to just get to the end as soon as possible. Maybe some readers are impatient with description, but not all of them, surely. Part of being a good book coach is helping the writer identify her ideal reader, and then write for that person. I hope that at some point I can serve a writer whose ideal reader loves this kind of description. I can then tell her, “Go for it. I’m right there with you.”