Help Wanted!

Well, I mean, you can't judge a craft by the slush pile. Ask them about the authors they work with and areas of the prose that are a little too "try hard" versus those that are "glossed over."

 

I don't think a writers voice or style is necessarily an experimental or advanced technique. It is something that can be nurtured from the start while still imparting the fundamentals.

 

Depending on what you mean by "write right," I may or may not agree. If it means you can't sell dense, descriptive prose, that's empirically false.

Part of the problem with characterizing something as "purple prose" is that it is highly subjective. I also think it is much harder to critique, and very easy to call anything purple if it isn't lean and spare. Many critiquers I come across would have nothing but criticism for the style of Peake or Nabokov or Shirley Jackson or Angela Carter, which tells me they lack the skill to distinguish between purple prose and effective dense or descriptive prose. People who can't make that distinction are not people you want telling new writers with more flowery styles whether what they're doing is good or bad. When you come across a new writer who writes like Dickens, you don't try to turn them into Lee Child (whom I love), you try to help them become effective at telling stories in their chosen style (assuming they've chosen it and aren't just flailing blindly).

 

Ok...but I can think of a few best sellers in recent times with generic prose. All I'm saying is that story matters more than prose because it's ultimately the story we're trying to sell to readers. But not everyone agrees with this concept and I'm cool with that.

As an aside, I've read a lot of boring books lately with polished prose. Beautiful prose without a story just won't do it for me.

OP: If you feel that sharing responsibilities with another writer will help strengthen your craft then it's all good. Do that. I wish you well in finding a reasonable arrangement.

 

Lest someone point out those are older works, look (for just one example) at Brian Catling's 2015 fantasy novel The Vorrh, which was quite good and one of the few fantasy works I've seen well-received in more of the literary community. As one reviewer (who liked the novel) put it:

"Catling is as close to a Renaissance Man as we get these days, and the novel reads like a painting, filled with intense imagery, complex constructions, and unusual metaphors....The language is rich and even overwhelming, often teetering on the edge of bombast without ever quite going over. You can get lost in its passages; Catling has an eerie ability to bring all of your senses to bear."

When I read works like that, I sometimes imagine what the reaction would have been had the writer, while writing, posted excerpts for critique on writing forums. The commentary would be vastly negative and critical on most of them, I suspect. Mythic Scribes seems to me to have a pretty good base of writers when it comes to critique, but not all writing forums do.

 

Not everyone wants to write a bestseller, nor should they. I think story and prose are both important. One can make up for a lack in the other, at least to some extent. Ideally, I'd like a good combination of both (and the good prose can be lean and mean or it can be lush and descriptive; I like both).

 

You can master fundamentals with lean or lush prose. Either approach can work. New writers who are writing over the top purple prose aren't screwing up because they are writing dense prose, they're screwing up because they aren't doing it well.

 

He was pretty new at prose fiction. Lots of poetry. One obscure novel before The Vorrh I believe. In any event, whether it is harder to do well or not there's no reason to beat it out of new writers. If that's the style they've chosen, they should be helped to develop it, in my view. However, that places a greater burden on the critiquer.

 

Just a word on co-authoring. I would put ghost writing as a sub-type of co-authoring. Often in that relationship, the instigator has ideas (e.g., her life story, anecdotes) but either cannot write well enough to sell, or lacks the confidence (or time) to try. I would not be surprised to find that in some cases, the instigator (is there a word for this?) might even have written a draft themselves, and so claim a co-author standing. I suspect ghost writing is a complex relationship.

In any case, ghost-written books clearly can succeed, so a request for co-authors is not a foolish request. I will point out, rather unnecessarily, that ghost writers get paid. But amateurs abound in every endeavor. The one question I'd ask of the OP is this: if your own writing is so poor (you said you've heard this from multiple sources), then if you were to try to co-author, wouldn't the other person be forced to rewrite your work? You did say you were willing to share the workload more or less equally. And if you aren't, in effect, writing half the story, then all that remains is that you supply the ideas while the other person writes the story. Which is exactly what people were criticizing.

That's on the negative side. On the positive, if you were to find a writing partner, there's every chance that your own writing might improve as you work together. So there's every reason to try, however dubious some of us sound.

 

I got the impression from this
>I cannot write. I am terrible at writing. My descriptions are horrible, the point does not come across,
>and the characters, though strong as characters, have weak dialogue.
that your writing was atrocious. I think that's where people got the idea that you wanted someone else to do the writing.

By your revision, maybe what you want is a developmental editor.

 

Agreed. I am a trained poet from way back and it still informs in my writing. Poetry is basically prose in distilled form, and having a grounding in poetry, even though I don't write it, anymore, has given extra punch to my narrative, in my opinion.

 

Guess I'm the only one here that doesn't like poetry or who thinks that story is more important than prose. I mean, hard to read prose isn't going to keep me around. But if you have lovely words and no story, I'm just as gone. A strong combination of both is what makes good books imho. Then again, I don't believe in polishing and polishing and polishing to make my sentences all the shinier. That works for some authors but not for me. I choose to focus on story and emotion above all else. My prose may be simple (I think it is) but that's just how I write. Not everyone is going to like my work and I'm okay with that fact. Finally, this is more for the OP, I tend to write more pulp fiction vs literary fiction. So your focus is going to determine how well you want your prose. Either way, you're going to have to work hard to get anywhere whether or not you have a writing partner.