#prose tips

Greetings, fellow gardeners of words!

Today, let's tend to the structure of our sentences. Have you ever felt like your writing sometimes sounds a bit... flat? Or maybe a little indirect? Chances are, the culprit might be the passive voice.

Don't get me wrong, passive voice isn't inherently bad, but it's often overused, a source of comfort (or a crutch) and can truly sap the energy right out of your prose. Understanding the difference between active and passive voice is like knowing whether to use a sharp pruning shear or a gentle spray bottle – each has its purpose, but one is usually more effective for shaping!

So What's the Difference?

At its simplest, active voice tells you who is doing the action. Passive voice tells you what is being acted upon, often obscuring who or what is performing the action.

The Key to Spotting Passive Voice: Look for a form of the verb "to be" (is, am, are, was, were, be, being, been) followed by a past participle (a verb ending in -ed, -en, etc., like "written," "broken," "eaten").

Why Active Voice is Usually Your Best Friend:

Clarity & Directness: It gets straight to the point.

Passive: "Mistakes were made." (By whom?)

Active: "I made mistakes." (Clear responsibility!)

Conciseness: It often uses fewer words.

Passive: "The report was finished by the team." (6 words)

Active: "The team finished the report." (5 words)

Vigor & Impact: It makes your sentences feel more energetic and engaging.

Passive: "The decision was approved by the committee." (Sounds bureaucratic, right?)

Active: "The committee approved the decision." (More decisive.)

Character Agency: It empowers your characters and shows them doing things.

Passive: "The secret was discovered by her."

Active: "She discovered the secret." (She's the one driving the action!)

When IS Passive Voice Okay (or Even Preferred)?

While active voice is your default, passive voice has its legitimate uses:

When the Actor is Unknown or Unimportant:

"My car was stolen last night." (You don't know who stole it.)

"The results were announced." (The focus is on the results, not who announced them.)

To Emphasise the Object of the Action:

"The ancient vase was carefully preserved." (The vase is the star here.)

To Create a Sense of Mystery or Impersonality: Often used in scientific or technical writing.

"The experiment was conducted under sterile conditions."

Think of the active voice as the vibrant main stem of your plant, reaching directly for the sun. Passive voice is like the supporting roots or the soil – essential, but not the main visual focus. Use the main stem whenever possible to make your plant stand tall and clear!

Next time you're reviewing your draft, do a quick "passive voice check." See if you can rephrase those "to be + past participle" constructions into punchier, more direct active sentences. You'll be amazed at the energy you can inject into your writing!

Here is how to bridge that gap and turn your next ship into a piece of literary art.

1. The "Mundane" vs. The "System"

In canon, magic is a set of tools. In magical realism, magic is a metaphor. To make this work, stop treating magic as a solution to a problem and start treating it as an expression of the character’s internal state.

The Shift: If your character is falling in love, don't just write "they felt butterflies." Write that every time they hold hands, the ink on the parchment in the room turns into dancing gold leaf.

The Rule: No one should be surprised by this. The characters don’t stop to ask, "What spell did you use?" because it’s not a spell—it’s just what love looks like in their world.

2. Emotional Realism Over Magical Logic

Magical realism thrives when you ground the supernatural in the boring, gritty, or mundane.

Small Details: If your couple is arguing, maybe the rain in the castle corridors isn't just falling—maybe it’s falling upwards because the tension is so high.

The "Inconvenient" Magic: Make magic feel like a burden or a quirk of personality. Perhaps your protagonist’s magic acts up when they’re nervous, causing the tea sets to start gossiping in French whenever their crush walks by. It’s not about winning a duel; it’s about the awkwardness of being alive.

3. Sensory Intimacy

High fantasy focuses on the flashy (sparks, explosions). Magical realism focuses on the sensory.

Use the Five Senses: How does their proximity change the air? Does the smell of ozone shift to the smell of rain on hot pavement? Does the weight of the gravity in the room change when they look at each other?

Writing Tip: Spend a full paragraph describing the texture of a shared secret, or the way the shadows in a library seem to lean in to listen to a confession.

4. The "Poetic" vs. The "Literal"

In your fic, stop trying to explain the "why." You don't need a lore-heavy explanation for why a ghost is crying or why the portrait of a knight is suddenly offering relationship advice.

Trust the Reader: You don't need to explain that "the walls are bleeding memories because of a curse." Just let the walls bleed. If you treat the impossible as a matter-of-fact part of the furniture, your reader will accept it as the emotional truth of the scene.

The TL;DR for your next scene:

Magic = Emotion: If they feel it, the world should react.

Don't Explain: If a stairwell starts singing when they kiss, don’t explain which spell caused it. Just describe the melody.

(reposting from own Twitter thread from Oct 2019)

Prose is your word choices; the bricks that build your sentences, your actions and your set dressing, your camera into the world. Prose is often going to be the majority of what is /actually on the page/ so get comfortable with it, and remember - dialogue has different rules.

Just like in films, where a camera can be static wide shots that tell you all the details, close ups that show everything your characters feel, or stylistic saturated images, so can your prose vary in style. And variety can keep your prose engaging, so study it all just in case.

“Wide shot” prose is something like your Wikipedia entries - easy to follow, only the facts, not a lot of personality to the narration. This can be useful when explaining rules about your world, describing buildings/past events/etc that your character already knows.

Distance can give you scope and it can ALSO give you a sense of dread and loneliness. A death scene, for example, when described in this sort of detached language can have an especially sad ache to it as it tells the reader that this scene “isn’t important” - except to the reader.

