Lush prose is what I write. Overwritten prose is what the other guy writes. ;-)
No seriously, I've really worked at trimming this from my own writing over the years. The stuff that I use to think was the height of expressive prose, I now see much of it as pretentious crap. What I like is expressive language that is there for service of the story, to bring forth the characters and plot. Often with so-called literary fiction, the emphasis seems to be only on the language, to mask that the writer doesn't have anything important to say. Here's a snippet I used from my review of the antho Paper Cities at The Fix. It's from Hal Duncan’s “The Tower of Morning’s Bones.”
Fire. He had dreamt of fire: a fierce firmament in the deep structure of the afterworld, a flux of flash in an ocean system of eddies and currents, waves and tides, splashes and ripples, the simple quarternity of colour complexified into chiaroscuro.
Need I say more? Some consider this fine writing. I find it very pretentious. So bad it would be funny if the writer wasn't serious.
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No seriously, I've really worked at trimming this from my own writing over the years. The stuff that I use to think was the height of expressive prose, I now see much of it as pretentious crap. What I like is expressive language that is there for service of the story, to bring forth the characters and plot. Often with so-called literary fiction, the emphasis seems to be only on the language, to mask that the writer doesn't have anything important to say. Here's a snippet I used from my review of the antho Paper Cities at The Fix. It's from Hal Duncan’s “The Tower of Morning’s Bones.”
Fire. He had dreamt of fire: a fierce firmament in the deep structure of the afterworld, a flux of flash in an ocean system of eddies and currents, waves and tides, splashes and ripples, the simple quarternity of colour complexified into chiaroscuro.
Need I say more? Some consider this fine writing. I find it very pretentious. So bad it would be funny if the writer wasn't serious.