You have your story idea and you have your story fundamentals (setting, characters, plot) and you want to write it now. It's simple, right? Just type some words on a keyboard and hope for the best, right?

Well, no. See, if you make a movie, you can always just take a camera and film everything you want the audience to see in the hope that they understand what's going on. But without a solid understanding of color, angles, and light, your movie is likely going to flop. While we often tell ourselves that only the plot and characters make or break a movie, let's be real, we care for how it looks, too. A movie that looks great can still be terrible (looking at you, Prometheus), but great looks are always a plus to have.

Prose is the text equivalent of a video game's graphics, a cartoon's animation quality, or a movie's special effects. It's a way to evoke emotions in the audience through word magic alone. Since its also the quickest way to get a reaction, your prose will decide the first impression your story makes on readers.

I've already talked about "Show, don't tell" and how to choose your perspective. This chapter will be a more general primer on prose.

Rule One: Don't Be Confusing!

Your prose is the way how you communicate the story in your head to the outside world. It's also what your audience must figure out before anything else makes sense. Unfortunately, there are plenty of ways to mess comprehensibility up. Spelling and grammar are the big ones.

A miselled word will sometimes be overlooked, sometimes recognized as misspelled and somtimes be plan confusing.

Lacking paragraph breaks can also hurt reading comprehension.

Since this is a common issue here, I'll devote a whole chapter extra to this topic.

Rule Two: Be Varied!

This sentence has words. Four, to be precise. So does this one. It is very dull. See what I mean?

Okay, I admit, never varying your sentence length, or structure can sometimes be appropriate. But generally speaking, your sentences should be varied. So should your word choice, though repeating a certain word often can help with emphasis. If you use a certain word too often, I suggest cracking open a thesaurus and searching for a fancy synonym.

Finally, watch out for sentences that are long and rambling. Read them out loud and see if you can do so without running out of breath. If you can't, split them in two. It's not hard.

Rule Three: Describe things in an appropriate level of detail

I've read several stories on this website where it feels like we don't get enough details to picture a scene. Let's see we have a character walk through a forest. What type of forest is it? Temperate or cold? Beautiful or creepy? What type of fauna and flora do we have? If a character walks through a city, is it a friendly suburb or is there a lot of crime? Make sure to describe sensory information. What does your character see, feel, hear or smell at the moment? Of course, it's also possible to go in the other direction and go into too much detail. The number of words you use to describe something should reflect its relative importance. Scenes that characterize the protagonist or drive the plot forward need detail while the character getting from A to B does not.

Rule Four: Don't be melodramatic

Sometimes, writers try to be poetic, but what they write sounds more funny than beautiful. This is especially common if they use clichéd or weird metaphors.

When people kiss, fanfiction authors on Wattpad often write stuff like "their tongues battled for dominance".  Likewise, YA books overuse the phrase "I let out a breath I didn't even know I was holding". Comparing beautiful eyes to precious gemstones ("Her eyes were sapphire orbs with a hint of emerald and ruby") or comparing the muscular build of a bad boy to a Greek God is likewise overdone.

Another way in which metaphors can be cringe-worthy is if they sound weird or too extreme. "My heart shattered into a thousand pieces" and similar should be used sparingly. Please also keep in mind that metaphors are supposed to conjure up a mental image. When that mental image is comical (like comparing a kiss to a battle), so is your metaphor.

And please, while it's good to use varied words, don't overuse your thesaurus. You don't need to write "orbs", it's enough to call eyes "eyes.

Rule Five: Don't be boring!

While you shouldn't be melodramatic, you shouldn't be too boring either. Use some fancy words from your thesaurus. Vary your sentences. Drop a metaphor here and there. There's a balance between being boring and being melodramatic.

If you want to know more about that, just read the next section.

Choosing a Style:

Once you've mastered these five rules, you should choose a writing style. To keep it simple, there's beige prose and purple prose.

Beige prose uses simple sentences, simple vocabulary, and not many figures of speech.

Here's an example:

"I woke up and got out of my bed. In the mirror, I saw my blue eyes. I tied my blonde hair into a messy bun and went to school."

Purple prose uses long-winding sentences, complex words, and flowery metaphors. And thesaurus overuse.

Here's an example.