Next let’s talk close ups - how your character is seeing the world, how they feel and think and act. You can do really fun things with a “close” narrative prose, as this is where the Unreliable Narrator trope comes from, but this is also where you get “Show Vs Tell” from.

A good example of “Tell” < “Show” are the differences between the original Blade Runner than had Harrison Ford’s (VERY BORED) commentary and the directors cut that lacked this. The actions of a character are generally enough - tears will tell us they’re sad without them saying so

Lastly we get to the Stylish prose - this is your poetic stuff, your metaphors and alliteration. If we wanna keep with film analogies this could be your Disney song moments, your dream sequences, your hyper-saturated slo-mo Matrix fight scenes.

You can be stylish throughout (think your Lemony Snickets and your Terry Prachetts) of course, and unlike the previous two “types” I would say you’re better off reading poetry rather than literature for studying how to be Stylish. Everything in moderation, though.

Let’s do some examples, because my eyes aren’t tired enough yet.

“The castle was very tall, and I looked up at it. It was raining. Eventually, the door opened and I was let inside.”

This tells you where we are and what’s happening, but that’s it. A classic “wide shot” prose. It would work best with a character who doesn’t have any strong feelings or opinions about where they are. Let’s try a closer shot.

“The castle loomed over me, and it hurt my neck to try to see the top. The rain soaked into my coat. I waited and waited to be let inside.”

The narrator finds the castle unpleasant - it’s intimidating, and painful to look at. They’re uncomfortable in the cold, and “waited” is repeated for impatient emphasis. Good for wanting to impart the characters emotions. Lastly, let’s try a stylistic view of the scene.

“In front of a grey castle, on a grey day, I stood and I waited. The rain soaked my clothes and hair until they clung to me like needy hands, and at last I was let in.”

This scene starts out wide, zooms in, and anthropomorphizes fabric and hair to make a really miserable scene.

Honestly, I do recommend a balance of all of them - yes in the same work - depending on what you want to accomplish in each scene. Study color theory if you want, and film, and poetry, and of course other books and fiction to hone your eye, but I hope this helps.

If you found this helpful, please reblog! And I might also do a post on dialogue~

Depending on how spooky or spectacular your magic is, magic circles may hum, glow faintly, cause tremors, cause the room to darken, shine as if the circle is a window to an oddly colored sun, you get the deal.

Maybe I was too blunt with the last answer… The key to describing scenes is not the absence of description; it is subtlety. As I said, people will assume people wear clothes, but saying that their clothes are regal and much higher quality than those around the character is fine, as long as this is the point of the scene. If your scene has magic going on, and it includes magic circles, go ahead and describe it!

Subtlety, moderation, these things are needed in your prose. People assume a tavern has mugs and plates, but there is nothing wrong with using these things as a way to reveal more things about the scene. Is the tavern a rowdy and unclean place? You don’t have to blatantly write that it is rowdy and unclean, you can write that there are broken mugs on the floors and the plates are unwashed and dirty.

The issue starts when you describe things for the sake of description. The man had shoes, that had laces made of nylon, like many other shoes. Under his shoes he wore socks. He wore jeans made of denim, dyed an indigo blue. Yadda, yadda, yadda. He’s dressed plainly, you can shorten it to him wearing jeans and tennis shoes, if you even need to describe that. If what he is wearing is something you really want to describe, bring it up through what is happening in the scene. He is tying his tennis shoes as someone speaks to him. Someone spills a drink on his jeans. Be subtle!

I hope that helps.

What are Rhetorical Devices? We all know the literary devices of metaphor and simile. Rhetorical devices are a little different. Instead of comparisons, rhetorical devices are used to add emphasis to one’s words. Most often used in oral speeches, some phrases and sentences are so powerful they go down in history as sayings everyone knows. For example, you have probably heard Julius Caesar’s…

January 18 is National Thesaurus Day. So it seems a perfect moment to honor the most important writing tool an author can have: The Thesaurus. The thesaurus is a type of dictionary that focuses on synonyms for the words listed. Writers has been relying on thesauruses to find just the right word for a long time. The very first is believed to have been produced by 1st century writer, Philo of…

The most important thing I ever learned about writing?

With very few exceptions, English teachers know quite a lot about English, but very little about prose. My writing has never been as dull and lifeless as when I religiously followed all the advice my teachers gave me.  This isn’t some personal fault on their part, it’s just that they are teachers, not writers. 

They will impart stylistic preferences like it is canonical doctrine, hammer in the importance of “said” or “whispered” or “pontificated” every time someone speaks, then in the same lesson bang on about showing instead of telling, because that is what you need to learn if you’re going to pass the big standardized tests that our education system loves so much.

But once you get through those tests, you will be freer than you can possibly imagine. Dropping conventions, toying with, experimenting with writing, learning how your favorite authors work and copying them religiously until you start to cobble bits and pieces of your stuck-together amalgamate of influences together, and round the edges with the sandpaper called practice.

That’s when you stop being a student, and start being a writer.

This is a line from The Giver by Lois Lowry. This line illustrates what makes her description so memorable in just two short paragraphs. 

1.  She avoids relying on similes. Instead of overusing them, she only uses one while instead choosing to focus on hard metaphors. This creates more impactful description. 

2. She avoids using extremely complex language. A hole many writers can fall into is becoming infatuated with larger words when a simpler word could be more effective and gripping for the reader. When it comes to description, sometimes the simpler solution can be the best one. 

3. One of my favorite lines from this excerpt is when she describes the flames as “licking at the torn bone and flesh”. Instead of using traditional language for burns such as “searing” or “scorching”, she chooses the word “licking”. This creates a more vivid and unique image in the mind of the reader. Don’t be afraid to break the routine when it comes to description.