This is a great distinction, and I think you're really onto something here. Maybe we could say that people who claim to like "invisible prose" don't want the writing getting in the way of the storytelling? If so, I'm reminded of Cleanth Brooks's "The Heresy of Paraphrase." You can't rewrite a sentence of Gravity's Rainbow (or if you did, it would lose quite a lot). But with many other novels, you can rewrite lots of sentences and not lose much of anything, as long as you keep the general plot the same.
That said, my frustration with this debate comes from people (not you, but others) who think that pretty, elaborate prose is the be-all and end-all of good writing. There are plenty of great writers whose prose is relatively plain, and arguably fairly skimmable, but the perfect match for the stories that they're telling, and the artistry of the whole. Patricia Highsmith comes immediately to mind: you can't change a word of Ripley Under Ground, I don't think, without ruining that novel's dry wit, let alone its suspense. Which is to say that the "Heresy of Paraphrase" applies just as much to Highsmith as it does Pynchon, even though I suspect lots of people would think that it doesn't. But prose style is ultimately just one aspect of the larger art that we call fiction.
Oh I love this spin on the argument! (I literally spent my morning trying to write my way through my own thoughts on this — the dismissal of “literary” prose feels so...closed-minded).
There is a thread on Sanderson's Reddit where his fans are all singing the praises of Sanderson's prose that is pretty interesting to read. I mean, none if it seems any more egregious than most author blurbs.
To claim that any horror writer’s prose is invisible is absurd. The effect of horror is entirely dependent on tone, on building tension and suspense and (obviously) fear, and in a medium in which literally the only way to do that is through words, the prose must be visible.
I really love the way that you link invisibility and "skimmability" -- I absolutely think that that is accurate. And obviously there are a lot of writers I admire whose prose is not easily skimmable, like Pynchon (who I see other commenters have already mentioned) or Angela Carter, whose main value add to some of the fairy tales she revisits is her ornate and encrusted prose.
However... I recently got my hands on a galley of Kelly Link's new story collection and I zoomed through the three longest stories in a single short sitting, trying in each case to figure out what she was doing with the macro structure and not spending any time lingering on the details. I know I will go back and read the entire collection multiple times because that's what I always end up doing with her work. But the fact that each story makes an interesting overall shape is important and something that you can lose sight of when you're creeping along at the language level.
That's even truer for novels. Like another one of your commenters here, I was horrified by that article that described a class reading To Kill a Mockingbird over a period of months and possibly never finishing it. I also once gave a friend a copy of a work in progress and was similarly weirded out when he said that he planned to read a couple of pages a night before going to sleep until he was finished (the work in question was something like 400 pages at the time). You can call that attention to detail, but it's also a kind of inattention to all the things that aren't detail, like structure and story.
I think of a quote from Jonathan Lethem: it's something to the effect that he learned to write the same way he learned to read, by skipping the parts that bored him. I'm not sure that's a great model to present to students, but it does seem like it has something to do with why many people find fiction interesting in the first place.
Yeah I think there's always a range here. I think one can read quickly without skimming through. Skimming to me implies you are literally skipping lines and or moving so quickly you're only getting part of the information on the page or half-registering the language. I read the Kelly Link recently too and loved it. I wasn't pondering every sentence, but I was reading each page if that makes sense.
I guess my main point re: the Link stories is I did skim them, they held up, and I think that says something about why they work (even though not every worthwhile piece of literature can be consumed that way, and these stories in particular would also reward closer reading).
Personally, if I'm honest, the reason I'm not interested in Sanderson -- who I've never read and might be wrong about -- is that his work doesn't sound interesting to me on the micro *or* macro level. If his prose was meh but the premises sounded fascinating, I would power through the prose, and probably appreciate he made it skimmable! That may not be true for everyone but I do think it's a fairly common readerly response, and not a value-less one.
I like the distinction between micro and macro level.
And I hear you re: the Link. I imagine we could expand this to something like skimmable prose that rewards close reading, skimmable prose that shouldn't be close read (some of my examples), unskimmable prose that rewards the close read, and then... just bad dense prose heh.
I'm not on social media, so thanks for alerting me to the discourse on this. Also never read Sanderson.
In my opinion any writer will want the prose to FEEL invisible, but still hold up upon scrutiny. So you either start at invisible and get more opaque when necessary, or start at visible and get more translucent when necessary. Where it's necessary to do either will feel different for different writers depending on their starting point and what they are trying to achieve.
