On "Prose-Forward" Writing and the Pleasures of Different Genre Conversations

Rambling thoughts on style, genre, and the infinite possibilities of fiction

Jack Kirby, the GOAT.

One thing I enjoy about the growth of Substack and similar newsletters is being able to have more sustained and complex conversations than social media allows. (A low bar to be sure, but still.) And so I thought I’d extend the conversation about “invisible prose,” in part inspired by Molly Templeton’s article “Style, Texture, Boundaries: On Being a Fluid Reader” at Tor.

Templeton talks about a lot of different things, including Kelly Link’s new collection that we both loved, and a useful set of terms from Max Gladstone adding to the invisible vs. visible prose question with “one additional tension: between texture and aerodynamics.” Like Templeton, I think this is a smart metaphor. It’s true that some prose feels more textured and other prose is made to breeze by you. It’s still prose. It isn’t invisible or a “clear window” you don’t notice. But some prose adds very distinct textures to a story and other prose is meant to speed you along.

Of course, my contrarian brain immediately wants to suggest prose can be both textured and aerodynamic. (Gladstone makes this point as well.) Yesterday I was rereading Charles Yu’s National Book Award-winning Interior Chinatown, and that’s a great example of prose that does both. The book is formatted like a screenplay and does a whole lot of very “textured” things on the page—from character names to strange formatting—but also reads very briskly.

Templeton brought up another tweet that had also caught my attention, from an editor at the SFF publisher Tor:

christina orlando 🌙 @cxorlando

this is maybe controversial but theres a BIG divide in genre fiction particularly between plot-forward writing and prose-forward writing. most sff readers prefer the former, most top sff writers are the former. lyrical sff is often called literary. there are few who can do both

Moniza Hossain @moniza_hossain

Everyone is so angry about that Sanderson article, but I think it raises an important point about writing. If you examine the work of prolific and beloved writers at a sentence level, you will often find mediocre sentences. And that’s ok! Writing often just has to be invisible

One thing I noticed with Orlando’s tweet is that the QTs/replies were filled with angry readers saying it’s bullshit… and then authors saying it was dead on and determines how they are marketed and published.

As an author who is published about equally in the SFF ecosystem and literary fiction ecosystem, this is a topic I think about a lot. It’s very easy to say “all these labels are false and mean nothing!” And obviously as someone who writes both SFF and “literary fiction” I think the binary is bullshit, the snobs on both sides are annoying, and all of these terms are fluid, overlapping, and spectrums. Etc. At the same time, questions of what gets called literary and what is embraced or rejected by SFF readers is a practical concern. Saying “it’s all bullshit” or “it’s all just marketing” doesn’t change the hard reality of where your work gets published, whether you have shots at awards, and how readers will find or fail to find your work.

As much as we’ve kicked down many of the bricks in the barrier between literary fiction and genre fiction—and the situation is indeed dramatically better than a decade or two ago—the ecosystems area still very separate. If you want a simple illustration of this, compare the finalists for the Hugo and Nebula vs. the NBA and Pulitzer. There’s virtually no overlap. Unless I’m missing someone, the sole exception in recent decades is Michael Chabon… and even he didn’t overlap for the same book.

But before I write an entire rant on that subject, let me move onto the idea of “prose-forward” fiction, which I think is a clarifying term. Templeton:

The most nail-on-the-head part of this observation, to me, is the bit about how the prose-forward SFF writers are often considered literary, or elevated, in a different way. Why do some clearly speculative stories get published by literary imprints, shelved in general fiction, treated as if they are not SFF stories at all? It’s not always because they are prose-forward, but it’s part of it.

I agree. I often hear SFF people ask why some speculative writers are embraced by the literary world and others aren’t. I think “prose-forward” is much of the answer. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that “prose-forward” writing is the defining quality of what is called “literary” in general. (Note that in my view authors can be simultaneously literary and genre. This is a Venn diagram, not a binary.)

