🌸 how to write ‘prettier’ prose and elevate your writing + free vocabulary list

0:00 foreign [Music] hi welcome back to the channel my name is Lindy Jung I am a science fiction and fantasy writer and I talk about books writing travel and pretty much whatever else I feel like here you probably guessed today's topic based off the title of this video but just in case we are going to be talking about how to write prettier or I guess a better word would be more elevated prose when I started writing out I was pretty young and one of the things I remember struggling with most and that I still definitely do struggle with quite a bit was just writing Pros that felt good that read smoothly that had that nice Rhythm that wasn't overly repetitive or redundant which funnily enough was very

0:46 repetitive of me that just felt nice to read it took me a while to develop a writing style that I liked and become comfortable enough with writing and style to finally just get that sort of prose onto the page but I'm still not 100 I definitely think it's a weak area of mine I definitely can't cough out fully fleshed out gorgeous reading very literary first drafts and I don't think most people can but I do think there are a couple of things that you can look out for and develop over time so you can just write Pros that fits what you are imagining in your head write Pros that isn't clunky or stiff or any of those things that sort of impact the reading experience because this is such a subjective and Broad scope like good Pros could mean so many different things I'm mostly going to be talking based off of personal experience and hope that

1:31 that resonates with you or helps you in some way so for me my main issues tend to be writing that feels just a little bit repetitive I use an overabundance of certain verbs and words my sentence structure can feel a little bit simplistic if I'm not really paying attention and of course like everyone I fall back on familiar phrasing quite a bit I also sometimes find that it's difficult to come up with fresh and interesting metaphors that don't sound completely ridiculous or aren't Supreme cliches and at the end of the day I want writing that really sings It's hard to describe I guess but you know that type of really really beautiful writing that just flows off the page it's sparse but it also gets the imagery across like it's a evocative without using too many words feeling too purple it's able to just conjure up emotions and images and descriptions just in the smallest amount of words like just being very particular

2:18 about your word choice as well as being paying a lot of attention to flow I think my favorite reading experiences are always just reading something that can carry me across several paragraphs or even pages of description without me even really noticing that it's been a long time like I just fall into that flow and it just goes on and I'm just Swept Away by it I also really like it when writers are able to utilize description and metaphor to convey things about character or theme or emotion and really novel or interesting ways there is a tendency especially once you start to learn what good Pros sounds and feels like to just use it to use it if that makes sense like you're writing for the sake of writing out a pretty string of sentences versus having that very purposeful intent with your words of course the kicker here is that again

3:05 good Pros entirely subjective I mean how would we even know of course the kicker here is that good Pros is entirely subjective it can mean so many different things depending on the age category genre length of what you're writing the tone that you want to convey the voice that you're using first or third person but of course there's always a way to tell when prose kind of isn't it isn't hitting the right way which I'll cover in a little bit so I think one of the first steps is to figure out what writing style speaks to you what you really enjoy reading and what you want to sort of emulate or evoke in your own writing think about the purpose of what you're writing think about the tone you're trying to set and the voice of your narration all of these are things you can take into consideration when it comes to your end goal like what you want this writing to look like I think that's also why I struggle with the idea of style like everyone does have a

3:51 writing style I think as you develop your writing over time but one I think writing style tends to evolve and I also think that it can change depending on the story you're telling quite a bit so I tend to think of writing style as less of a prose level thing and more of like a macro thing it's like a storytelling Style to me so we won't be covering style as much just these little tricks to elevate your pros and to make it read a little bit nicer in my opinion so a couple of caveats here prescriptivist writing advice is for the birds always going to say that it's always going to be true I by no means I'm trying to lay down the law or create a hard set of rules or tell you that this is how to write and this is the only way to do it again super subjective subject especially also this is not a video about dialogue I feel like that's kind of a really different sphere of writing I do want to get into it a little bit

4:38 but I'm trying to articulate my thoughts on it better before I dive into a video about that so we're just going to talk about Pros in general for now and not so much dialogue and that's pretty much it so let's go ahead and dive right into today's topic first we're going to talk about what bad prose looks like and of course again making sweeping generalizations here I think the obvious answer is like poor spelling and weak grammar that is not intentional and not for some sort of stylistic purpose or reason other than that it's kind of your mileage may vary right however I do think there is definitely awkward and clunky and stiff and just sort of repetitive is what stand out to me most of the time that kind of prose that you sort of know it when you see it the other side of the spectrum would be very

5:23 overdone purple overly descriptive and Flowery prose that kind of conveys nothing while saying a million things at once I think it is important to note that to me prose is more than just line level and sentence level writing Pros is also how you fit entire paragraphs Pages chapters books all of that together all of it should fit well and flow in a way that creates a very cohesive and consistent reading experience all short stories and books I won't say all I again always exceptions multiple POV and that sort of thing but in general short stories and books should have a very consistent voice and tone throughout so good prose is distinct and developed I'm about to go through a whole sort of list of writing sins but you can definitely pull some of these off at the line level once or twice I think it's when it becomes a pattern of consistent usage

