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- #21
Demesnedenoir
Vala
In one draft of my working that sentence I think I mentioned my pondering whether that particular sentence was important enough to really draw attention to, a glance suggests it got deleted. I am assuming here that if I am talking about rain on a parched field the moment is important enough to really draw the reader's attention to it. The end of a drought or some such. Otherwise I'd just its raining and move the hell on, LOL.
I do concur on Sanderson's work being serviceable to good from what I've read.
I do concur on Sanderson's work being serviceable to good from what I've read.
Hrmm, perhaps this is just me, but I have a strange style, one born out of how I write most days. One thing that I do, constantly, is that when I find a word to describe a thing that is the word I use to describe that thing. So, in one of my works I have literal talismans. They are metal disks anywhere from the size of a quarter to the size of a friggin city. In a paragraph I am describing a character looking and analyzing his quarter sized fire talisman. I think in 6 sentences I use the word talisman three times. Once at the beginning to say this character had grabbed the fire talisman, once in the middle after calling it, it several times, and once at the end where he put it in his special drawer for talismans. There is no "variation" and some readers hate it. They consider it bland prose. I disagree. It is precise prose. It is not an amulet, it is not a charm, it is not a phylactery, it is a damn talisman.
I point this out for one reason, the definition of "good prose" is so very, very subjective. Granted, there is a threshold of quality. When someone meets that threshold I would call the prose acceptable. This is John Grisham. His prose is tight, accurate, but not pretty. It is acceptable. Sanderson is serviceable to good. Most of the time it is serviceable, however, there are points, like that final fight at the end of Words of Radiance, where his prose is good to great, but on average just good.
The question of "good prose" is not just a micro consideration. Often times, the strength of prose is judged in the macro perspective, over books and chapters, rather than by sentences and paragraphs. So, let's turn to your examples, Dem, and presuppose that an entire book is written in the style of sentence 3. The unfortunate truth is, while great as a single sentence, it would not work for the whole of a book. It would bog the book a bit too much. Why? Because, it would draw out so many unimportant, yet necessary details, that we would be describing things with such detail that the reader would get lost. While ther should be a presumption against passive voice or adverbs, that presumption is rebuttable. Passive voice should be used when deliberately obfuscating the actor. -ly adverbs should be used when the action is rathe unimportant and the information needs to be conveyed quickly. And any number of items for what makes "good prose" has an exception that can be met for a single instance. Just like in baseball you have all of these statistics telling what a batter can and cannot hit and where he hits or doesn't. But, on any given night that can change. Normally a batter is a 33% average. That is a really good batter, depending on HRs and RBIs he could be a player of the year candidate. However, on this night he is 0/3 with a groundout and fly into the 3d base area and a strikeout where he was caught looking. He's just having a problem on the micro level in this game, nothing to worry about. You shouldn't go out and rethink his game because of that one bad night. This same thing is with prose. You can have really good prose, like a batter with a 33% average, and still have micro level problems. You shouldn't go and oust your voice simply because you have some micro level problems that some readers might dislike.