Whether it holds up to scrutiny depends on the tastes and preferences of the reader, and whether they scrutinize at all. Most readers don't.
I think people like Sanderson start at invisible. Stephen King too, famous for "pure plot." Both are prolific, which I don't think is a coincidence. They also have more mass appeal.
Whereas maybe stuff like James Joyce is a concrete wall. Writing for writing's sake. (Wish I could think of a more relevant modern example. David Foster Wallace?)
This is brilliant! When the tweet came across my timeline, I was struggling to decide whether I was being a literary snob or if there was an illogical undercurrent in people's desire for invisible writing. It's one of those situations where reading into people's thoughts can veer on trivial or hypercritical but you've towed the line beautifully!!! :)
It seems like people are on a spectrum between enrichment through plot and enrichment through prose, but personally I feel there is so much to lose if you don’t view prose as a plot device in itself! It’s fascinating how literary weight of the sentence to signify the emotional/atmospheric/etc weight lends itself perfectly to invisibility or, as you rightly put it, skimmability!
I think the loss when neglecting prose is that subtlety of metaphors themselves are incredibly immersive themselves; they convey all the little sensations and ‘sub-thoughts’ of real life. They aren’t ever fully acknowledged in reality so they work their way perfectly into atmospheric descriptions that we instinctively navigate but enjoy as well-crafted writing.
It’s a strange paradox of visibility; you can elevate your text by playing with/acknowledging the invisible sentiments of life (like Hardy weaving his social commentary as well as his foreshadowing into the landscape of his novels) at the risk of making your text very ‘visible’ again. But for me personally, the inclusion of those sentiments makes the prose almost invisible to me again — the right kind of invisible. I’m become so engrossed by what I’m reading!
Maybe I’m pivoting the discussion on a tangent but I love the beauty in pinpointing an abstract feeling and simultaneously retaining its intangibility i.e. tastefully on the nose. It’s like a micro-homage to the empirical invisibility we experience everyday… making the invisible visible for the first time!
I think you nailed it, especially linking invisible prose to skimmability, as somebody else already mentioned, and probably another person. A very large group of people do not read anymore, they only skim, hence the abominable popularity of putting paragraph breaks between each sentence, short sentences. And if the sentence might stretch too long, one might drop an ellipsis character or an incongruent comma, then make a break and continue.
Just wanted to offer a discussion/counterpoint to one idea here:
"A work of fiction *is* prose. In the most literal sense, a story is nothing except its sentences. There’s nothing through the window. The pane itself is the story."
Speaking as a linguist, I have to disagree. Writing is language, and language is inherently an abstract representation of ideas. Consider speech as a simpler example: when we talk to someone, the sounds we make are not the important thing. Nor are the larger words or the sentences. Instead, the sounds together represent an idea, and that idea can be something far removed from anything present at the moment of utterance. Stated most simply: sounds, words, and sentences are only a MEDIUM of idea exchange, not CONTENT. And is its just so with written language.
Now, I'm far from an "invisible prose" purist. I think the medium of art is equally as important as its content, and that applies to writing just as well as anything else. I just thought that the summary dismissal of a perfectly valid point was rather a mistake.
I think we're saying similar things in different ways. You say the medium is as important as its content, which is also what I'm saying. A novel is prose. It isn't music or a film with visuals or a graphic novel. To adapt the story to a different medium is to change it. You can have 5 versions of the same story in different mediums and they will all be different in various ways, both small and large. So there isn't a single story behind the pane so to speak.
We might be saying the same thing, but I'm not sure. You seem to be making the case that content and medium are inseparable. Which I can understand; If you're looking through a window at a scene that appears suffused with orange, you can't necessarily tell if it looks that way because the windowpane is orange or because the natural light is orange.
But I'm making the opposite case: that content and medium are entirely separable. I believe that you *can* tell the difference between an orange-tinted window and orange light, if you look long and carefully enough, and that the experience of each is distinct.
In other words, you CAN tell the same story in any medium...you just go about it differently.
Thinking and writing about the Sanderson profile this week as well, but hadn't thought about as two types of prose styles and instead thought of it as two different skill sets being judged--writing sentences and telling a story. But I like your point about skimmable prose, which is that the sentence style seems specifically designed to communicate "hey you don't have to care about this as writing and I'm not going to tax your imagination"...It's fine to want that as a reader, and the best interesting, complex writers can also make their sentences untaxing to read, like they're plugged into your brain. But it does get iffy when you start using that as an ideal as a reader--as you said it is the equivalent of putting on Netflix on in the background while you're on your phone; how can you expect to get anything out of a book or a movie or anything if you're not putting anything into it?
