Imagine rating prose because it's le pretty. Go straight to the point and express information as concisely and efficiently as possible. That's what words are for. Everything else is just prose slop.
Hemingway does this and his work is only barely better than Joyce. Both extremes suck.
If the prose is not an effective part of the total achievement of a work, then it is not good prose. There's no such thing as good prose divorced from narrative, character, etc. I'm so sick of hearing people say "the story and characters were boring but the writing was really good." No it fucking isnt.
autistic automaton thinks he's allowed to have opinions on human affairs kek
>>25429800Based
>>25429766prose slop is so fucking boring, performative garbage that infests the neo-modern bullshit world
>>25429801>you don't talk absolute nonsense?>must be autisticnormies everybodygo collect your funkopops and psychiatric drugs like the rest of the totally mindraped cattle, those are your peers
>25429852>i didn't understand it, therefore it's nonsense
>>25429834>fighting proseslop with buzzword-slop
Literal NPC.
>>25429766This is an ESL meme, that's why it gets posted over and over. The focus on long sentences gives it away. Plus you could have used either concisely or efficiently in your sentence about concision, it's normal to do that with adverbs but you see the irony.
>>25429857>I'm too scared to reply to you so i'll post a shitty adhom and hope you don't noticePROSE DEMON BE GONE, this is a board of MEANING
>>25429982>Hating the faggot le pretty prose makes you an esl
>>25429852funko pops are reddit, and reddit is obsessed with genre fiction, not purpley prose lit fic. nice self-own, retard
>25430013>I NEED (YOU)S GIMME NOW
Based and Schopenhauer pilled
i'm not sure i even believe people like op anymore. they must be doing it simply for attention.
>>25430153attention whoring + fomo. entire generations of bugmen that think literature and language is only for facts and logic and data and trivia. the moment anything starts getting aesthetic it fries their cyborg brains. they're part of the downpath of literacy recently. think of high school lit like shakespeare now being taught in colleges only because teenagers are dumber than ever before. these are the type of vampires and parasites bitching about any prose more lucid than burger king menus or steely dan lyrics.
>>25430168No retard i dont want freaks like you judging stories based on how pretty its prose is, thats all
Ok but what if I just like it
>>25429766The antipathy to “style” is always an antipathy to a given style or autism. There are no style-less works of art, only works of art belonging to different, more or less complex stylistic traditions and conventions.
>>25430173>t. bugman
>>25429860Kek. OP utterly destroyed.
>>25429766>Go straight to the point and express information as concisely and efficiently as possible.Half of this sentence is redundant. You could have just written "Express information as concisely as possible."You literally just wrote "prose slop."
>>25430224no, that was a good sentence. books should be written with sentences like that.
>>25430300>more literal proseslop
Just shut up retard and go do something else, you don't have to like everything, if you hate reading just don't read, no one cares.
prose helps structure an argument and more importantly actually retain it in the readers mind thru novelty. if you hate prose why even read? just use AI summaries to generate spaces repetition flashcards to learn. After all that's the concise and efficient way! Look at yourself, you don't mean what you really say
It's an emotional thing. It just feels good to read a nicely written sentence. If the sentence reads nicely, you are more receptive to the emotions whatever it's describing is meant to convey. You can still tell a good story with minimal prose, just like you can still make a good movie with minimal visuals, but that way you're not using the unique qualities of the medium to their fullest, you know? It's language. You can build something beautiful out of it.
>>25429766Maximum simplicity is and should stay reserved for non-fiction or essays, not storytelling. You can build a good story with concise prose, sure, but you can also do it the other way around.So please stop falling into these dumbass extremes. It's not nearly as clever or insightful as you think it is. A good storyteller can work both ways. Language is beautiful and it's the author's job to handle it so effortlessly that it'll fire your imagination on all cylinders.
