A writer’s quest to perfect prose
Do you often lie awake at night, eyes fixed on the ceiling, and think of a story plot that shows a great potential, that even dreaming about it makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up?
Have you ever sat behind your desk, with a pen in hand, or your fingers lingering above the keyboard, just waiting for the right words to pour out so you can write that plot with the most agonizingly beautiful prose? And yet, you write and delete, write and scratch, because something, an element, seems lost?
You’re not alone. Writing perfect prose is dreaded by so many up-and-coming and even professional writers. It doesn’t matter how confident you are about your idea, the ability to put it on paper in a way that would make sense to the reader and intrigue them to continue reading, in my opinion, is the greatest writer’s block.
I spent a great decade of my life in the exact limbo. I’d create worlds and fascinating characters in my head and I’d constantly think about them whenever I was alone. But then, I would try to write a paragraph or two, maybe a word here, a description there, and I was never satisfied with the outcome. My words seemed like an elaborate pretence, as if I had written a simple sentence like: “April was beautiful and everyone knew it but her,” and then spent time right-clicking every single word just to find a more sophisticated, more polished synonym. Much like what Joey had done for Monica and Chandler’s letter of recommendation. (And if you don’t know these characters, we can’t be friends.)
I would shy away from writing altogether then. I’d tell myself that I’d never be able to write perfect prose in English. That I was just a person with a roaring imagination and not enough tools to create.
I tried to write in my mother tongue, Farsi, and ironically, I would think of my next paragraph in simple English and would try to find the best equivalent in Farsi. The fundamentals and the grammatical order of the two is so different that the result proved to be even worse than right-clicking each word.
Then I became a journalist, and I spent most of my time reading articles, feature stories, and political pieces. Slowly, I upped my vocabulary and paid a close attention to the keywords that made a piece interesting.
But the pinnacle of my quest in writing better, is when I started to write fan fiction. I understand that a lot of people look down on the genre, so many might even consider it plagiarism, but the truth is that building an idea around worlds and characters that already have a life of their own, allows you to focus on your “writing” rather than fretting the creation of something entirely new. At least, that’s how I and the small group of fan fiction writers I joined felt. When I published my very first multi-chapter romantic drama, and after receiving so many feedbacks that I wouldn’t have received if I hadn’t braved reader rejection, I wrote my second fan fiction with more attention to detail and a keen eye for editorial perfection. I had readers now, I had smart readers, and I had to live up to their expectation; I had to live up to my own expectation.
Slowly and unbeknown to me, the process of writing what I fostered in my mind became easier every day. There were days that I didn’t even need to open a dictionary, because I knew what I wanted to write and knew exactly which words I needed to use. There had been days, however, that I still found myself illiterate to perfect prose; simple words seemed insufficient and fancy ones, too extreme.
In the fall of 2019, I wrote the first chapter of my novel. It was far from ideal, and it needed a lot of edits, but I had been able to write a precise and clean chapter. In winter, I wrote a few more chapters and then the pandemic started and I was too depressed to continue. A friend urged me to work with a professional editor, someone who’d keep my head straight and force me to be consistent in my writing. My editor to date did just that.
She was candid, honest, and attentive. She put me on a strict schedule of writing a fix amount of words each week. After two months, I wanted to cut ties with her; her deadlines were too hard to follow, and she brutalized my work every week. I felt incompetent.
But the consistency in writing every day and the prospect of someone waiting for me to finish the week’s work, forced me to get out of my comfort zone and do what I never did before: write whatever came to my mind just as it came. Previously, I would try to write “perfect prose” from the beginning, from the very first draft and anyone who’s ever written even a simple letter, knows how absurd it can be. There is no such thing as perfection, and even if there is, it can only be achieved by re-reading and editing and re-reading and more editing.
four months into our professional relationship, and I could see the drastic change in my writing. I could feel how effortlessly I wrote, and how little I struggled to put my ideas on the paper. My editor taught me the essentials of writing “accurately and correctly”. But more so, she gave me the tools to find my own style. She welcomed the new rhythms I used, and she praised all the little proverbs I Westernized from Farsi.
For new writers, it is too easy to fall in the pitfall of, what I would like to call,“repetitive writing”, where we read something amazing, have an idea of our own, and then write it in the exact same way that amazing story was told. We do it unconsciously, just like when we hear something cool and might repeat it elsewhere as our own cool opinion. But as Ella Wheeler Wilcox says: “A poor original is better than a good imitation.”
Once, I told my editor that I’m fresh out of new ideas. That I can’t continue my story without step into concepts that have been written about countless times. “What kind of concepts?” She asked. “I don’t know. love, fear, betrayal.”
“Well,” she wrote me back. “The world is built on them. You can’t really create a new feeling to fit your rhetoric. You can only write about them from your point of view; of how you perceive them, understand them, and use them.”
In an article published on Jericho Writers, Harry Bingham talks about the most effective tips for “Writing Perfect Prose.”
He asks writers to: 1. avoid clichés, 2. be accurate, 3. keep it short (this is very important folks, don’t over use adjectives and don’t describe in detail when it’s unnecessary to the plot), 4. cull your adjectives, 5. mix your rhythms, 6. ditch the modifiers, 7. use unexpected words to shock the reader, 8. trust your reader, and finally 9. ask for help.
For me, the last tip really did the trick.
Ask your friends to read your story. Join different writing groups, give tips and receive some. Don’t just read in the genre that you’d like to write in, spread your wings and experience different writing styles. Watch movies, especially foreign ones, play video games, read and read and read. Whatever helps you to unleash your imagination. But at the end of the day, don’t lose focus on your originality. Don’t fall into the trends of the day, of what is “selling”. Of course, it is important to know the market, of what subjects are being talked about, or understand the society you are writing for. But don’t try to fit your plot within that box. Your plot might be so much bigger than the box, and miniaturizing it would not only take away your originality, it will also rob the reader of understanding your true creativity.
