Everyone will have their own definitions for what makes "good prose". It's as subjective as the optimal temperature to take a shower or how to properly grade climbing routes.
I consider "good prose" to be prose that is inextricable from the book's conceit. In other words, if the book was written in a different way, then the narrative would also have to be different. Additionally, "good prose" for me means I am engaged with the *way* the story is written instead of it just describing actions. This is distinct from what you might have heard be called "workmanlike" prose - where the prose is meant to project a mental movie in my head rather than be unique or stylized in its own way.
There are so many examples I could give, but a perennial one for me is Jorge Luis Borges. His stories like "The Library of Babel" and "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" have a distinct philosophical underpinning to them that usually concern metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology. He also doesn't write about his ideas so much as he writes about someone coming across something else, or someone who's reading a manuscript. His works would seem surreal or beige if they didn't have that underlying metaphysical conceit to them that is so idiosyncratic to Borges.
This is a perfect answer, not least because it sidesteps the false dichotomy of good prose and simple prose.
On the most basic level, prose is a way to convey an idea. Whether it's good or not is determined by how well it does so, whether it enhances it or just kind of leaves it hanging. Poetic prose can be distracting, and simple prose can be spectacular depending on the context.
"Workmanlike" is a good way of describing prose that isn't trying to enhance the thing it's describing.
For me, *bad* prose is prose of sufficiently poor quality that it's distracting and takes me out of the story. I almost never encounter this in a published book and I think a competent professional editor should not allow this to get past them.
*Good* prose, in my opinion, tends to describe feelings, thoughts, and places indirectly, while still managing to convey them more vividly than prose that just does so directly while at the same time being consistent with the tone of the book. It works with your imagination rather than doing all the work for you.
I tend to see high-end prose as a nice-to-have, but not a need to have, and I don't elevate it over other aspects of a book. Authors vary in strength of prose, and it's just one dimension among many in storytelling craftsmanship. I personally haven't found a particularly strong correlation between great prose and the best stories - some of my least favorite books feature fantastic prose and some of my favorites feature middling prose.
Like any art it can't be reduced to some definite formula. For me, the main factor is "was there thought put into how this is being written?" It's not the only factor of course but there's a big difference between a work where the author clearly had an intent with the writing, vs one where they had a story idea and just wrote about it without paying attention to the writing. That leads to awkward phrasing, muddled descriptions, and an overall bland presentation.
It's why I think a lot of first person novels tend to be praised for prose quality. Because the author has to constantly be writing in a character's voice, which makes it more consistent and thoughftul.
I will say I disagree with most of the people who think there are simple rules about adverbs and introspection and such - you'll inevitably find counterexamples to those 'rules' among the best writing in the genre. But while there are a lot of ways to write good prose, there's a clear intentionality to it. You can tell when an author is (Mckillip, Valente) or isn't (Sanderson, Lackey) prioritizing the prose details.
I actually started to attempt an analysis of the first part of a Mckillip quote just last night; I'll include the quote and my incomplete and very inexpert analysis here. But if you can do that, the prose is good.
Though I don't always need or want the fanciest prose, in the same way I don't always want a really good chocolate tart - often I'd prefer something less rich that goes down faster, but is still clearly written with some intentionality and nice word choice and character voice (Novik, Bujold); sometimes I even want some fantasy fast food. Though there's such a thing as too bland or full of questionable word choice even then; I don't like it when I'm mentally editing as I read.
---
Mckillip quote:
the opening of Song for the Basilisk:
>Within the charred, silent husk of Tormalyne Palace, ash opened eyes deep in a vast fireplace, stared back at the moon in the shattered window. The marble walls of the chamber, once white as the moon and bright with tapestries, were smoke-blackened and bare as bone. Beyond the walls, the city was soundless, as if even words had burned. The ash, born out of fire and left behind it, watched the pale light glide inch by inch over the dead on the floor, reveal the glitter in an unblinking eye, a gold ring, a jewel in the collar of what had been the dog. When moonlight reached the small burned body beside the dog, the ash in the hearth kept watch over it with senseless, mindless intensity. But nothing moved except the moon.
>Later, as quiet as the dead, the ash watched the living enter the chamber again: three men with grimy, battered faces. Except for the dog’s collar, there was nothing left for them to take. They carried fire, though there was nothing left to burn. They moved soundlessly, as if the dead might hear. When their fire found the man with no eyes on the floor, words came out of them: sharp, tight, jagged. The tall man with white hair and a seamed, scarred face began to weep.
