I see plenty of talk about prose when it comes to the fantasy genre. Some of the best fantasy writers have a very flowery, poetic like prose to their books. It’s to a point where some very good authors are being called bad because their prose isn’t done as well.
Why do other genre’s not have this same stigma? When was the last time anyone talked about the prose of a mystery novel or thriller? I understand why prose makes a book better. It elevates the text, it shows how good a writer can be. It just doesn’t seem to matter with most genres though from what I can tell.
by JuiceyMoon
3 Comments
>Why do other genre’s not have this same stigma? When was the last time anyone talked about the prose of a mystery novel or thriller?
Other genre writers do get criticized. You are probably experiencing confirmation bias.
Thriller novelists like Dan Brown, Lee Child, Paula Hawkins, etc. get accused of bad prose all the time. Romance novelists like Colleen Hoover, Stephanie Meyer, etc.
I don’t think “stigma” is the right word here. Do just you mean to say that people seem to expect flowery prose in fantasy books?
I suspect one reason is the otherworldly nature of fantasy. Fantasy readers often love to get immersed in a world that’s *very* different from ours, and detailed prose helps with that.
People talk about the prose of all sorts of genres, so I somewhat disagree with that part of your premise to start.
Fantasy, however, has a mixture of:
1) It’s very popular, thus has a lot of books, thus is in people’s minds often.
2) Has a few *very* good writers like Gene Wolfe and Mervyn Peake.
3) Has, at the same time, an obscene amount of blatant pulp or writers who explicitly want to *not* write great prose because they think it gets in the way of the story, ie Sanderson.
4) Is sort of the sister genre to sci-fi, which often *does* have really good prose.
So I think it faces a situation where people see the bland prose of the mainstream and most popular fantasy but *know* that it can be more, or at least hope it can. Fantasy as an idea – speculative fiction in general – is fascinating, but compared to the other historical major player in spec fic (sci fi), there’s much more escapism and fewer contemplative or prose-forward works. And the comparison to sci-fi is inevitable since they’re so often grouped together.
There’s no real expectation for romance genre prose because it’s just how it is. There’s great prose writers in romance but they’re not really the focus of the genre and there’s not this ever-looming comparison genre for it, I think. The same is true for thrillers even though they’ve had the grace of people like Umberto Eco before.
So I guess what I’m trying to say is that a lot of people *want* to like fantasy and run into works that don’t at all deliver what they want out of it.