"I rose out of my slumber and ascended from my resting place. In the shimmering bathroom glass, I watched my twinkling sapphire orbs gaze back into my soul just as I gazed into them. Then, I combined my luscious, saffron-gold hair into a messy bun before I embarked on a journey to the institution of my education."

The first example sounds boring while the second sounds comical. In practice though, most stories you'll read will fall somewhere between those two extremes. There's a spectrum between the two. Stories that lean towards beige prose have the advantage of easier comprehensibility and can convey humor or tension more easily. Stories that lean towards purple prose have their readers go wild with their imagination and can convey a sense of wonder or intense feelings more easily.

Science fiction and fantasy stories often use purple prose when describing fantastical elements. J.R.R. Tolkien did this a lot.

Here's how he describes the Dimrill Dale in The Fellowship of the Ring:

"They rose and looked about them. Northward the dale ran up into a glen of shadows between two great arms of the mountains, above which three white peaks were shining: Celebdil, Fanuidhol, Caradhras, the Mountains of Moria. At the head of the glen a torrent flowed like a white lace over an endless ladder of short falls, and a mist of foam hung in the air about the mountains' feet.

[...]

To the east the outflung arm of the mountains marched to a sudden end, and far lands could be descried beyond them, wide and vague. To the south the Misty Mountains receded endlessly as far as sight could reach. Less than a mile away, and a little below them, for they still stood high up on the west side of the dale, there lay a mere. It was long and oval, shaped like a great spear-head thrust deep into the northern glen; but its southern end was beyond the shadows under the sunlit sky. Yet its waters were dark: a deep blue like clear evening sky seen from a lamp-lit room. Its face was still and unruffled. About it lay a smooth sward, shelving down on all sides to its bare unbroken rim."

(And much, much more.)

Like a movie in your head, isn't it?

The popular Wattpad book Fayre likewise uses purple prose to create a magical atmosphere. From its prologue:

"The moon is hidden behind a thick dark cloud. The stars are nowhere to be seen. The wind is picking up speed.
A man helps an elegantly dressed woman and a little girl out of a black Town Car. He then leads them towards a dreary looking building where you can see flickers of candlelights dancing through the windows."

The horror, thriller, and mystery genres, by contrast, often rely on beige prose.

A.G. Riddle opens his sci-fi action thriller novel Winter World like this:

"For the past five months, I have watched the world die.

Glaciers have advanced across Canada, England, Russia, and Scandinavia, trampling everything in their path. They show no signs of stopping. The data says they won't.

Within three months, ice will cover the Earth, and life as we know it will end.

My job is to find out why.

And to stop it."

You can see that he uses much shorter paragraphs than Tolkien and that his vocabulary is more mundane (though Granted, some of the words Tolkien used were probably commonplace in the time he wrote LOTR). He also has short sentences that trim unnecessary words. His writing is less magical overall, but it conveys a sense of tension and unease.

To make one thing clear, your genre doesn't force you towards a particular style. While most horror novels tend towards beige prose, horror author H.P. Lovecraft used purple prose all the time to show how incomprehensible and mysterious his otherworldly monsters are. This is mostly about the effect each prose attains.

You can also switch your writing style within your work. In fact, you should do it, because a good story has variety in its scenes and evokes different emotions. As a general rule of thumb, the more important something is, the more you should describe it and the more poetic you should get.

However, switching styles too much too quickly can be downright cringe-worthy. Consider these cliché Wattpad books. Many of them will barely describe the surroundings at all, but when the bad boy love interest appears, we suddenly get three paragraphs on the shape of his jaw, four more on the color of his eyes, and two more on the rock type that best describes his ab hardness. Like, seriously. It's like the entire story, you listen to a normal teenage girl narrating her life, but any time her love interest enters the room, she talks like a poet from three centuries ago!

I think it's also a bit easier to switch styles if you are writing in third-person rather than first. Many Wattpad books who make these jarring transitions are written in first-person (if you have multiple first-person narrators though, that can be a great way to distinguish them). But regardless of what style your write in, make sure you transition gracefully.

Personally, I find purple prose harder. When I get poetic, I sometimes get confused readers who don't understand what I wrote or who think my story moves too slowly due to all the description. Likewise, even when it's consistent, it's really easy for flowery prose to sound just plain embarrassing. But that's just my opinion.

As with most writing-related subjects, just see what prose feels natural to you and how it's done in your favorite stories.

How do you prefer to write?