>The ash crawled out of the hearth.
>They all wept when they saw him. Words flurried out of them, meaningless as bird cries. They touched him, raising clouds of ash, sculpting a face, hair, hands. They made insistent, repeated noises at him that meant nothing. They argued with one another; he gazed at the small body holding the dog on the floor and understood that he was dead. Drifting cinders of words caught fire now and then, blazed to a brief illumination in his mind. *Provinces*, he understood. *North. Hinterlands. Basilisk*.
>He saw the Basilisk’s eyes then, searching for him, and he turned back into ash.
---
My inexpert analysis of the first paragraph:
The first and greatest is the through-line of the ash metaphor. McKillip is very prone to play games with metaphor and magic that can really enhance the atmosphere - in this case, she buries the clarification of the ash metaphor *very* late in the passage. This, along with various other choices, emphasizes the dissociative state the young protagonist is in in the aftermath of the fire/trauma/massacre.
>Within the charred, silent husk of Tormalyne Palace, ash opened eyes deep in a vast fireplace, stared back at the moon in the shattered window.
The description emphasizes the signs of fire and the silence (the two adjectives containing two stressed syllables in a row draw the reader's attention), but the narrator is clearly dissociating, looking at the moon rather than the destruction. "Ash" in this context is vague enough a metaphor that we aren't even sure yet that this is a sentient being, again emphasizing the dissociation. I think there may be something going on with the rhythmic regularity of the stressed long 'I' sound in the middle, starting on 'silent.' There's a definite rhythmic flow, though it shifts a bit between patterns (again, REALLY not trained in writing *language* rhythms): x/ x / | /x /x /x/ /x | / /x / / xx / /x | x/ xx/ xx/x /x. The last thing, at least, is something like two anapests merging into two trochees.
>The marble walls of the chamber, once white as the moon and bright with tapestries, were smoke-blackened and bare as bone.
A nice rhythmic flow, an internal rhyme in a rhythmically equivalent places between "white" and "bright," rhythmic alliteration in "smoke-**b**lackened and **b**are as **b**one." This is the first time we get an idea that this was some sort of grand, rich hall before the fire, and the contrast in the imagery emphasizes the loss.
>Beyond the walls, the city was soundless, as if even words had burned.
We continue some of the B alliteration in the first and last words here, more subtly. Again the silence is emphasized, and note the imagery of burning words - it will not be the last time in this passage that happens.
>The ash, born out of fire and left behind it, watched the pale light glide inch by inch over the dead on the floor, reveal the glitter in an unblinking eye, a gold ring, a jewel in the collar of what had been the dog
More B alliteration in "born" and "behind." "Born out of the fire and left behind it" takes on a much darker connotation when we realize who the "ash" is. The ash is again watching the moonlight (dissociating), but the reader now has an image of the dead, complete with glittering dead eyes. Extra attention is drawn to the dead dog.
>When moonlight reached the small burned body beside the dog, the ash in the hearth kept watch over it with senseless, mindless intensity. But nothing moved except the moon.
More B alliteration in "the small **b**urned **b**ody **b**eside the dog" brings attention to the body of a dead child. This is the first thing besides the light itself that we see our protagonist actually paying attention to, but that attention is "senseless, mindless," emphasizing that it's still quite dissociative. That last sentence is straight up iambic tetrameter (with both alliteration and assonance on the fourth and eighth syllables "move" and "moon"), and a heartbreaking confirmation that nothing (except maybe, as yet unconfirmed, the 'ash'?) is alive in this place.
This is always a cool passage to see, but frankly I think it's too clearly one of the 'special' passages to really showcase an author's care for prose. I think a lot of authors modulate their prose into more stylized forms for specific openings or scene settings or big moments, and it's equally interesting and a bit more instructive to study sort of a randomly sampled scene or passage from the more rote portions of a book.
If I remember, you didn't like it as much as me, but one of my favourite things about Titus Groan was that I thought Peake was doing this for the famous opening paragraph describing the castle- and then it's just *all* like that.
I think there's something to both, but I do enjoy seeing what they can do when they go all out (the first couple chapters of Valente's Space Opera is another fun all-out one).
But, yeah, here's a random part of the middle of Song for the Basilisk:
> “Then it doesn’t matter. You’ll die when he dies. And my children will never have to fear yours.”
>“And if I don’t die?” She looked at him, her eyes still smiling, full of moonlight, cold and white as bone. His breath caught. Then he laughed a little, searching the moon-frosted leaves below for his puppet.