For as long as I've read Sanderson, and watched his lecture series on YouTube along with interviews at conventions, I've never conceived of his 'clear pane' as invisible prose. It is his chosen style. The style is a scale of clear pane to stained glass window ranging from, say, Sanderson to Guy Gavriel Kay (and beyond) with the difference being in word 'cost'. Sanderson uses far more 1 pence words than Kay who uses 5 pence, 10 pence, and 50 pence words freely. Readers notice when Sanderson uses 'patina' a half-dozen times in Elantris but don't notice Kay using similarly uncommon words. I don't find Sanderson particularly skimmable and have a far easier time (though not faster) reading Kay.
I'm not sure if invisible is solely skimmable, GRRM writes quite 'visible prose' but I can read an ASOIAF novel much faster than a Sanderson one. Sure, speed of reading isn't equal to skimming but you could skim parts of GRRM and get the gist (perhaps due to his specific aesthetic and tone set up by the prose). Guy Gavriel Kay on the otherhand is a slow read, you cannot skim his 'visible prose', but it's a cosy drift through the story carried by the prose. Whereas Stephen King I found a total slog to the point where when I finished The Gunslinger I had to take a break from reading. I was exhausted from what I can only describe as the weight of the words (not the story).
You're right that invisible prose means something else and it is linked to skimmability but I think there is something else to it, I just can't put my finger on it right now.
Good post. I agree with your point about "invisibility" = "skimability." Sure, there are times when it's okay to skim, but generally reading is a action that requires some effort on a reader's part. There are foods one could do well to simply gulp and swallow; but eating is so much more if done with deliberation and attention. ps: the Stephen King sentence was the worst of the bunch.
This is a great distinction, and I think you're really onto something here. Maybe we could say that people who claim to like "invisible prose" don't want the writing getting in the way of the storytelling? If so, I'm reminded of Cleanth Brooks's "The Heresy of Paraphrase." You can't rewrite a sentence of Gravity's Rainbow (or if you did, it would lose quite a lot). But with many other novels, you can rewrite lots of sentences and not lose much of anything, as long as you keep the general plot the same.
That said, my frustration with this debate comes from people (not you, but others) who think that pretty, elaborate prose is the be-all and end-all of good writing. There are plenty of great writers whose prose is relatively plain, and arguably fairly skimmable, but the perfect match for the stories that they're telling, and the artistry of the whole. Patricia Highsmith comes immediately to mind: you can't change a word of Ripley Under Ground, I don't think, without ruining that novel's dry wit, let alone its suspense. Which is to say that the "Heresy of Paraphrase" applies just as much to Highsmith as it does Pynchon, even though I suspect lots of people would think that it doesn't. But prose style is ultimately just one aspect of the larger art that we call fiction.
Oh I love this spin on the argument! (I literally spent my morning trying to write my way through my own thoughts on this — the dismissal of “literary” prose feels so...closed-minded).
There is a thread on Sanderson's Reddit where his fans are all singing the praises of Sanderson's prose that is pretty interesting to read. I mean, none if it seems any more egregious than most author blurbs.
To claim that any horror writer’s prose is invisible is absurd. The effect of horror is entirely dependent on tone, on building tension and suspense and (obviously) fear, and in a medium in which literally the only way to do that is through words, the prose must be visible.
I really love the way that you link invisibility and "skimmability" -- I absolutely think that that is accurate. And obviously there are a lot of writers I admire whose prose is not easily skimmable, like Pynchon (who I see other commenters have already mentioned) or Angela Carter, whose main value add to some of the fairy tales she revisits is her ornate and encrusted prose.
However... I recently got my hands on a galley of Kelly Link's new story collection and I zoomed through the three longest stories in a single short sitting, trying in each case to figure out what she was doing with the macro structure and not spending any time lingering on the details. I know I will go back and read the entire collection multiple times because that's what I always end up doing with her work. But the fact that each story makes an interesting overall shape is important and something that you can lose sight of when you're creeping along at the language level.
