Do you hear prose when you read?

[Laer Carroll]

Do you hear prose when you read? Do you listen to the silent sounds of fiction?

This question occurred to me a few days ago. That's when I received in the mail the latest issue of all three US F&SF magazines on the same day, just a couple of days after the latest issue of the UK print magazine Interzone.

Each magazine has a distinctive sound in my mind's ear. It varies somewhat from author to author, but even those share much the same qualities. I guess it's because the editor of each magazine selects partly for similar writing styles, even though s/he may try not to.

Interzone sounds, to me, like warehouses. I know that may not make sense to you, but it's the best I can do. There's a sort of utilitarian, grungy feel to the style and much of the content. Europeans, at least those in the UK, aren't much for shiny optimistic futures or alternative realities. Perhaps it's all those wars they've suffered through, and living next to the Balkan nations and the USSR. Which is now Russian and Ukraine and so on, some of the grungiest supposedly modern nations in the world.

A couple of free stories from the magazine are online here. From there you can find their story submission guidelines.

Analog is the oldest of the three US magazines and has the largest circulation, about 25,000 last year and the several previous years. The submission guidelines are here. They want "stories in which some aspect of future science or technology is so integral to the plot that, if that aspect were removed, the story would collapse."

To my ears Analog stories sound utilitarian. They remind me of engineering papers, which I have both written and edited. (At Boeing and NASA I was several times drafted to manage or edit in-house news and article publications relevant to the company.)

You can read a couple of stories and articles from recent issues here. There are also many short articles by writers about the science behind the story they wrote. The two stories are strong arguments against my Analog-style thesis.

Again, there are variations, and I'm sure you can find more counter-examples. But this is my personal, subjective impression, wrong-headed and maybe flat-out wrong as it may be.

Asimov's (circ. circa 17,000) guidelines are here. They want "'character oriented' stories, those in which the characters, rather than the science, provide the main focus for the reader’s interest."

The "sound" of Asimov's (to me) is a bit livelier but still somewhat utilitarian. The magazine boasts of "winning 44 Hugos and 24 Nebula Awards, and our editors have received 18 Hugo Awards for Best Editor." So I may be in the minority, but I stand by my personal impression.

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (circ. 15,500) has been around a long time. Their writers guidelines are here. I won't quote from the page because it confuses me, so I don't know what to select. They say they want more SF, but for the past year the vast majority of stories have been fantasy.

The sound of the stories to me seem much like that of literary magazines, such as this story published in The New Yorker. Or this one from the Paris Review.

They are talky, personal, subjective, focus often on trivial issues of daily life. They seem time-bound and ordinary, mundane, even when the strange of the supernatural or superscientific intrudes.

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A personal question. What one writer do you immediately think of when someone asks you for a writing style that is most memorable? Can you give an online example?

If they are not an F&SF writer, is there an F&SF writer who also is especially memorable?

My choice is Nina Kiriki Hoffman. One book blurb called her "this generation's Ray Bradbury" and there is some truth in that. Her writing is lyrical, evocative, but elegantly simple. It doesn't intrude into the story. It only makes the story more vivid, more real, more "transportive" to use a clunky phrase some literary critics and neophyte agents use.

My favorite book is A Red Heart of Memories and its sequel Past the Size of Dreaming. Get them in hardback. You likely will need something more durable than paperback.

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OK. That's my last two days of breakfast warm-up writing. Now on to real work!

 

[PeteMC]

Interesting article, like most of your posts.

Do you hear prose when you read? Do you listen to the silent sounds of fiction?

Hmmm, difficult question. Sometimes. Or, "yes and no". Helpful, I know... I don't read any of those magazines so I can't comment on your observations, but I'll relate it to authors I've read instead.

Sometimes, if the prose is exceptionally good (or bad) I really notice it, but usually when I'm caught up in a story I "see" it rather than "hear" it so most of the time I guess my answer would be no - I'm too busy watching the story unfold to really notice the words used to tell it.

Take WOT as a well-known example. We all know Robert Jordan wasn't exactly the most gifted writer of the 20th century, but I really loved that series. I didn't so much read it, I watched the movie(s). Does that make sense? I know what I mean, but I'm not sure I'm explaining it too well.

Now take something else that I (personally) thought was bad - "Orcs" by Stan Nicholls. I loved the idea, and I tried to like the book, I really did. But I found the writing jarred so badly I kept noticing things I didn't like about it to the extent that it destroyed my immersion in the story until I just gave up on it.

Europeans, at least those in the UK, aren't much for shiny optimistic futures or alternative realities.

No, we're not. Have you been to England recently? We haven't got a lot to be optimistic about at the moment... mind you, being pessimistic is the national sport over here at the best of times! Which gave us John Wyndham if nothing else, so I suppose we should be glad of that!

A personal question. What one writer do you immediately think of when someone asks you for a writing style that is most memorable? Can you give an online example?

Tanith Lee, hands down. A lyrical, poetic style that suits her subjects perfectly. She is the one writer I most often catch myself trying to emulate (ill-advisedly) in my own writing.