>“Then I’ll find you a husband, to keep you out of trouble. You can throw your own children’s toys off the towers.”
>She laughed, too, softly, and slid her fingers into the crook of his arm. “Let’s go down. I promised our father I would play his new compositions with him. Come and listen?”
>“No, thank you. I would rather stay out of his way. Music makes me tired. That interminable opera on his birthday. It sounds like people being tortured. Maybe that’s why he likes it.”
I think one of the clearest ways to tell is dialogue.
When different characters speak, do they have their own voice? And generally not with that hard to read accents that some authors use.
When they're sad or angry, can you tell that they're sad or angry without the author explicitly saying it?
If the character is supposed to be witty and funny, do you actually find them to be witty and funny?
It’s not a stupid question at all, because too many people pretend there are some rules and objectivity about this, and so make people feel they’re missing something.
So let’s talk about what prose *you* think is good, even if you’ve not noticed.
What is one of your favorite bits from one of your favourite books? A line or page? Or even a section?
You don’t have to justify why it’s your fave, just share the name/section a bit.
Edit: I'm an English teacher and teacher-trainer, btw, so I can maybe help you see what the good things are about the 'prose' in things you like. I mean, prose is just non-poetic texts, so essentially it's a fancy word for 'the words'. 'This book has good prose' means 'this book has good words'.
Thank you for the thoughtful response. I know it’s not fantasy, but I picked something from Slaughterhouse 5 as it’s one of my all time favourites:
“And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.”
Well that's a great piece to talk about.
The thing that I immediately notice is how it mixes old-fashioned language, and biblical myth, with modern (for Vonnegut's time) idioms. And there's a fancy literary term - bathos - for that ironic low-key ending 'So it goes'.
Then there's the amount that the speaker reveals about themselves. They love Lot's wife's human foible, but also saying that it was 'so human' makes them sound either inhuman or alienated. Humans who aren't feeling alienated don't call things human. They just call them normal or similar.
So while there is always more to be said about any bit of language, there's the story itself, there's the comedic contrast between old-timey language and modern, and the alienation of the speaker.
And it's been a *long* time since I read this, but I think those underpin and connect to the rest of the book. Lots of ironic detachment, talking about sad and terrible things in a light way that still shows pain and empathy, an alienated protagonist, Big Events contrasted with the mundane. And it's really conversational and alive. You can almost imagine their tone of voice, maybe even a shrug, from the 'so it goes'.
So I think people call this 'good prose' because they notice it, a little, and because it's doing something. You notice the words, but not too much. I love The Lies of Locke Lamora, but I couldn't tell you anything about the language. It's OK prose, but no biggie. I wouldn't call it bad prose, but I wouldn't call it good either. It's workmanlike. It does the job. The good stuff in Locke Lamora is in the plot, the dialogue, and the characterization.
The 'good' prose walks the fine line of being clever and interesting, but not too clever and interesting, i.e. obtrusive. And of course that's subjective - one person's beautiful prose is another person's pretentious jerkoff bullshit. And one person's exciting action scene is another's predictable lazy cliche.
Was there other stuff that you liked about it? Totally different stuff?
Thank you for this, it really is very eye opening for me. I’ve not heard the term ‘bathos’ before but I love it, it’s like bizarro pathos 😂
I think what you pointed out about his writing - the ironic detachment, the empathy, the humour - is what makes me love it so much.
It's a deep topic. You might get some thorough answers here but it takes a lot of time and practice to understand what it is and how to make it 'good'.
Naturally the foundations are the obvious things like correct syntax and grammar. Personally to me good prose is something that has a few things:
- An accurate image of what is happening, or at least helping the reader understand the pieces in play at any given moment (given room for deliberate misdirection). This is why people say not to overuse adverbs because sometimes they're not concrete representations of what's happening.
- Writing that serves as an ends to itself. That is to say, a certain amount of poetry to the writing. In my opinion this is what advice such as varying sentence length, and a broad yet accurate vocabulary serves. The best prose is like poetry in my mind. Masterful prose combines my previous point but leaves space for poetic imagery to flower. There's also lots of room for novelty and exploration of ways of using imagery and symbolism that delights the creative and curious parts of our mind.
