How to Write Decent Prose
Here’s a sentence worth remembering:
You know how it is there early in the morning in Havana with the bums still asleep against the walls of the buildings; before even the ice wagons come by with ice for the bars? Well, we came across the square from the dock to the Pearl of San Francisco Café to get coffee and there was only one beggar awake in the square and he was getting a drink out of the fountain. But when we got inside the café and sat down, there were three of them waiting for us.
This is the beginning of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not.
This is a really beautiful sentence.
Read it aloud!
Here, let me help:
You know how it is there (slight pause)
early in the morning in Havana (slight pause)
with the bums still asleep against the walls of the buildings (slight pause)
From Graham Greene's The Quiet American
After dinner I sat and waited for Pyle in my room over the rue Catinat; he had said, ‘I’ll be with you at the latest by ten,’ and when midnight struck I couldn’t stay quiet any longer and went down into the street.
Like this:
After dinner I sat and waited for Pyle in my room over the rue Catinat;
he had said,
‘I’ll be with you at the latest by ten,’
and when midnight struck I couldn’t stay quiet any longer and went down into the street.
Relax and read them both aloud to yourself (or to your dog). Do you hear the cadence in Hemingway’s sentence?
It’s almost as poetic as Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach.
How about Greene’s? Do you hear the flatness? It’s got cadence, the cadence of a far away machine gun.
You already start to think (or your subconscious does) of the characters, or the narrator. The almost dreaminess of To Have and Have Not. “You know how it is”…the narrator is talking to you and me in a bar in La Havana. Remembering?
Greene’s sentence reads like a newspaper article. He’s reporting, telling you how it is, also, but not evoking.
Both Hemingway and Greene are about as good as it gets.
I personally can read their prose and recognize the sublime.
I, however, can’t write as well as either of them, and I’m okay with that.
I’m a workaday writer.
Sort of a hack.
I profit from writing. (Well, I guess they did too, although, it was Hemingway’s wife who bought him the house in Key West, if you’ve ever been there.)
But I can write well enough to tell a damn good story and have people enjoy it.
This article isn’t about becoming a Hemingway, Greene, Shakespeare, Thoreau, Racine, or Flaubert. (Or pick any of your favorites, but please make sure they’re over 50 years old!)
This article is about learning how to write damn good prose so you can tell your damn good story and have people enjoy it.
Workaday!
So, here’s how to do it…become a decent writer.
Step 1
You gotta read! But the NYT bestseller list or whatever TikTok is pimping won’t do it. Most of those people can’t write their way out of a wet paper bag. None of them will stand the test of time. (Unless it’s for sheer brilliance of imagination like J. K. Rowling or Stephen King.)
My daughter suggested I read The Raven Boys. I got about twenty pages in and had to quit. Normally, I would have quit after the first paragraph, which I often do, but I was trying to do it for my daughter. Reading those few pages was like eating a sawdust sandwich. It just wouldn’t go down.
Read the greats!
You know who they are: Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Conrad (Heart of Darkness guy), Dickens.
There are lists of great authors. Try to avoid the writers before the 60s. That’s when things get murky. Also, there hasn’t been enough time to filter out the bad. Writers are like water seeping through an aquifer. It takes a lot of time. But you get damn good water!
Try to avoid the DEI lists and the grievance pimps. I want you to learn how to write. If you want to show everyone how nice you are, get one of those “In this house we believe…” signs and stick it in your front yard. (Or stick it somewhere else.)
Art…even at the level of craft…is truth. And, as they say… the truth will out!
Just so you don’t think I’m a snob, which I kinda sorta am, here’s the first line from Donald Westlake’s Somebody Owes Me Money.
I bet none of it would have happened if I wasn’t so eloquent. That’s always been my problem, eloquence, though some might claim my problem was something else again. But life’s a gamble, is what I say, and not all the eloquent people in the world are in Congress.
That’s a damn good few sentences.
Or this…
There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch.
Raymond Chandler. The first sentence in the short story, Red Wind.
Or this…
When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.
Walden, Henry David Thoreau.
I could go on and on and on. High-brow, low-brow. Other languages.
I think you got the gist.
So, step 1. Read the greats!
Step 2
Write Every Day!
Let me rephrase that… Write every damn day!
Write every f’ing day!
HAVE I MADE MYSELF CLEAR?
I’m not the only person who says this.
Writers from all walks say this.
Even advertising writers say this. Dan Kennedy, one of the greatest living copywriters (direct response advertising writer), said this in a book I read back in the 90s.
Write every freakin’ day!
Write when you feel good. Write when you feel bad. Write when you’re happy. Write when you’re sad. (This is starting to sound like Dr. Seuss!)
But seriously…Write, dammit, write!
Okay, so those two things right there, if practiced, will make you quite a good writer.
How fast? Heck, if I know.
Besides, what does fast have to do with it?
If you’re serious about writing, this is a life thing, not a flash-in-the-pan thing.
Is there a step 3?
Perhaps a Step 3
There can be. If there were, I’d say it would be to get someone truly knowledgeable to read your writing and comment on it in detail.
I did that with the first six “practice” novels I wrote. Not only did I learn a lot, but I got used to the idea of someone else reading my work. My editor, if you could call her that, was a university English major. She was cheap. She was also knowledgeable.
Hire someone to read your work. A good idea would be to call your local college or university and speak with someone in the English department. Ask them if they know of a good student who would like a few extra bucks.
Barring that, get your wife, husband, or dog to read your writing and be critical. Don’t just make you feel good about yourself. (Dogs are notorious about gaslighting their owners.)
So, there you have it.
The streets of hell are paved with good intentions. The streets heading the other way are paved with…writing every damn day!
PS: Did you see the calendar on the wall in the graphic? I really wish AI could get its you-know-what together when it comes to words.
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