6:10 that you really sort of have to watch out for these because that's when your writing is weakening because it's not a choice anymore it's just something that you've Fallen back on like a bad habit that you're just utilizing over and over again so some Hallmarks of Pros that need more development and this list is sort of based off of things that I notice when editing my own work or has been pointed out to me or that I've seen in other people's writing or even published books if you have any of these don't feel bad this is an opportunity for you to recognize and correct these issues if they're causing problems in your Pros the first one here is going to be repetitive sentence structure especially overuse or just consistent use of that whole pronoun or name verb adverbly I will give you an example in a second

6:56 so anything like she smiled softly he ran quickly they laughed loudly it's just weak writing and I'll get into adverbs as well in a little bit but this structure is very standard it is you know it gets the point across I often use it in place of dialogue tags and it is a type of dialogue tag like she said quietly that is a dialogue tag and a lot of the time this sort of sentence structure will be invisible it will just kind of get the point across and then the reader will keep going it's nothing special but it gets the job done it's when there's an overuse of this and an overuse of this like overly simplistic structure in general or really any type of sentence structure that it becomes sort of a problem you want to mix your sentence structure up you want your writing to have variety so that there's I don't know just like better pacing

7:41 more breaks for action scenes you want punchier sentences for descriptions you probably want longer more complex or compound complex sentences there are four standard sentence structures that I learned about in like Middle School English so we've got the simple the compound the complex and the compound complex that took me like three tries because I kept mixing those up of course these are grammatically correct sentence structures but you can mix things up you can break grammar conventions have single word sentences run-on sentences are also okay sometimes if you really get into the flow of a description or if you're following a character's sort of compulsive Chain of Thought that can definitely be an effective way to do that you can break all the rules that people have told you just mix it up once in a while so I'm going to give you an example that I wrote really quickly of a very repetitive string of sentences and

8:27 then sort of mix it up a little just to show you the change in Rhythm and flow she ran down the hall and took a sharp left she almost fell but managed to pick herself up in time she knew she had to keep running and that if you mixed it up a little and just sort of tweaked the structure you can go from that to her boot slammed against the Aging floorboards which creaked and threatened to snap beneath the onslaught a rusty nail sprang up nearly tripped her but she caught herself and kept sprinting down the Maze of a hallway a fork loomed ahead left or right it didn't matter all she had to do was keep running that isn't like a perfect example but notice how mixing up sentence structure kind of creates a better Rhythm it also forces you to come up with different ways to describe what's happening Maybe you can describe the setting as well as the actual actions that the character is taking I personally really like short

9:12 and Punchy sentences for any sort of action scene and then longer and more almost a run-on sentences for introspection and description of setting emotion Etc just sort of experiment play around with different structures and styles and figure out what works for the scene or the character or whatever project you're working on another sin is repetitive word usage particularly of weak or really uncommon or unusual words if an author uses the word said 500 times and their 100 000 word manuscript no one's going to notice unless it's 500 times in a row said is one of those beautiful words that's completely invisible to most people you just sort of don't notice it because all it is is a dialogue tag usually just to convey who's speaking a particular line however if an author uses the word limerence more than two or three times in a book someone's bound to take notice and it's

9:59 going to be one of those things that takes you right out and yes it is useful to have these very hyper specific words for very specific things however if you're at the point in your story where you're using a hyper-specific word to describe something that's happening more than like two or three times it's just very noticeable sometimes a little odd and it always makes me think of Stephanie Meyer using Chagrin like a bunch of times in Twilight for basically no reason another sin is going to be that weak verb and adverb combination when a stronger verb would do sometimes adverbs serve their purpose I definitely use them maybe more than I should in my writing but they're there for a reason and sometimes there is not a verb that can get across the verb slash adverb combination or there's a unique enough adverb that it's worth utilizing however if you have something like she ran

10:44 quickly down the street just use she pelted or sprinted or barreled down the street instead it'll be more evocative it'll useless words it's just more interesting to read as well and the last one here is overuse of filter words a filter word basically puts a barrier between the reader and your character when there shouldn't be one so if you don't know what a filter word is instead of allowing the care character to just sort of describe what's happening if that makes sense instead of allowing the narration to describe what's happening around the character the author forces you to see or experience things through the character's eyes and it usually uses and it always uses an extraneous verb so for example you would write like they saw the water turn red versus the water turned red they felt the breeze lift their hair versus The Breeze lifted

