Writing better prose

If you've already got the basics (grammar, etc.) down, the best thing you can do is read. A lot. Try to figure out what works for you and what doesn't - then try to figure out why.

^^^^ Yes. Reading well written books is the best way to learn.
Aside from that, journaling every day will build your skills.
One more suggestion: play with writing descriptions. Write about where you are right now. Not just visual, the snell, temperature, humidity, and the mood of the place. How do you feel being there?

I agree with the advice to read a lot.

Also write a lot, but don't just write, reread what you write and see how it reads to you. Rather than focusing on rules or snippets of advice, focus on how your words feel to you when you read them and what you can do to make them better. This not only helps to develop your skill at writing but also at reviewing your own work. Advice can be helpful but there's a lot more to it than just following a set of rules/advice - in fact viewing advice as rules can be counter productive and restrain your writing rather than improving it. Very often "rules" don't apply universally and are best not considered to be rules at all. See this thread: https://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?343564-Breaking-rules But also snippets of advice can't replace what you gain from the experience of reading and writing a lot and getting a feel for what reads well and what doesn't.

It's not that different to other skills... you need loads of practice to be good at something and you also need to be able to analyse your own work and learn to judge what's working well and what's not and also to look at other people whose work you admire and figure out how they make it work.

When reviewing what you've written it's sometimes helpful to leave a few days between writing something and rereading it. Rereading it straight away can help you spot glaring errors but you tend to still see the mental vision of what you're aiming at as opposed to what the words are actually saying.

Aiming for flow and clarity should help towards the writing of better prose.

It can take a long time to develop the ability to see - when reading our own work - the images conveyed by the words and sentences we have actually written, as distinct from simply seeing the images we think or hope we have conveyed.

Good beta readers are invaluable.

In addition to all the good advice above, particularly search out examples (in poetry as well as prose) of elevated, sophisticated writing, to accustom your ear to what good writing sounds like. Also study up on the use of rhetorical devices. You probably already use some of the common ones without realizing it.

Two books I read recently that helped me reassess my own bad prose:

The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher
Sin and Syntax by Constance Hale

no i have some wring books i use but i'ma newbie at the whole writing thing and willing to learn

Keeping a journal works for me. I mostly focus on clarity and meter, because it's a rare occasion (once or twice a month) when I can actually come up with a clever phrase or two. And that's never changed, even after all these years. Once or twice a month, at best. I imagine it's more often for real writers.

I didn't think of it, but nickj47 is right, at least for me. I keep a journal, hand written, and the slower pace of getting words down on paper allows me to think my thoughts through and get the better wording and phrasing in place. It's good practice for a writer.

And as everyone else has said, read widely. And then pause and figure out why a particular sentence you've just read works (or doesn't).

1) Don't love all the sentences you write. Learn to delete and rewrite things.

2) Read others and reread yourself.

3) Find out what time of the day works best for your brain and pick that time for creativity.

4) Coherence of the text is much more important than imagination. You imagine ten different situations, speeches, scenes, etc. You want everything in your book, even when these situations/scenes/speeches do not create a beautiful whole. Think of the complete work and leave out all distorting elements.

5) Texts need a feeling, apart from concepts. Try to keep that aesthetic feeling alive in the whole text --stop writing when that feeling is lost and return to your draft only when you are able to track that feeling again.

Yes to reading a lot.


Make sure you rewrite your own prose. Rough drafts always suck. Whisper that to yourself over and over when you're feeling down about your work: rough drafts always suck. We can talk about the exceptions but the phrase is so much more useful as an absolute because please, on the miracle day that a paragraph in your rough draft doesn't suck even a little bit, you will know! You can get up and dance on your desk, it'll be great, but till that day rough drafts always suck so don't even worry about it. The rough draft was you cutting your way into the jungle of story with a machete, and now you can go back and dig the soil and plant incredible flowers along the path. Or, you know, start with hostas, that's fine. (OK I guess they don't like a jungle environment, this metaphor is breaking down, the point is, start with flow and clarity before you get fancy.)