Prose-forward doesn’t mean a specific style but rather that the prose itself is an integral part of the work. The texture of it, to use Gladstone’s metaphor. That texture might be dense and lush like Southern Gothic or gritty and minimalist like dirty realism or a million other things. But the literary world places great focus on the texture of sentences, whatever that texture might be.

The Problem with the “Character-Driven” vs. “Plot-Driven” Binary

“Prose-forward” strikes me as a far more accurate determiner of what is called “literary” than other definitions. The most common one you hear is that literary fiction is “character-driven” as opposed to “plot-driven.” The problem with the character/plot binary is that it gets it wrong on all sides.

A whole lot of literary fiction that is very thin on character. As a case in point, consider Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities that for the most part doesn’t even have characters. The closest you get are short interstitial chapters where avatars named Marco Polo and Kublai Khan have whimsical philosophical conversations. However, these are a slim part of the book and the “characters” have no real unifying traits, goals, arcs, or backstories. They’re not really characters in the way we typically mean. That’s an extreme example, but literary fiction is filled with work that’s quite light on character by design. A lot of surrealism, postmodernism, flash fiction, etc.

Conversely, a lot of genre fiction is very character focused. I read pretty widely across genres and would probably say that horror fiction—in novel form, not short stories—is the heaviest on character. Horror requires you to care about the characters and, frankly, you can only spend a small amount of page space on the overt scares. So most horror novels spend the majority of their page space exploring and deepening character. Try reading, just as an example, The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay and tell me it isn’t character-driven. Romance is another genre that requires pretty deep character investment.

And the definition is wrong on the plot side too. Yes, there’s indeed plenty of plotless literary fiction in which a character meanders around Brooklyn thinking lyrical thoughts. But they’re the minority. Much of what’s published as literary fiction these days is pretty heavily plotted. Remember, plot doesn’t just mean guns blazing action scenes. A family saga full of reveals and twists can be as plotted as any spy thriller. And of course there is genre fiction that is minimally plotted too.

And the Problem with Conflating “Literary” with “Realism”

Another definition of “literary fiction,” mostly popular in the SFF world, is that it is “mimetic fiction.” Realism. This is a topic I could write a book on. But suffice to say if your definition of genres is related to what is read, published, and awarded in the real world then this claim makes little sense. There is a vast swath of literature outside the realm of realism that has been published, read, and celebrated in the literary world—and, I would crucially note, mostly ignored by the SFF world—for as long as the term literary has existed.

There are other problems with this binary. A lot of non-SFF genres are forms of realism: most crime fiction, most romance, historical fiction, etc. And fictional realities exist on a huge spectrum that can’t be split into a binary. To pick one example, consider the aestheticism of Oscar Wilde in a work like The Importance of Being Earnest. This is not our reality, and Wilde hated realism. It’s full of implausible events and the characters speak in unrealistic ways. Does this make the play “fantasy”? You could argue it, I suppose, but doing so wouldn’t actually tell you anything about Wilde’s work and I think most fantasy readers would raise an eyebrow.

There’s simply an infinite number of ways to warp, exaggerate, tweak, or subvert reality. I went into that at length here.

Where Genre and Lit Conversations Overlap

"Prose-forward,” though, goes a long way toward explaining what books are counted as literary in the real world. Not just as a term that explains what unites the surrealism of Donald Barthelme, the Kmart realism of Ann Beattie, the lush prose of Toni Morrison, and [insert infinite other examples here]. But also what genre authors are counted among and celebrated by the literary world. For example, look at the SFF authors who have been given Library of America editions: Kurt Vonnegut, Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Ray Bradbury. Tremendous stylists all. You might notice very stylistic writers from other genres, like Raymond Chandler and Elmore Leonard, on the LOA list as well.

Well realism snobs do exist—in thankfully dwindling numbers—the above authors are all pretty widely celebrated in the literary fiction world. If you took an MFA class on speculative fiction you’re far more likely to be reading Ursula K. Le Guin and Ray Bradbury than someone like Brandon Sanderson, to bring it back to the author who kicked off the invisible prose debate.

