Good vs Bad Prose? How To Tell If Your Writing Is GOOD

have you ever wondered if your writing is good or not have you ever thought about the purpose of your own pros and if it is helping or hurting your story well whether you have or haven't good pros and bad Pros can often be the difference between having somebody fall in love with your writing or somebody hating it welcome back to the wrestling with words podcast my name is Cameron I'm a writer an editor and your host here we talk about all things related to writing and storytelling the goal is to help you tell better stories while also understanding how the best stories are told but before we jump into today's discussion bit of housekeeping first I apologize last week I was sick so I missed the upload for what would be this episode but we are back on track to our regular upload schedule however we did start a new series on the YouTube channel covering the character Ghost and the different types of character ghosts if you haven't already watched that video I suggest going over and checking that out after finishing this episode last week we covered guilt and how guilt can play a role in developing your character's backstory also a few weeks ago wrestling with words officially became a LLC this has been something that I've wanted to do for a long time and officialize and making the brand that sort of started as just a freelancing sort of project seeing a develop into a legitimate business is something that is really exciting between now and the new year we are working on coordinating some changes to the website as well as launching some additional Services right now I'm in the process of finding a web developer and a designer to help sort of overhaul the website as well as give the brand and branding a bit of a facelift there's also going to be a patreon that gets set up as well where you you all can suggest topic ideas and vote on future videos as well as get access to some exclusive content information I'm also going to be offering some sample first page critiques and edits as well but more on all of that later we'll have some formal announcements and whatnot but for today's topic Pros but more specifically good pros and bad Pros good writing and bad writing when I think of good Pros or good writing there's sort of two big buckets that I start to categorize these things into and this is sort of like a checklist or even something that you can use to confirm if you're either on the right track or perhaps you have been getting some feedback that you're writing is lacking in some regard we're going to go over those two sort of points those two buckets first and then we'll get into some other symptoms of perhaps bad Pros or ineffective Pros but the first question which is sort of the first bucket is you should ask yourself is your writing clear now I have said in the past that I'm a big fan of ambiguous storytelling but ambiguous storytelling and ambiguous Pros are two very different things the goal of our Pros should be to deliver information and deliver the story to our reader and being ambiguous with our writing can often have the opposite effect our writing should be clear and our audience should understand what is being said they should understand all of the W's the who the what the where and the when having there be this ambiguity in who is speaking and where they are or what exactly is going on is going to cause the opposite effect or make your Pros off putut puding the actual pros of our writing should help enhance the story itself and facilitate this information in a clear and concise way now there's always going to be sort of stylistic choices and even Pros that are a little more flowery or even going into the category of purple Pros there are times to do it and times not to but at the end of the day your writing should help the reader understand what is going on and understand what is happening in your story we should try to be consistent with our point of view and the narrative voice as well as strong shifts in the tone and sort of the atmosphere more specifically within a scene is really important to to maintain breaking these sorts of things can often be very disengaging from your story and even from the the writing itself and at worst this could turn off your reader entirely but again the difference between ambiguous storytelling and ambiguous writing are are are vastly different ambiguous storytelling is good if that is what you're going for if you want sort of this ambiguous mystery or some ambiguity left for the reader to interpret that usually isn't done in your Pros but more so in the story elements and the actual delivery of the narrative ambiguous storytelling can be very immersive if it kind of fits your tone and your story and again ambiguous storytelling isn't confusing Pros ambiguous Pros is in fact confusing Pros but the second on the list or the second question that we can also ask ourself is our writing interesting interesting is very Broad and it's kind of meant to be that way because the different forms and different genres that we can write within will vary when we talk about interesting writing we are usually referring to four things tension conflict showing and telling and the idea when we are within our pros and we are checking to make sure that these four things are being maintained it's usually in regards to am I doing these things at the right time and the easiest one to point to is our showing and telling or showing versus telling both are required in a story there are times to show and there are times to tell however what often can happen is that we find ourselves showing too much or showing too often and other times we might find oursel telling too much or telling too often and this will be a thing that usually gets ironed out during revisions but there isn't necessarily A Hard rule to follow it's more of a feel that you'll have to understand with your own writing usually if we give our work to somebody and and have them provide some sort of feedback or critique we can get a good sense of if I'm showing too much or if I'm telling too much and a similar thing goes with conflict and tension we need to understand the sort of roller coaster of conflict and tension and when to provide tension and when to not similar to conflict we need to usually there will always be some sort of conflict present but knowing when to really showcase that that conflict and then when to give some sort of resolution to that conflict and again the the is our writing interesting question is a part of Pros that takes the most to get a feel for because everybody's pros and everybody's writing style is going to be different so the sooner you can kind of recognize what are things that I do a lot of that might be hurting my pros and what do I what am I doing doing well that might be