How to Write Killer Prose (2)

The most important piece of advice I have to share about writing fiction sounds really boring. It sounds like one of those dicta that sound meaningful, but don't actually mean anything. But it does, and it's this:

Your reader must be invested in your story.

Let's rewind. A friend's going on a blind date, and asks you for advice. You say the usual things: act normally, don't overthink the situation, be yourself. That's good advice, and it applies equally to fiction. When a reader first encounters your work, it's a blind date. You want her or him to be intrigued, to like what they see, to be drawn in. But how do you achieve this? How do you use words and sentences to make people invest in your fictional world. Can this be taught? Can it be learnt?

Absolutely.

Let's get the negatives out of the way. What are the sure-fire loser moves? What's the literary equivalent of asking your date how much they think your watch cost, or dragging them to a karaoke bar and forcing them to sit through your off-key rendition of My Humps?

Basically, any kind of peacocking. Overwrought prose, laboured description, simulated deep feeling, look-at-me metaphors (and yes, I've been guilty them all of them). The problem with this kind of stuff is that it sets out to impress rather than communicate, and that's every bit as distancing on the page as it is face to face. A successful first date is one in which an encounter between strangers becomes a shared experience. That's what you should be trying to achieve with your fiction.

Let's look at ways and means.

The first adjustment is philosophical. You have to take yourself out of the frame, and leave your reader alone with your words. The moment that your reader becomes conscious of you and your writing process shadowing their experience, the thread breaks. By the same token, nothing wrecks a reader's experience more surely than an author's desire to be thought clever, or worse, literary. If you're using words and constructions on the page that you wouldn't use in conversation, ask yourself why.

If you want to write successful fiction, get used to wrangling your ego. This is easier than it sounds, and you don't need Buddhist qualities of detachment to achieve it. The moment you're writing wholly for your reader, to communicate rather than to impress, the old show-off material reveals itself for what it is.

Let's assume you've crossed the ego barrier. You're writing away, and you want more than anything else for your narrative to engage your readers. And you think, you hope against hope, that this just might be happening. But then you start re-reading, and suddenly your words look terrifyingly random. You stare at them, your guts turning to ice. Why would anyone want to read this? Why would anyone care?

This is the second barrier and it's a lot tougher than the first, because it faces you with the brutal question: am I actually a writer at all?

Every fictioneer's been here. It's part of the process, a sickener, and experience teaches you that it's something you just have to battle through. This is absolutely not the time to listen to the tempter's voice in your ear, and stop. Keep writing, keep moving forward - a word at a time, a sentence at a time - and you'll break through. Next time (and there will be many next times), it will be easier. What doesn't kill you, etcetera.

Persist. There's no way round it: fiction is hard.

That said, there's a concept which, once grasped, will make your journey much less arduous. It's more a way of looking at things than anything technical, but it's the key to getting readers to invest in your writing, which is what we're all ultimately trying to do. If you can embrace this idea, and I promise you it's not complicated, then all the other craft skills - dialogue, characterisation, etcetera - will follow. For me, and I've been writing fiction for thirty years, it's the basis of everything.

Let’s go there.

I'm talking about the difference between porous and non-porous prose.

What exactly do I mean by this? Porosity is a measure of the empty spaces in a material. Chalk is porous, sponges are porous, and while I'm no scientist, I'd guess Aero chocolate is porous too. Glass, metal and plastic are non-porous. A porous sentence is one in which the writer leaves imaginative space for the reader. A non-porous sentence is sealed, fixed, and non-negotiable. Let's look at two examples.

'The man who walked out of the office had officialdom stamped all over him.'

'The man who walked out of the office was six feet tall, with thinning grey hair, a fussy little moustache, and ink-stained fingers.'

The first example is porous because it leaves space for the reader to complete the description of the man in their mind. He could be tall, short, fat, thin, old, young, whatever. The important thing is that his appearence has been prompted by you, but generated by your reader. The second example is non-porous, because it is so specific. There's no room for us to generate our own details, because the imagining has been done for us, in advance, by the writer.

I'm not concerned here with which of the examples is the 'better' description. What I want us to consider is the reader's contribution to the act of imagining. Let's go back to our couple on their date. If a date goes better when it's a shared experience (rather than one which is overwhelmingly controlled by one person), it's because both parties are invested. To be invested is to want a continuation, a future, a growing relationship. And that's what we want from our readers. We want them to stick around.

Porous writing encourages readers to invest in our story, because (although they may not be aware of this), so much of that story's world has been generated by them. The writer's words don't so much specify, as act as a catalyst.

Non-porous writing invites a much more passive response on the reader's part. The writer is in total control of the experience. (This, in its turn, impacts on pace. Processing non-porous descriptive prose puts the brakes on. Porous writing enables the reader to fly between plot points.)

Let's look at a few more examples (from my new novel #Panic):

He notes the shining fall of her hair, the pale shoulders, the scooped back of her blue sun-dress.

He looks smooth-jowled and sleek, and smells of Acqua di Parma.

...their hostess, an ageless figure with a transparent, Retinol-peeled face and hair like spun sugar.

Note how, while creating a specific image of the person in your mind's eye, these descriptions are actually pretty non-specific. You're doing the seeing. You're painting the portrait.

Scene-setting. See how the small details prompt the bigger picture.

Glancing at the pinboard in the foyer, with its announcements about the drama club and an upcoming craft bazaar, Jaleesa pushes through the double doors and swings her backpack from her shoulders. The hall is illuminated by a single strip-light, and smells of damp.

The interior of the bungalow has been the same for as long as Dani can remember. The same sun-faded curtains and wallpaper, the same portraits of Elvis and the Queen, the same knick-knacks and glass ornaments on the shelves.

As they drive into the city Ilya gazes around him. It's like a dream, or a movie. The temperature is neutral, precisely blood-heat. Palm trees and illuminated hoardings stand tall against a darkening, azure sky. The air smells of exhaust and Brad's cologne.

In the course of your story you'll need to employ both porous and non-porous writing. Sometimes you have to be ironclad and specific. You have to establish your structure, your time-frame, your inalienable facts. But the more you can encourage readers to generate their own imaginative experience, the better. It'll mean reining yourself in, sometimes a lot. It'll mean writing prose which, on the surface, looks much sparser. But at a deeper level, much more will be happening.

So how do we actually do this? How do we get our readers to summon up a room, a landscape, or a living and breathing character, from just a few words? It's not easy, and you're not going to crack it overnight, but the moment you get on track and start trying, your writing will improve in leaps and bounds. That's what we're going to look at in the next post. How to build lean, high-performing sentences that fire up your readers' imaginations and get them to invest in your story.

Meanwhile, two key takeaways:

1) Reader-directed writing sends a signal, it communicates, it's alive. Over-curated, ego-driven writing just puts out noise.

2) Get the reader to do the imagining. Choose the words that will act as the most effective catalyst of this process. If you're doing this right, you'll end up with fewer words. Keep your nerve. They're better words.

Until next time - Luke

Fun fact: the French novelist Collette (1873 - 1954) started each day's writing by picking the fleas off her cat.