Sometimes when I’m teaching, new ways of expressing things just turn up. So it is that I’m standing next to a flip chart on which I’ve just written PROSE IS A VEHICLE. I look around at the eight students sitting behind desks arranged in a loose arc. We’re in one of the large sunny rooms of a pleasant college in Oxfordshire. The course is for near-beginners and we’re on our second day. I think it’s going pretty well, but you can’t always tell.
“Prose is difficult to discuss,” I say, “even though you could argue it’s the most important element of writing.”
“What kind of vehicle?” says Steven, brow furrowed. Steven is a retired civil engineer.
“Well,” I say, “that depends on what kind of writer you are.”
“I don’t follow,” he says. “Surely, the best vehicle is the one that gets you from A to B at minimal cost and maximum mechanical efficiency.” I think he has a twinkle in the eye which I take to be a welcome sign of the healthy beginnings of self-parody.
I love these moments, when I have to let the idea inform me, rather than the other way round.
“That may be true if you’re an out and out commercial writer,” I say. “Then, prose for you is mostly just functional.”
“So,” says Steven, “you’re saying that for a commercial writer, prose is like a Ford Transit van, whereas for an arty writer it’s a – ”
“Pimped up Morris Minor!” says Jools, one of the younger students.
“As usual,” I say, “analogies only take you so far. What I think I’m trying to say is that functional, well-constructed prose will do the job but it mostly suits the passenger who just wants to know, ‘Are we there yet?'”
“So, are you saying that with good writers, it’s all about the journey?” says Dawn, with just a touch of world-weary sarcasm.
What do I mean? Why are analogies so limiting? The idea seemed simple enough: prose is the vehicle which takes you on your trip through the story. But I can see now that if we stay with this analogy we’re in danger of saying that prose is a fixed commodity: once built, it’s always going to be the same, whatever the journey.
“You have to keep re-building it as you go,” I say, “depending on the territory.”
“Like a Transformer?” says Jools.
This reminds me that I really must put on a specialised Fantasy and Science Fiction writing course soon. Most of my references are F&SF, and a lot of my students’ are too. I blame Stephen Spielberg, George Lucas, Gene Roddenberry and whoever it is that writes Dr Who these days.
“Kind of,” I say, “but I think it also has to change between proactive and reactive continually, whereas Transformers basically just kick the crap out of each other.”
Most of them look confused. I’m probably confused, too, but I press on.
“If you look at extremes,” I say, frantically searching for examples, “you’ve got, say, Jeffrey Archer and James Joyce. Archer’s prose is always running ahead of itself, always verging on premature plot ejaculation. He can barely hold in the climax – sorry – just wants to get you to the pay-off as fast as possible, before you have time to notice the utter lack of believable characters and the creaky storyline that was nicked from Scooby-Doo. With something like ‘Finnegans Wake’, however, almost all the meaning is in the prose itself.”
“Have you actually read Finnegans Wake?” says Mark.
“Of course not,” I say. “But we studied a passage of it at college. It read like gibberish until our tutor showed us how it was actually packed with historical puns and references.”
“At least Jeffrey Archer tells a good story,” says Jess. “With a proper beginning, middle and end.”
“Anyway,” I say, “I think we’re saying that good prose does more than just get you there but not so much that you lose sight of the story.”
Jools asks the question I always dread around about this time. “Examples?” she says. “Which writers use good prose?”
I think about my own writing. Definitely, there have been moments when I’ve felt the story, the vehicle for telling it and me, the writer, all merge into one headstrong force, riding the plot, even teasing it, while at the same time encouraging the characters to not just join the flow but if they feel like it, to build an otter dam and turn it into their own special world for a time . . . then the prose has its own life: not plot, not character, not voice, not tone, not even words exactly, but some kind of spirit machine that you barely even believed in until that moment when it just turned up.
“I’m not sure it’s ever all of any one writer’s work,” I say. “You get it in Dylan Thomas at times; and Ray Bradbury and Doris Lessing. You have to find your own examples. And if you produce it yourself it probably won’t secure you a sale. But you’ll know it when you write it. And so will anyone else who reads it, who isn’t a slave just to what happens next.”
“I’m probably stuck with the Ford Transit,” says Steven. “I’m very literal.”