I really do mean rewrite. Don't tweak it, don't go in and change a sentence or a phrase. It really helps me when I understand that the words are not the story. The events are the story--the bones, the structure, what actually happens, that's the story, and that's what you use the rough-drafting process to create which is why it doesn't matter that the rough prose sucks. And once you've written it the bones of the story are pretty much in your head, but yeah, keep your eyes on the rough draft as you rewrite so you won't forget anything, but you're going to throw it away at the end, it's just a blueprint. So either open a separate textfile or press enter ten times in your same textfile, and get a blank space in front of your cursor. And then write a new scene while looking at the old one, a scene that follows the same outline and probably keeps some of the best lines of the old but also flows and sounds way better--not because you followed the rules and did it right, but simply because, now that you know how the story goes, you can be thinking about the words. Cover the bones with something pretty--or at least healthy and strong. Which is pretty, so what the hey.

Here's a few things that have helped me improve my prose:

• Reading, of course. And as you read, figure out what you like about what you're reading, beyond the big idea things like plot and character. Don't be afraid to dissect what you're reading, down to sentence structure and word choice.
• Journaling, as the folks above me have said. In particular, I keep a freewriting journal as a daily exercise. Freewriting is basically just sitting down and committing to write a certain amount (as in one page) without stopping or really thinking. That means no crossing anything out or correcting spelling. I've found that freewriting has made me a much more fluid writer. I can really just sit down and bang out some prose.
• A lot of writers say that in describing scenes, you should think in terms of the five senses. This can work really well if you truly have no frame of reference for what something would look or feel like, and need ideas as to how you would describe a scene.
• Honestly, any advice that boils down to "just practice" is good advice. Practice is everything, so do it in any way that you can.

Glad these things helped.

Re the remaining point below, it's advisable to be alert to using any one or more of the five senses (of the POV character) all the time, not just when describing scenes and not only if you have no frame of reference - whatever that meant.

thorbjorn said:

Here's a few things that have helped me improve my prose:

• A lot of writers say that in describing scenes, you should think in terms of the five senses. This can work really well if you truly have no frame of reference for what something would look or feel like, and need ideas as to how you would describe a scene.

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SwallowFeather said:

Make sure you rewrite your own prose. <snip> I really do mean rewrite. Don't tweak it, don't go in and change a sentence or a phrase. It really helps me when I understand that the words are not the story. The events are the story--the bones, the structure, what actually happens, that's the story, and that's what you use the rough-drafting process to create which is why it doesn't matter that the rough prose sucks. And once you've written it the bones of the story are pretty much in your head, but yeah, keep your eyes on the rough draft as you rewrite so you won't forget anything, but you're going to throw it away at the end, it's just a blueprint.

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Bolding mine.

I think the words are not the story bears repeating - this is a critical truth, and an epiphany most (all?) writers need to have eventually - but I would suggest that processes vary dramatically from writer to writer. I have never and would never, for instance, 'throw away' my first draft of anything, or rewrite anything from scratch. My process as a mainly-plotter is to edit as I go, to take my time pulling the story together scene to scene, to layer it up and flesh it out in real time, so that by the time I reach the end I have a pretty 'clean' rough draft. And the extra time I take in getting there is saved in the revision stage.

To be honest, I'd quite like to be able to write bare-bones, blueprint-style drafts - getting a concept down so quick and dirty sounds pretty exhilarating - but my brain just doesn't work that way. Lots of writers' don't. This is an approach I'd recommend experimenting with, for sure, but it's just one approach of many that may work for the individual writer.

Revision quite literally means "see again."

Revise. Some revise as they go, some in smaller chunks, some wait until "the end" then revise methodically from start to finish; some are recursive revisers.

Find out what works for you; remember that what works for one book might not for another, and be open to trying something else if one thing isn't working.