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/lit/ - Literature

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4112526 No.4112526[DELETED]  [Reply] [Original]

I can't recognizing bad prose. Will I be able to after I've read more?

>> No.4112531

I can recognize awful prose but not "good" prose.

>> No.4112542

I can't make the distinction between good prose and purple prose.

>> No.4112546

Anything thats not written like Hemingway is purple prose.

>> No.4112562

>>4112542

http://www.nownovel.com/blog/purple-prose-how-to-recognize-it-and-tame-it/

>> No.4112586
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4112586

is this good?

>> No.4112585

I can't tell the difference between signs and signifiers.

>> No.4112594

>>4112586

Is that real?

>> No.4112628
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4112628

>>4112586
holy shit is that awful

>> No.4112634

>>4112542

disliking purple prose is blatant anti-intellectualism. stop.

>> No.4112636

>>4112586
this is the first extract that i've read from game of thrones apart from the dany diarrhoea bit and i actually kinda like it
i can see why people would make fun of it, but it does a great job of painting the scene

>> No.4112648

>>4112586
>>4112636
it's pretty fucking stupid. but who actually read game of thrones for the prose. you read it the same reason you watch naruto. you know it's pretty terrible, objectively, but it's a good experience. sort of like watching a sitcom

>> No.4112649

>>4112586
Can people say precisely why this is bad? All I really get from it is that there's a fair amount of cliches and the spelling out of the sound effects feels oddly childish.

>> No.4112668

>>4112542
To me purple prose is only a problem when it's, well, noticeable. When the prose swells unnecessarily in one place and not in another, it becomes really noticeable. Young writers do this a lot. They read a guy like Nabokov and try to emulate him. But see, Nabokov had the writing chops to maintain that singular, flowery prose style for a whole novel. He doesn't slip in and out of that voice, he's consistent.

>> No.4113897

>>4112586

cherry picking

>> No.4113918

>>4112586
The only bit that seems obviously bad is the repetition of "arch" in the sentence "...a vast flight of arrows arched up from his right, where the archers stood flanking the road." I guess the repeated onomatopoeia seems silly at a glance too. Otherwise it's pretty vivid and forceful prose, imo.

>> No.4113922

>>4112668
Don't forget that Nabokov was also being quite ironic about it, at least in Lolita and Pale Fire.

>> No.4113927

In the evening they came out upon a mesa that overlooked all the country to the north. The sun to the west lay in a holocaust where there rose a steady column of small desert bats and to the north along the trembling perimeter of the world dust was blowing down the void like the smoke of distant armies. The crumpled butcherpaper mountains lay in sharp shadowfold under the long blue dusk and in the middle distance the glazed bed of a dry lake lay shimmering like the mare imbrium and herds of deer were moving north in the last of the twilight, harried over the plain by wolves who were themselves the color of the desert floor.

>> No.4113944

>>4112526
>I can't recognizing bad prose.
I know that /lit/ has its own dipshit argot for asking such questions, but the correspondence of form and content in this sentence is just shocking to me.

>> No.4113956

>>4113944

What?

>> No.4113957

>>4113944
>form and content correspond because they both show the author can't recognize bad prose
>form and content corresponding is a characteristic of strong prose, and since they correspond so well the sentence becomes good prose
>but if the sentence is good prose, then the form and content don't correspond, making it bad prose again
>and so on

WHAT THE FUCK

>> No.4113962

>>4112634
If it's well-written, it's not purple prose. The definition of purple prose requires it to be so over-written it's distracting and melodramatic.

>> No.4113965

>>4112586

you know something... I never noticed how bad the writing was when I was actually reading the books. If you just take off your /lit/ hat and let yourself get into it, the story kind of sucks you in despite it.

>> No.4113968

>purple

Is Anne Rice considered purple? It's been years since I've read any of her stuff but she kind of pops out in my mind, I remember there were several times when she'd stop right in the middle of a conversation and spend 2 pages describing the surroundings in mind-numbing detail, I ended up skim reading over a lot of shit that didn't matter to me, like the texture and color of the tiles on the floor and the exact wood-grain inside a house, etc.

>> No.4113971

>>4113957
Form is content. The medium is the message.

>> No.4113988

>>4113971
That doesn't make sense. There is no form without content. Form follows function.

>> No.4113990

>>4113988
That's one view.

>> No.4113998

>>4113990
Make that make sense.

>> No.4114042

the short answer is yes

the long answer is if you read critically and think about what you read, you should be able to recognize what authors are attempting to do with their writing and distinguish success from failure. "good" prose can come in any style, the important thing is to know your own personal taste, so you can prevent it from interfering with your ability to appreciate something else. for example, i would say both nabakov and mccarthy write "good" prose, but one may have a preference for mccarthy's austerity and dislike indulgent, musical prose. imho the best readers are ones who can understand and appreciate any style, even young adult and genre fiction

>> No.4114052

>>4113998
>>4113988
>>4113998
It's whether you believe the point of language is to represent some essence of things that can't be truly captured, or whether language has its own meaning and can perfectly represent things. For example, whether "mother" is representing the idea of the definition, or whether it means what it is always.

>> No.4114057 [DELETED] 

>>4114052
There's a word for languages that don't represent anything, it's called gibberish.

>> No.4114058

>>4112526
>Will I be able to after I've read more?

Are you going to read YA fiction? Are you going to read one author or one genre exclusively?

Then no.

>> No.4114061

>>4114057
You're misinterpreting me, funnily enough. In fact, it's hard to represent what I'm trying to say with the constraints of language -- actually, I'm not really the one saying it, philosophers before me have somehow represented it.

>> No.4114752

>>4112586
I don't see anything particularly bad about it except spelling out sound effects. If he wants to put forward a certain sound, what is he going to do, write down the musical notes?