 

[Laer Carroll]

Sometimes, if the prose is exceptionally good (or bad) I really notice it, but usually when I'm caught up in a story I "see" it rather than "hear" it so most of the time I guess my answer would be no - I'm too busy watching the story unfold to really notice the words used to tell it.

Good point. Now that you mention it I do the same thing. It's when I re-read a story that I notice style more. After all, I already know what's going to happen next, and am less in a rush to find it out. So I tend to live in the moment more, which includes noticing the media which carries the message.

Some writers have an a style so understated that it's not until the third or further reading that I notice them having one. An example is Lois McMaster Bujold, a story-teller so good that I get swept up in her reality even several times after I've read a work the first time and know the story well. It's only rarely that I can focus on her style. Then I see how elegantly simple yet evocative it is.

 

[plblair]

I seldom "hear" prose. I think I'm more visually oriented - I "see" the action rather than hear it. That's true not only in what I read but in what I write. What I hear when I'm writing is dialog: my characters have their own distinct voices. Sometimes when I'm writing, I feel I'm not so much "writing" dialog as transcribing what my characters say.

 

[hippokrene]

Good novels play out as silent movies in my head. I can sometimes hear the conversations in short stories and longer works. The only time I can hear all the prose is when there's a stong narrative voice - usually first person - but even then it comes and goes.

 

[Laer Carroll]

medium vs. message

Sometimes the point of a post which I or others make does not bloom upon me until days later.

Here we seem to be talking about what critical theorists call the medium and its message, the container and the contained. In the visual arts this is sometimes called the window and the windowed. That is, looking at the painting or photograph, its brush strokes and chiaroscuro. Then looking "through" the window at the person or landscape or scene or abstract visual experience.

The natural tendency is to attend to the objects and actions portrayed by a story, to look at the windowed. Professors of literature and the visual and musical arts try to teach us not to be "naive" and spend much time educating us on the window.

Some professors go so far as to sneer at those of us who would prefer to follow our nature, to call us uncritical and label us as the unwashed. To them the intellectual experience of reading (or viewing or listening) is superior to the emotional and the sensual. I return their contempt. I think it vomitous to ignore the content, to turn us all into mental giants and emotional and sensual pygmies.

But a binary, polarized approach to the question is too either/or for me. I think to some extent Marshall McLuhan was right to say "The medium is the message." I would amend that to "The medium is PART OF the message." Although I'd say that for most of us it is a tiny part of the message, probably varying with the person and how susceptible they are to the "sounds" of text. I'd guess that for only a few of us is the language totally irrelevant as we experience the story.

What does this have to do with us as writers?

I think it depends partly on what mode we are in when we write. In the creative mode I focus on the content of the section I'm writing and how it relates to other sections. The language, through decades of writing, flows from me in an unconscious stream. The more I'm "in" the story, experiencing it in my imagination almost as if I'm there, the more unconscious the writing is.

In the critical mode, after I've dispensed with larger concerns of plot and character, I focus on the language and how I can make it better.

Every artist works differently. This includes a continuum between those who pre-plan much, and those who write "intuitively" and in the moment.

I tend more toward the latter. I'll write for paragraphs and pages at a time. Then I'll change my posture in the chair, or even take a turn about the room, and read the paragraphs or pages I've put on the screen. That's when I'll sharpen the text, chop the extraneous or awkward, smooth the flow of sentences, breaking those that are too long or awkwardly complex.

How about you?

 

[PeteMC]

Every artist works differently. This includes a continuum between those who pre-plan much, and those who write "intuitively" and in the moment.

I tend more toward the latter. I'll write for paragraphs and pages at a time. Then I'll change my posture in the chair, or even take a turn about the room, and read the paragraphs or pages I've put on the screen. That's when I'll sharpen the text, chop the extraneous or awkward, smooth the flow of sentences, breaking those that are too long or awkwardly complex.

How about you?

That's largely how I write too. It takes me a while to finish writing each chapter up from my outline notes, revising and re-wording as I go, but once it's done it's pretty much done.

 

[plblair]

Laer ... Your style is pretty much my own as well, although I never quite leave a chapter until the entire manuscript is done. By that I mean I have, on occasion, gone back to an earlier chapter and made a minor change because of something that occurred to me as I was writing a later chapter in the book. (Oh, the joys of computers that allow such re-crafting with a minimum of hassle! This compared to writing on the old manual or electric typewriters, I mean.)
My intent in writing is to tell a story, with a minimum of intrusion by the "writer." I don't mind readers thinking about my style after the fact (i.e., when they finish the last page of the book). In fact, I think that's a good thing. But when they're reading, my goal is to have them totally immersed in the story, the characters. That's why I write from the POV of one character at a time and - while I'm in that character's POV - I stay strictly with what that character knows or feels or thinks. For me, it's all about the story and how my characters interact with each other.

 

[Window Bar]

The Sound of Prose..

Great post, Laer. You know, I haven't read any of these mags since I was in high school --- and that must be some kind of a time warp, because I believe that was before Gutenberg invented movable type. Maybe it's time again to smell that cheap-press paper and to hear the sounds of all of those writers who are **not quite** as undiscovered as I am.