And Where they Don’t

Now, I’m not arguing this is a scientific process. There are certainly many great SFF stylists who don’t get much traction in the literary fiction world. Take Gene Wolfe, who I’ve heard called “The Nabokov of Science Fiction” more than once. Wolfe—who I love—isn’t widely known in the literary world despite being prose-forward. Why?

The answer, I think, is that writers like Wolfe speak the language of SFF in a way that can be impenetrable to outsiders. He’s deep in a conversation that’s hard to access if you aren’t a part of it. This isn’t a criticism. Again, I adore Wolfe. It’s just I’d argue you have to be pretty familiar with SFF tropes, concerns, and ideas to understand a book like The Fifth Head of Cerberus in a way that is not true for, say, Octavia Butler’s Kindred or Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five.

I think this is the other part of the puzzle to what speculative authors get lumped in with literary fiction or placed on the literary fiction shelf. It isn’t just snobbery, though that exists. And it isn’t just that they’re prose-forward. It’s also that they are accessible to general readers. George Saunders may include fictional technologies and Gabriel García Márquez will include magical elements, but they are otherwise speaking the language of “literary fiction.” On the flipside, those authors may not always be speaking the language of SFF. Which is why SFF readers will not infrequently dismiss magical realism as “lacking worldbuilding rigor.”

We can extend this to genres/subgenres in general. Why is near-future SF more accepted in literary circles than far-future space opera? Probably because it’s more accessible to general readers. Why is epic fantasy suddenly getting literary world attention after decades of being utterly ignored? Probably because the success of adaptations of Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, The Witcher, and so on have made the language of epic fantasy more understandable to the culture at large.

Does that mean the SFF world dislikes prose-forward work? I don’t believe that. It might be true of many casual readers, but then casual readers of general fiction don’t typically love prose forward work either. To speak personally, the short stories I’ve published in Lightspeed or F&SF are exactly as prose-forward as the stories I’ve published in Granta or The Paris Review. There’s no difference in the prose. (Side note, if you’re a Hugo voter my Lightspeed novelette is eligible.)

I’d say most of the writers who compete for the Hugo and Nebula are pretty prose-forward, although that’s not universally true. But in my experience, the SFF readership simply has somewhat different concerns and focuses. It’s not that they don’t care about sentences so much as they place a greater focus on exploration of ideas, for example, or the logic and texture of the world more than the prose.

These aren’t better or worse concerns. Just different. And they don’t always overlap. The pleasures of logically fleshed-out science fiction worlds are different than the pleasures of magical realist worlds. But the great thing about literature is we don’t have to choose. We can always read both.

On Moving Between Genre Conversations

My preferred metaphor for genres (and I include literary fiction here), is that they are conversations. Great long-running conversations between authors alive and dead, and also between readers and critics. They stretch through time and overlap. Sometimes a conversation dwindles and dies. Other times they get so large they form smaller groups of side conversations called styles or sub-genres.

As with any groups, these conversations develop their own jargon. Their own in-jokes, references, and concerns. Some books speak only to one conversation. Other books to multiple ones. Some authors and readers prefer just a few conversations. Others like to float around, the aesthetic equivalent of social butterflies.

It’s fine to find a conversation you love, and stick with it. Although in my experience the more you explore different genre conversations the more you will learn to appreciate the full variety of literary pleasures and possibilities. There pleasures and possibilities of noir are different than the pleasures and possibilities of epic fantasy or postmodernism or Gothic horror.

The only way—as either a reader or a writer—to be fluid in your conversations is, well, to listen. That is to say, to read. The more you read in a given genre, the more you will understand it’s interests and concerns. And the more you will appreciate the infinite possibilities of literature.

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If you like this newsletter, consider subscribing or checking out my recent science fiction novel The Body Scout that The New York Times called “Timeless and original…a wild ride, sad and funny, surreal and intelligent.”

Other works I’ve written or co-edited include Upright Beasts (my story collection), Tiny Nightmares (an anthology of horror fiction), and Tiny Crimes (an anthology of crime fiction).