11:30 their hair it's just one of those things that you have to start looking out for I think for a lot of us it is a knee-jerk reaction to just sort of write a sentence like that once you develop that out of yourself with practice you can get it out otherwise line editing exists for a reason so now that we've covered some issues that can crop up in prose and bog your Pros down let's go ahead and talk about fixing Pros once again I really want to hammer in the fact that you should adapt for your own personal preference read a lot and understand what sounds and feels good to you when you read and try to utilize that in your own writing you can do short writing exercises or write short stories or even just go back and edit some older works and try to up your Pros just to get a feel for how to make that happen one thing I've really gotten into lately that I didn't think I would ever do was read out loud to myself I think that's one of the best ways to develop your voice is to hear your voice saying your

12:17 words and figuring out what sounds good what doesn't sound good I don't know it just like works really well for me it also keeps me engaged with the reading process longer so it makes line editing a little bit less awful not that I think line editing is awful I personally enjoy it it just makes it go smoother so anyway how to elevate your Pros number one is going to be to read lots of inspirational voices and read broadly I feel like I always end up saying this in any sort of writing video but read poetry read short stories read literary fiction read the genres you're trying to write in figure out what sounds good in those genres like figure out who the best writers are in those genres to you make it a personal mission and then dissect their sentences dissect their paragraphs try to understand that flow like get a sense for it by reading it I

13:03 think that has been absolutely the most helpful thing for me personally I've never ever taken any sort of like creative writing lesson in a formal educational environment but reading has been my biggest teacher and I think it can be a lot of writers biggest teachers and greatest Inspirations as well number two is to dramatize instead of narrating if the scene calls for it this is basically just show don't tell but I feel like it's sort of on a macro level so since we're talking about Good Pros existing on larger scales than just the line and just the sentence dramatizing a scene instead of just telling it flat out has changed the way I write it feels like one of those things that was probably quite obvious to other people except for me but once I put it into words it just helped me consider what I was putting on the page so much more so

13:48 when you dramatize instead of narrating you're taking something like I don't know like she felt angry and turning it into an actual description of the anger you're making it dramatic you're giving it that punch you're stretching that emotion that singular emotion and experience out for a little bit longer just to really drive it home and of course this should be a punctuation point it should not be how you write the whole book I'm a big advocate of using a combination of show and tell when writing because they both exist for a reason if everything were written a show reading would take forever every book would be 5 000 pages long but dramatization gives you the opportunity to sort of expand upon those very pronoun verb adverb sentences and create things that flow to utilize different sentence structures to just make

14:35 everything more interesting to read that was also a big lesson for me is that I don't want my books to be boring I want them to be interesting for myself and for people who read them so definitely dramatize don't narrate when the situation calls for it and you'll get a sense of it I think over time I mean that's another reason why line editing exists if you stumble upon a scene that is actually really important to the character's Arc or relationships or the story in general and you find that it's just a couple of really Bland sentences you can expand upon it with the dramatization number three is to find your niche which I don't know if I'm going to be able to describe this 100 accurately but it's when you find your or your character's interests I almost said special interest use their interest their perspective and their background to construct your metaphors this was a

15:22 game changer for me and my metaphors I felt like I was relying too much on the same old like I don't know I I fall back on a lot of animal metaphors generally but they're not super great like Brave is a lion that sort of thing the more specific I was able to get with my character's interests and metaphors the more interesting my metaphors became especially if I was writing from that character's point of view I'm writing a book right now about an entomologist so her brain is bugs everything is bugs and that's how she sees people everything is like lab bug field work science and it's so interesting to write the world through her point of view and to do a lot of research and entomology I've only taken like a couple of classes but so much fun to just figure out different

16:07 unique ways to describe this or that thing through the lens of an entomologist and it's really elevated my writing I think and made the writing of that book more interesting make it pop more make her a more interesting character because she's so clearly fixated on this topic and such an obsessive person also this doesn't have to be a super Niche or specific interest necessarily of course not every character you write needs to be an entomologist but you can relate things back to your character's Hometown or loved ones or just things they like art music who even knows random r b 90s r b and Hip-Hop history how about that this also provides the added bonus of just giving your character more depth and a sense of realness like they're an actual person with actual interest and actual perspective and something they'd rather be doing number four is to learn

16:53 and use strong verbs this might be easier said than done because personally I am a normal person I do not have a magical repertoire of a thousand verbs in my head to replace the word side with take advantage of online thesauruses make lists of verbs that you see jot down verbs that really Intrigue you as you read I also I don't know on a whim I keep a personal vocabulous so I just kind of threw it onto a word doc and I will link that Below in the comments in case you're looking for a list of strong or interesting verbs I also have sections for adjectives and nouns I'll try to update it as I update my own but I don't know we'll see but that'll be in the comments number five is to eliminate your filter words honestly probably like 85 to 90 of the time I feel like you can just cut the filter word part of a sentence out entirely so

