WTF IS GOOD PROSE?

IDK LIKE BEFUDDLING GOBBELDYGOOK

— 1 .

I HAVE NO FUCKING IDEA, —

. . . as a budding writer, I was CERTAIN, — intoxicated by Nabokov & DFW, — that any writing not lavishly pyrotechnic was GARBAGE; I made a vocabulary list of every unfamiliar & arcane word I encountered: I would keep the tab of my word-list open, constantly & inappropriately squeezing in “daffy”, “zephyr”, “ubiquitous” (which for several years, I thought meant one of a kind) into whatever absurd yarn I was spinning; which led to outrageous mouthfuls such as this passage, from my first completed novel Rain, Rain (2016), — try to picture this character, —

“She was an altitudinously statuesque cunningly sardonic graceful voluble vixen with ubiquitous long straight coruscatingly glimmerant gorgeous raven tresses that smelled zephyrous, complimenting her jarringly crystalline cobalt eyes that peeked coquettishly behind daffy spectacles wondrously—and big tits.”

(Don’t U still write like this, Harold?)

(I won’t cite any examples of when I discovered metaphor, but U can imagine.) — Despite literally all the frank & disappointing feedback I was getting from the world, I thought I was a GREAT writer (a testament to delusion’s powerful engine).

My lone jolt: my girlfriend at the time was reading one of her daily homework assignments (I refused to talk to her until she served my genius-kudos in a praise soufflé for whatever story I sent her in the morning), and she had the temerity to say my prose “seemed a bit stilted, kinda wooden”. It was the last time she would ever criticize me: I spent the whole day threatening (and honestly contemplating) suicide. But my problem wasn’t vocab-paucity.

The real problem: I had absolutely NOTHING to fucking SAY!

It seems so obvious, but the best way to write good prose is to have good THOUGHTS. The point of writing is to communicate what U THINK: preferably with elegant, sonorous STYLE. . . and there’s a reason why the Novel is the art form that requires the longest gestation: a great novel is a cathedral of thought: built out of the raw material of LIFE. . . . But U, probably, will never be able to live as much as U need; so a short cut to more life is to READ. . .

— but of course, too much LITERARITY can be a problem. The only compelling critique I’ve ever heard of Ulysses is from Wyndham Lewis,

“In Ulysses you have a deliberate display, on the grand scale, of technical virtuosity and literary scholarship. What is underneath this overcharged surface, few people, so far, have seriously inquired.”

He thinks Joyce, the scavenger, collates a heap of well-shaped bric-a-brac (Lewis understand Joyce better than almost any other critic) to disguise how little he actually understands about the world,

— he is garrulous & artificial because he’s trying to see life thru books,

“The inability to observe directly, a habit of always looking at people through other people’s eyes and not through his own, is deeply rooted with Joyce. Where a multitude of little details or some obvious idiosyncrasy are concerned, he may be said to be observant; but the secret of an entire organism escapes him.”

Wyndham was a painter, so obviously he put great value into LOOKING at the subject DIRECTLY. . . he thinks Joyce don’t have any ideas. I think he’s wrong: Ulysses is about how a regular person learns to ACCEPT their fate and find happiness. But that’s besides the point.

What will make U a better writer: reading Ulysses or going into the park with a notebook and trying to describe what U see? I don’t know.

But, — we are trying to define GOOD PROSE. . .

— 2 .

WHAT WRITER HASN’T BEEN CALLED TERRIBLE ? —

. . . last week somebody sent me a thread on the r/TrueLit reddit where people were up in arms about my stack “MY DEBUT NOVEL WAS A FLOP” calling me a knob and a terrible prose stylist,

“The first paragraph of the substack essay was so excruciatingly poorly written that I’m not surprised his actual novel didn’t sell. . . such a bizarre combination of thesaurus words and ‘U’ and ‘UR’”

pointing out for specific negative distinction my phrase: “they mewl sympathetically with unanimous succor” : — one of my prose lodestars is Neymar’s golaço against Flamengo in 2011 where he dribbles past two defenders, lays it off to a teammate, gets it back and pulls a ridiculous move on the final defender and scores:

a tightrope vitality that makes FUN the ultimate virtue; I don’t wanna be a staid grammarian who spells out “you”, — at least not on this stack, which is a completely different form than a Novel. . .

— last June, my dad’s know-it-all lawyer friend read one of my stacks and texted my dad this,

“Please pass the following on to Harold: One can say: 1. His proposition is of evanescent proportion. 2. His theory has murky origins. 3. He pulled that one out of his ass. They all mean the same thing, and each can be funny. Harold is using all 1s, he can benefit from throwing in some 2s and 3s.”