That's even truer for novels. Like another one of your commenters here, I was horrified by that article that described a class reading To Kill a Mockingbird over a period of months and possibly never finishing it. I also once gave a friend a copy of a work in progress and was similarly weirded out when he said that he planned to read a couple of pages a night before going to sleep until he was finished (the work in question was something like 400 pages at the time). You can call that attention to detail, but it's also a kind of inattention to all the things that aren't detail, like structure and story.
I think of a quote from Jonathan Lethem: it's something to the effect that he learned to write the same way he learned to read, by skipping the parts that bored him. I'm not sure that's a great model to present to students, but it does seem like it has something to do with why many people find fiction interesting in the first place.
Still pondering all of this, clearly!
Yeah I think there's always a range here. I think one can read quickly without skimming through. Skimming to me implies you are literally skipping lines and or moving so quickly you're only getting part of the information on the page or half-registering the language. I read the Kelly Link recently too and loved it. I wasn't pondering every sentence, but I was reading each page if that makes sense.
I guess my main point re: the Link stories is I did skim them, they held up, and I think that says something about why they work (even though not every worthwhile piece of literature can be consumed that way, and these stories in particular would also reward closer reading).
Personally, if I'm honest, the reason I'm not interested in Sanderson -- who I've never read and might be wrong about -- is that his work doesn't sound interesting to me on the micro *or* macro level. If his prose was meh but the premises sounded fascinating, I would power through the prose, and probably appreciate he made it skimmable! That may not be true for everyone but I do think it's a fairly common readerly response, and not a value-less one.
I like the distinction between micro and macro level.
And I hear you re: the Link. I imagine we could expand this to something like skimmable prose that rewards close reading, skimmable prose that shouldn't be close read (some of my examples), unskimmable prose that rewards the close read, and then... just bad dense prose heh.
💯
I'm not on social media, so thanks for alerting me to the discourse on this. Also never read Sanderson.
In my opinion any writer will want the prose to FEEL invisible, but still hold up upon scrutiny. So you either start at invisible and get more opaque when necessary, or start at visible and get more translucent when necessary. Where it's necessary to do either will feel different for different writers depending on their starting point and what they are trying to achieve.
Whether it holds up to scrutiny depends on the tastes and preferences of the reader, and whether they scrutinize at all. Most readers don't.
I think people like Sanderson start at invisible. Stephen King too, famous for "pure plot." Both are prolific, which I don't think is a coincidence. They also have more mass appeal.
Whereas maybe stuff like James Joyce is a concrete wall. Writing for writing's sake. (Wish I could think of a more relevant modern example. David Foster Wallace?)
This is brilliant! When the tweet came across my timeline, I was struggling to decide whether I was being a literary snob or if there was an illogical undercurrent in people's desire for invisible writing. It's one of those situations where reading into people's thoughts can veer on trivial or hypercritical but you've towed the line beautifully!!! :)
It seems like people are on a spectrum between enrichment through plot and enrichment through prose, but personally I feel there is so much to lose if you don’t view prose as a plot device in itself! It’s fascinating how literary weight of the sentence to signify the emotional/atmospheric/etc weight lends itself perfectly to invisibility or, as you rightly put it, skimmability!
I think the loss when neglecting prose is that subtlety of metaphors themselves are incredibly immersive themselves; they convey all the little sensations and ‘sub-thoughts’ of real life. They aren’t ever fully acknowledged in reality so they work their way perfectly into atmospheric descriptions that we instinctively navigate but enjoy as well-crafted writing.
It’s a strange paradox of visibility; you can elevate your text by playing with/acknowledging the invisible sentiments of life (like Hardy weaving his social commentary as well as his foreshadowing into the landscape of his novels) at the risk of making your text very ‘visible’ again. But for me personally, the inclusion of those sentiments makes the prose almost invisible to me again — the right kind of invisible. I’m become so engrossed by what I’m reading!
Maybe I’m pivoting the discussion on a tangent but I love the beauty in pinpointing an abstract feeling and simultaneously retaining its intangibility i.e. tastefully on the nose. It’s like a micro-homage to the empirical invisibility we experience everyday… making the invisible visible for the first time!
I thought this Atlantic piece was an interesting companion to all this... https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2023/03/children-reading-books-english-middle-grade/673457/
I think you nailed it, especially linking invisible prose to skimmability, as somebody else already mentioned, and probably another person. A very large group of people do not read anymore, they only skim, hence the abominable popularity of putting paragraph breaks between each sentence, short sentences. And if the sentence might stretch too long, one might drop an ellipsis character or an incongruent comma, then make a break and continue.