helping my Pros are really the best way to sort of repair this issue if it is an issue but really quickly if you are finding value in this episode or in what I'm saying consider liking or even subscribing as it's a good indicator that you're getting value out of this video and that it's a way to really help out the channel one thing in particular that we can really kind of examine or be a symptom of bad Pros is purple pros and this is a term that you might have heard before or might not have but essentially it is in reference to being too flowery or too wordy with our Pros there's a sliding scale of the acceptance level or the tolerance level for this usually in literary fiction this is a little more acceptable depending on the historical time period of a his hisorical fiction this can also be acceptable and even this can be acceptable in uh some some sub genres of fantasy and again there's exceptions to all of this some people may really prefer or really like a certain author's style and that style might include very flowery or even purple Pros but usually we want to shy on the edge of not going in the camp that is purple Pros usually you see a lot of purple Pros being used by firsttime writers or by um younger authors because we think that we need to be the most flowery and the most descriptive with our writing to make it good writing but good writing is subjective but it's also good writing is effective writing if you can tell a compelling story and you aren't using tons of descriptors or at least an unnecessary amount of descriptors then those Pros are good in a sense now someone who does the same thing but is able to have very poetic Pros is also good but the the difference is when it starts to distract from your writing or becomes even hard to read if you find yourself using a thesaurus for synonyms or for different words to to spice up your word choice it's better to go with the word that first comes to mind now you do kind of want to avoid Double Jeopardy where you have you know the same you're using the same word in a follow along sentence and in that case you might want to try to find a synonym but for the most part if you're going and searching for sophisticated or super descriptive words or words that aren't really used as often in in common language you're probably going towards that camp that is purple Pros but it's not always just descriptions it can be analogies as well using synonyms and analogies and and all of these different things to help aid the imagery of your story can sometimes be really distracting and hurtful to your writing but another sort of symptom that can be a sign of going down that sliding scale that is bad Pros can be overwriting now this isn't necess necessarily always the case but this canel has be an indicator that we're being a little bit too wordy with what we are writing if our word count is very high we either are dealing with too many scenes which could be more of a structural problem but if we're trying to trim out words it could be that we are just very wordy with our sentences good thing to practice doing while we're writing is changing up our sentence length in our sentence structure this is sort of another topic as well in the symptoms of bad Pros but changing the pace of our actual writing can can create sort of an unpredictable feeling usually if a sentence if we're writing paragraph long sentences readers will tend to gloss over or skip same thing goes for if our writing is very choppy and very short sentences and very literal we can often skip over or it feels like we're reading a grocery list of things that a character has done but another Point within the realm of the longer word counts is sort of our Meandering thoughts we can look at scenes and if they don't feel that they are concise or if we look in chapters and where we started and where we end are all over the place we can see that we might be possibly Meandering with our thoughts and Meandering within scenes and sort of the last point would be flat right writing and this is writing with without any tension or without any sort of conflict and I think that when when I think of flat writing I usually put the actual structure of sentences and the delivery of sentences in there as well so just a moment ago I referenced if our sentences are very very short very very literal this can often be very flat for writing can feel like we're just reading a list of actions or a list of descriptors the same thing goes for too long of sentences or there's no variation or no sort of longer Rhythm to our sentence structure now all of these things don't necessarily need to be thought of as we're actually writing the key with recognizing good and bad Pros is going to be from the revision process so what's most important is that we get the words in the page and then following that the second most important thing is seeing where these strengths and weaknesses are in our writing if it works out that you just need to get everything on the page and it comes off as very flat that's okay but you need to recognize and and and understand that you're you write flat on that first draft and that you can then go back and and revise but that sort of comes full circle then if once we recognize and once we learn to recognize maybe where our own limitations are with our Pros what good Pros are or even maybe what we're doing well in our Pros the best thing we can do is continue to go back to those sort of those two buckets those being is our writing clear and then is our writing interesting and we can go back to those two points and try to understand and try to look at our work objectively and see what it needs to be better or what might need to be dialed back so that it's not as dramatic or in the realm of purple Pros but that's all to say I think it's a good place to sort of wrap it up as well let me know where you're wrestling with this was a suggestion from the YouTube comment section so if you have any comments or suggestions on upcoming videos or if you want to suggest a topic feel free to comment down below and let me know at least until we get the patreon up and running but that's all to say thanks for watching and I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Wrestling With Words

Views: 5,416

Keywords: Good Prose or Bad Prose? How To Tell If Your Writing Is GOOD, writing, writing advice, creative writing, authortube, Wrestling With Words Podcast, Wrestling With Words, prose, writing tips, prose style, booktube, writing style, how to write a book, good vs bad writing, How to write, literature, how to write, fiction writing, writing fiction, showing in writing, telling in writing, writing advice for beginners, writing craft, creative writing tips, fiction

Id: HA8JqeGCLvQ

Length: 15min 43sec (943 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 22 2023