Writers vs Storytellers
Today's riff is about Storytellers vs Writers within the context of popularity.
I'm wondering if there would be any utility in discussing our ideas of what makes pedestrian prose (gets the job done, then we move on, the story pretty much passing out of mind), effective prose (pulls the reader in hard, lingers afterward, invites rereads) and lapidary prose (so poetic and rich with image and symbol, cadence and complexity one stops to parse, or read, sentences, which do pay off).
"Which do pay off" is important, at least to me. The difficult--if there is one--is that different styles are going to be successful or not, depending on the reader. For example, Greer Gilman is my idea of a lapidary prose artist. She's sometimes been teamed back east with another writer who is hailed as a lapidary prose writer whose prose doesn't strike me as lapidary so much as uncontrolled spew. Then there is the writer who comes to English from another language, who is sometimes lapidary, but those gems are embedded between the purplest of overused expressions and unnecessary scaffolding. Yet reviews go on about 'lyrical' writing.
So I don't know if there can be a conclusion reached.
I'm wondering if there would be any utility in discussing our ideas of what makes pedestrian prose (gets the job done, then we move on, the story pretty much passing out of mind), effective prose (pulls the reader in hard, lingers afterward, invites rereads) and lapidary prose (so poetic and rich with image and symbol, cadence and complexity one stops to parse, or read, sentences, which do pay off).
"Which do pay off" is important, at least to me. The difficult--if there is one--is that different styles are going to be successful or not, depending on the reader. For example, Greer Gilman is my idea of a lapidary prose artist. She's sometimes been teamed back east with another writer who is hailed as a lapidary prose writer whose prose doesn't strike me as lapidary so much as uncontrolled spew. Then there is the writer who comes to English from another language, who is sometimes lapidary, but those gems are embedded between the purplest of overused expressions and unnecessary scaffolding. Yet reviews go on about 'lyrical' writing.
So I don't know if there can be a conclusion reached.