I texted my dad back, “tell Barry to go FUCK HIMSELF!”

But, I agree with him. When my writing falters, it is because it defaults too much to mode 1. . . I’ve had to learn to harness simplicity: ornanity can sometimes be a symptom of insecurity of thought. . .

Cervantes gives perfect writing advice in the prologue of Don Quixote,

“you should strive, in plain speech, with words that are straightforward, honest, and well-placed, to make your sentences and phrases sonorous and entertaining, and have them portray, as much as you can and as far as it is possible, your intention, making your ideas clear without complicating and obscuring them.

Another thing to strive for: reading your history should move the melancholy to laughter, increase the joy of the cheerful, not irritate the simple, fill the clever with admiration for its invention, not give the serious reason to scorn it, and allow the prudent to praise it. . . if you accomplish this, you will have accomplished no small thing.”

But it’s easier said than fucking done! — My frenemy, the curmudgeon Mark Krellkat, sent me a story of his recently. I thought it was one of the most terrible & incoherent things I’ve ever read,

“Greg cleans out his attic. There is so much stuff in here, he thinks, or maybe worse than stuff, this is crap, junk—probably. His radio blares. Loudly, there is familiar music playing on his radio station. I like this song, he thinks, but now wanders my attention. His mind flies, thinkingly. Gigantic waves, screaming people. . . soon he hears on the radio: “braking [sic] news! A tsunami in Japan! Oh no, Greg thinks, I caused that. . .”

I emailed him,

“Krellkat, U asked me to give it to you straight & minceless. I’m sorry but, What the hell is this? Everything about the story is stupid. The style, the characters, the narrative. U ask me if we want to publish this in BLAST 2, are you joking? What happened to that other story U were working on, ‘Fuck, I am a bug’? That shit was Kafkaesque. . . ”

He emailed me back,

“I positively feel no rancor against you but URGE you: free yourself from this coffin of quality & standards in which you lie like an insipid vampire, waiting to taste the fresh blood of your supposed inferiors. U: ‘expert’: eat shit! See, I can write like you with the utmost facility, but I choose a different path. I am concerned with the present when I read the plaintive epigraphs in the American boneyard of literature and poetry, and in weighing the head and the heart that ached in the land. You are not. Goodbye. — ”

That’s the last time I give anyone writing advice!

— 3 .

SO, HAROLD, WTF IS GOOD PROSE?! —

. . . there are incalculably multifarious, — you know: a lot, — of ways to write GOOD; writing is like boxing: there are only a few fundamental moves U must learn: U drill those moves for YEARS: eventually, out of the pugilistic forge, a unique STYLE might emerge; but also, like writing, in the truly upper echelon, there’s a mysterious, inimitable something that makes the greats GREAT.

Muhammad Ali & Floyd Mayweather have gotten more people knocked out than anyone else: random bums come in the gym with their chin popping out of their Philly shell, copying what they saw on TV, and they get flatlined. . .

U gotta figure out what makes U, U ; but like boxing, the good thing about writing is the process NEVER ENDS. It’s easy to know whether a fighter is actually gonna get better or not: do they LOVE the work? or do they love the IDEA of being a boxer. . . but the big difference: boxing is about U & Ur triumph: I used to think the only thing that mattered was being IMPRESSIVE, but now I do think there is something vital in trying to communicate to a reader;

though communication doesn’t require the transcendent simplicity of the Humpty Dumpty rhyme,

“Humpy Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. And all the kings horses, and all the King’s men, couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again.”

Which communicates a profound parable of masculine failure (and really, universal failure: the abyss to which all life leads) and irrevocable consequences in a silly, sticky, sprightly (alliteration is WACK now btw) way everyone can understand (which is why I chose it as the title for my novel).

U can also have the stately mellifluousness of George Eliot, concluding Middlemarch with a distillation of a lifetime of wisdom,

“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive, for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on un-historic acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half-owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.”

Or like this passage from Sebald’s The Emigrants which I just read this morning; the narrator describing his elementary school teacher who ended up going mad, with a perfect, simple, original metaphor,

“In well-structured sentences, he spoke without any touch of dialect but with a slight impediment of speech or timbre, as if the sound were coming not from the larynx but from somewhere near the heart. This sometimes gave one the feeling that it was all being powered by clock-work inside him and Paul in his entirety was a mechanical human made of tin and other metal parts, and might be put out of operation for ever by the smallest functional hitch.”

But I don’t know anything; I’m still learning. . .

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