Just wanted to offer a discussion/counterpoint to one idea here:
"A work of fiction *is* prose. In the most literal sense, a story is nothing except its sentences. There’s nothing through the window. The pane itself is the story."
Speaking as a linguist, I have to disagree. Writing is language, and language is inherently an abstract representation of ideas. Consider speech as a simpler example: when we talk to someone, the sounds we make are not the important thing. Nor are the larger words or the sentences. Instead, the sounds together represent an idea, and that idea can be something far removed from anything present at the moment of utterance. Stated most simply: sounds, words, and sentences are only a MEDIUM of idea exchange, not CONTENT. And is its just so with written language.
Now, I'm far from an "invisible prose" purist. I think the medium of art is equally as important as its content, and that applies to writing just as well as anything else. I just thought that the summary dismissal of a perfectly valid point was rather a mistake.
I think we're saying similar things in different ways. You say the medium is as important as its content, which is also what I'm saying. A novel is prose. It isn't music or a film with visuals or a graphic novel. To adapt the story to a different medium is to change it. You can have 5 versions of the same story in different mediums and they will all be different in various ways, both small and large. So there isn't a single story behind the pane so to speak.
We might be saying the same thing, but I'm not sure. You seem to be making the case that content and medium are inseparable. Which I can understand; If you're looking through a window at a scene that appears suffused with orange, you can't necessarily tell if it looks that way because the windowpane is orange or because the natural light is orange.
But I'm making the opposite case: that content and medium are entirely separable. I believe that you *can* tell the difference between an orange-tinted window and orange light, if you look long and carefully enough, and that the experience of each is distinct.
In other words, you CAN tell the same story in any medium...you just go about it differently.
Thinking and writing about the Sanderson profile this week as well, but hadn't thought about as two types of prose styles and instead thought of it as two different skill sets being judged--writing sentences and telling a story. But I like your point about skimmable prose, which is that the sentence style seems specifically designed to communicate "hey you don't have to care about this as writing and I'm not going to tax your imagination"...It's fine to want that as a reader, and the best interesting, complex writers can also make their sentences untaxing to read, like they're plugged into your brain. But it does get iffy when you start using that as an ideal as a reader--as you said it is the equivalent of putting on Netflix on in the background while you're on your phone; how can you expect to get anything out of a book or a movie or anything if you're not putting anything into it?
https://dearheadofmine.substack.com/p/the-41-million-dollar-man
Well put.
For as long as I've read Sanderson, and watched his lecture series on YouTube along with interviews at conventions, I've never conceived of his 'clear pane' as invisible prose. It is his chosen style. The style is a scale of clear pane to stained glass window ranging from, say, Sanderson to Guy Gavriel Kay (and beyond) with the difference being in word 'cost'. Sanderson uses far more 1 pence words than Kay who uses 5 pence, 10 pence, and 50 pence words freely. Readers notice when Sanderson uses 'patina' a half-dozen times in Elantris but don't notice Kay using similarly uncommon words. I don't find Sanderson particularly skimmable and have a far easier time (though not faster) reading Kay.
I'm not sure if invisible is solely skimmable, GRRM writes quite 'visible prose' but I can read an ASOIAF novel much faster than a Sanderson one. Sure, speed of reading isn't equal to skimming but you could skim parts of GRRM and get the gist (perhaps due to his specific aesthetic and tone set up by the prose). Guy Gavriel Kay on the otherhand is a slow read, you cannot skim his 'visible prose', but it's a cosy drift through the story carried by the prose. Whereas Stephen King I found a total slog to the point where when I finished The Gunslinger I had to take a break from reading. I was exhausted from what I can only describe as the weight of the words (not the story).
You're right that invisible prose means something else and it is linked to skimmability but I think there is something else to it, I just can't put my finger on it right now.
Thank you, I really enjoy reading your newsletter
I was trying to think of how to articulate this concept but you’ve managed to explain this perfectly. Thank you!
Wow. This was eye opening. Never really thought of this.
Great article!
Good post. I agree with your point about "invisibility" = "skimability." Sure, there are times when it's okay to skim, but generally reading is a action that requires some effort on a reader's part. There are foods one could do well to simply gulp and swallow; but eating is so much more if done with deliberation and attention. ps: the Stephen King sentence was the worst of the bunch.