• Welcome to the Fantasy Writing Forums. Register Now to join us!

Prose Style Concern

MSadiq

Dreamer
I´m planning, God willing, insha'Allah, to write a fantasy series, but my major concern is my prose style; my first language isn't English. It's Arabic, but, I'd say, I'm quite competent, but my style doesn't conform to English's usual preferences. Still, I'm writing fiction, so there should be some wiggle room.

While I haven't written anything outside of a short story, which was, in a way, a "formalization" of a local folktale, I came up with some prose that doesn't take place in anywhere to test my style. Because I naturally write, well, like an Arab would, I leaned more into it, so it would not come out as an English-Arabic blob with misaligned features.

I'd appreciate your feedback very much. Is it too weird? Repetitive? Hard to follow? Does it have "redundancy"?


The man’s almost-corpse dropped with the heaviness of a boulder onto the torrid, scarlet, desert sand, back laced with arrows; from afar, his visage seemed of a giant urchin. Enemies, five hundred strong surrounding him, like a necklace on a girls neck. Still, they did not dare approach a hand span closer; his presence required trepidation and demanded reverence.

“Saddlebags swollen with silver and gold,” a man clamored, breaking the noiselessness, “for whoever sunders his head.”


He was motionless as a mountain, as if the world around him had turned black, a canvas inked to absolute pitchiness, punctuated with blobs of white malign. Eyes shooting him stares of daggers, parched—lusting to spurt from his flesh springs of delicious red.


“Pride, that’s what you lack,” Qais said, walking backwards as he faced Baqir with swagger in his gait, throwing his weight left and right in strut and making wide swings with his fists and drumming them on his chest.
 
I’d say you’re working at a level higher than simply ‘competent’ - with caveats.

I would not read this in isolation and assume the writer is Arabic in origin, despite the context made clear in the passage.

You’ve obviously been purposeful to use archaic adjacent language, which works for fantasy / classic / historic in flavour.

There are some areas where the texture is dense. Stacking simile and metaphor is making it feel heavy at the moment for me. The girls necklace line is interesting but it feels out of place, because people have different ideas of what a necklace looks like, for example.

Leaning into the Arabic -ness in this case is working anyway, so that isn’t an issue.

If you tried to write a Northern European setting and started using desert metaphors then I would be questioning things. In this case. You’re consciously taking into account the setting.
 
Top