i don't know why these threads bug me so much.my sense is people aren't speaking from experience. they're not thinking about their experiences of books they've actually enjoyed. they're thinking abstractly about how they would justify reading those books if they were thrust into some kind of court of law. if i thought people were speaking from experience then i wouldn't care; but i don't believe they are.you need shift perspective, stop thinking about aesthetic value in the abstract, and look at what books materially are.materially they're a sequence of words. they're experiments in everything words can do.as a writer composes a sentence, they try out different combinations of words and observe the effect produced. sometimes there's a strange spark of mysterious energy when two words or two phrases rub against each other. what's going on? it's something that doesn't usually happen in everyday life. they experiment more, pursue and deepen that effect.then as they keep adding sentence to sentence, larger structures of meaning emerge: the development of stories and characters and scenes. this is another thing words can do, at the same time as they're doing everything else. the effects produced by the sentences now resonate through these larger systems, it's like touching one corner of a spider web and seeing the whole structure tremble in response.but it's really hard to describe and explain what's going on when your brain encounters these words and forms this brain--book structure that's larger than the sum of its parts. so if you feel the need to judge and justify the pleasure of reading, you translate that pleasure back into obvious, general values from your everyday life: i wanted to see this person succeed, this person punished, i wanted to find out what happened, i wanted to receive information, like when my boss sends me an email or youtube shows me an ad.but that's just the easiest way for you to justify the experience. that's not what the experience actually was. that's not how the words actually functioned when they made contact with your unconscious and set it spinning off in new directions.
>>25431464i absolutely agree with your general thrust, but i think maximum simplicity is always a virtue in art, fat should always be cut. it's just that in literature the question of what's fat and what's the real juicy meat is a very mysterious question, which it takes great artistic skill to intuit an answer to.
>>25431477(btw none of this is in defence of prettiness)
>>25429766>Go straight to the point and express information as concisely and efficiently as possibleThen just read a summary? What's stopping? Cope?
>>25431481Not enough fat makes the meat less tasty.It's a fine balancing act but we don't into nuance on 4chins.org
george saunders on style. incredibly insightful imo. the kind of insight you only get through the practical experience of honing your craft.
>>25431481I've always believed good storytelling comes down to a responsible blend of technique and expression, and I'd still feel that way even if the OP argued prose is all that mattersThe basic idea behind getting to the fat is whether it fits the scene or idea you're trying to convey. If I wanted to portray the beauty of a garden through the eyes of a depressed character, it would make sense to describe it simply, since he's feeling dead inside. Meanwhile, it would be fitting to explain it beautifully if the garden felt like a reprieve to this character.
>>25429766>Imagine using a big canvas when 5x5 inches is perfectly fine. >Imagine making a 2 or 3 hour movie. Everyone should stick to 90 minutes. >Imagine a song longer than 120 seconds. What a waste of time.
>>25431537>eyes of a depressed character, it would make sense to describe it simplyI can't speak for everyone but for me depression is constant negative thought spirals so you could justify a complex description but it would be seeing the worst in everything rather than beauty.
>>25429766Just admit art filters you.
>>25431536(the 'jangly, energetic surface' he talks about is a less pretentious name for the 'plane of immanence' mentioned in the screenshot here >>25431477)>>25431546no reason to demoralise anyone. i think the problem is they're neurotically overthinking things in a way that blocks them from sinking into the text and enjoying it on its own terms. it's like a self-constructed prison - but you can bust out of it if you have the will.
>>25431540Yeah, that makes sense too. There's always a reason to go simple or go elaborate. A lot of Nabokov's narrators are characterized as pretentious or snobby, so the ornate prose fits right in. A little setup goes a long way.
the more i think about it, the more the opposition between style and information seems completely bogus when applied to art.think about painting: there, style and information are the same thing. in the style itself you see how paint, bodies, light, space, canvas interact. you see their possible combinations, what effects get produced, how certain forces act on certain forms and vice versa. there's no distinction between the style and the information it makes manifest.it's the same in books. will i explain how? no. i refuse. not smart enough, plus i need to go grill my lunch. but read charles bovary standing by the deathbed of his beautiful wife, and consider:>Charles came in, and, walking across to the bed, he slowly drew back the curtains.>Emma had her head resting on her right shoulder. The corner of her mouth, set open, looked rather like a black hole in the lower part of her face; her thumbs were curved across the palms of her hands; a sort of white powder besprinkled her eylashes; and her eyes were beginning to blur under a pale film of mucus that was like a soft web, just as if spiders had been at work upon them. The sheet curved across smoothly from her breasts to her knees, making another peak at the tips of her toes; and to Charles it seemed as if an infinite mass, an enormous weight, lay pressing upon her.>The church-clock struck two. They could hear the prodigious murmur of the river flowing in the darkness, at the foot of the terrace. Monsieur Bournisien, now and again, blew his nose loudly ...