17:38 something like she saw the Flies buzzing over the carcass the Flies were buzzing over the carcass the Flies buzzed over the carcass another thing is that two B verbs can also be distracting or unnecessary so yeah just cut those unnecessary verbs as much as you can and move on with your life I guess number six as I mentioned a little bit earlier is to play with unique sentence structures again reading and highlighting examples that you like or just sort of reading poetry just breaking apart that deeply ingrained conventional sentence structure that exists in your brain and trying new things is going to be a great way to really elevate your writing and create a little bit more Rhythm and Variety in your prose number eight once again read out loud to figure out flow and Rhythm I covered a lot of these when I was talking previously I'm just now realizing very sorry about that number nine is to avoid purple prose so purple

18:26 prose is prose that is overly flowery or descriptive and just uses a lot of words it's to convey something that should be relatively simple to describe this generally comes about because overzealous Young Writers really like to write and really want to create fun sentences and I cannot fault them for that at all but it is very distracting and it can be a very confusing reading experience another thing to note is that good writing is usually very clear and concise writing it is Clarity you're trying to communicate something writing is first and foremost communication and writing fiction is communicating a story so if you're not able to communicate your story your writing has sort of failed on some level anyway avoid purple prose by looking out for words that mean

19:11 the same thing and don't really say much it's another thing where most of the time you'll kind of know it when you see it I think it also makes itself very evident in the line editing stage and to Beta readers people will usually be able to recognize when you have purple prose and be like just cut that out simplify sentences cut down on long-winded descriptions of anything like like descriptions don't need to be super long most of the time unless it's a very critical part of the story for some reason descriptions of setting especially can go on for a really long time when they kind of don't have to same goes for objects and people's physical characteristics it's good to have like a decent idea of someone's face and like their hair color skin color eye color maybe ethnicity but you really don't need to wax poetic about

19:56 the golden color of a character's locks for a really long time unless for some reason it's relevant to the story also overly relying on physical descriptions of characters to convey character traits instead of like having them do things that show off their traits is lazy hackneyed and can often result in some like pretty unfortunate stereotyping honestly at the end of the day I usually just describe a character's basic features and then like one or two physical traits that stand out to distinguish them from the rest we're not casting directors we're not necessarily trying to like create the perfect Flawless image of a human being in someone's brain readers are more than capable of using their imaginations to film the details of a character yeah I think especially in y a when a character is like good looking there's just so much emphasis on how good looking they are and Pros can get really purple when

20:43 they're describing like how hot this person is when like yeah they're hot you can just say they're hot that was my little rant for the day another area of Pros that can get really purple I think is introspection maybe this is just me I struggle to describe emotion in a really concise way other than just saying like Angry you know it's it's a hard thing to do emotion is just so difficult to describe but moments of introspection should not go on for Pages at a time try to keep it short if you notice that you're getting a little bit long-winded maybe pair it back a little bit see if you can just keep that concise action scenes should also not go on for too long because they get very repetitive and it's very much just going to be a description of like the same couple of moves in a bunch of different ways keep them Swift and keep

21:28 them Punchy if possible number 10 is to expand your vocabulary in general this goes hand in hand with stronger verbs but honestly just keeping down a general list of the words that you love a personal one one that you can refer back to instead of one that you have to look up and they always say petrichor whenever you type in like interesting words to use they always say Patrick or jot down words and phrases that you love as you go through life as you read and watch things keep the list and organize them if you want to you don't have to necessarily I don't know it's your life but the main thing here is that you have to be sure to reference them when you're writing sometimes I'll even just scroll through my vocab list just to give myself a little bit of a boost before I even start writing it's a really helpful way to just remind yourself that there are words in the world that are not purple or said or Leaf the English language and all languages really are

22:15 very expansive and gorgeous and there's a lot of words that we can use in a lot of different ways we can use them number 11 and the last piece of advice here is that when all else fails just keep it simple I think I've been harping on that a lot in this video where I just kind of want people to get to the point and that doesn't mean you can't write beautifully or use interesting words it just means that you don't have to go on for Pages at a time necessarily and if you're struggling to find a really interesting way to describe someone's emotional state you can just say that they were angry and then save the really nice introspective prose bit for later again it doesn't have to necessarily be a sin if you do it once and on purpose you're allowed to tell instead of showing once in a while and you can narrate instead of dramatizing as well so that basically covers everything this one was relatively short compared to some of my

23:02 other writing craft videos once again just to reiterate last time I uploaded a writing craft video I talked about this but I am trying to make more in-depth and detailed writing craft videos which means that my uploading schedule is not going to be as regular as it was I will still be putting out the occasional like you know fun light-hearted Slice of Life writing video once in a while but for now this is what we're doing thank you so much guys for watching and I'll see you next time