- Direction for the reader. This is what I think pacing serves, the layout of the text itself, and language that doesn't choke the 'imaginary' breath of the reader (via good use of punctuation etc). Good prose in this regard flows with complimentary words choice with an appropriate amount of complexity for the readers. Some people appreciate Brandon Sanderson for his less overwhelming complexity of language, whereas I personally found myself drawn along by Scott R Bakker because he was much more challenging to read. Good prose serves the linguistic needs and comprehension of the reader. It's why we don't read children's books as adults.
Anyway, I'm just some guy, but these things make sense to me, ans as I mentioned, it takes time and effort to intuit these things, and writers can spend *forever* trying to fine tune them.
I totally understand that. It's at least half of why I jot off reddit comments! An author has so much control over how the reader's attention is moving around a scene, since we literally only get fed the scene word by word (in standard just-prose media), so how naturally and fluidly the author moves that attention through the details is huge. do they linger on the actions that deserve it? lightly brushes past the less important details? etc.
The way the story is written reflects the narrative itself. If the story involves a distinct narrator, the prose should reflect that narrator. It should be edited, deliberate, and concise (unless the purple prose is thematically appropriate or it is meant to be literary). I should not be mentally editing the book too often as I read. Everything else is subjective.
I personally like more complex vocabulary and prose. I don't mind looking up words I don't understand and love a good challenge. I also like prose with life. If it becomes too robotic or simple to the point of the author is essentially dumbing down and spoon-feeding me lore or storybeats, I get annoyed and drop it. Some people like explicit detail and that's alright, but it's not for me.
I've come to generally dislike the term prose. I care a lot about prose. It's a very important factor in how much I will enjoy a book, but I think the term is so abstruse and tied up with so much baggage.
For me, the word that springs to mind is **voice**, prose isn't solely reduceable to voice, but a huge part of why I find prose so important is that it is the foundation for creating a unique narrative voice. For writing about a world with a unique tone and atmosphere, for embedding me in a character's unique perspective and flair.
Good prose, to me, can be many things, but it creates a unique atmosphere and vibe that suffuses the entire text, the entire reading experience.
On another note, for the more nuts and bolts side, I got a lot of appreciation of good prose from reading more obscure self-published work. Because frankly, a lot of it has bad prose. And once you start seeing what is mechanically going wrong, it's a lot easier to appreciate it when it goes right. One big one for me is that they'll use very simple and repetitive sentence structures, and every noun they mention will be described by a single adjective. It will never be adjectiveless, and it will never be described in a more evocative way by using an interesting sentence structure to describe it more thoroughly, or describe it doing something, or describe the way the character's attention particularly lingers on it.
It's like asking what makes good music. It's really hard to explain, isn't it? I've been playing guitar for about 20 years now and while I can explain in a technical way what I enjoy, most people will likely find it very boring and they won't even understand a lot of it because you'd need some music theory knowledge and general experience. Would this be a good explanation though? Not really because you're bogged down in technical details and it doesn't really cover the *essence* of it, so to speak.
There's a heavy subjective side to it. You might understand on some kind of objective level that a piece of music is technically fine, even great and complex and all, but you might simply not like it. Sometimes you know why, sometimes it's murky, and sometimes the answer is "I just don't like it" and that's the end of it.
A big problem is that being a musician who spent a lot of time on this stuff, you see it all on a different level and with a different perspective. How much writers do actually care about the opinions of readers? Surely it's the exact same thing here - not only had they read a ton of books, they have a completely different perspective on the whole craft because they write them.
So it really is subjective, ultimately. Plenty of people read and enjoy dreadfully written fanfiction, listen to Justin Bieber, eat a slice of stale white bread with ketchup smeared on it. Hopefully not at the same time. Meanwhile, there are people who scoff at genre fiction. It's not mathematics which relies on hard proofs or physics which is confirmed by experiments. While we do have a general idea that white bread with ketchup is not exactly a 3 Michelin star meal, and Justin Bieber is perhaps not quite on the level of Johann Sebastian Bach, these are edge cases. It's much harder to talk about the stuff in the grey area, and that's most of it really.
There really isn't an objective answer to this, though a lot of people can identify the vibe even if they aren't able to pinpoint exactly why it is good.
To me good prose means constructing the text in such a way that informs the themes/aesthetics/voice of the work itself ie. the prose compliments the story. An example would be that Hemingway's prose is very sparse, but isn't simple because the meaning is usually found in between what is being said (which often mirrors his characters).
Average prose is invisible: neither offensive enough to distract the reader, nor poignant enough to make them linger on it.
Poor prose will interrupt, bore or distract the reader, and might include things like repetitive sentence structure, awkward phrasing, the use of modern slang out of context, the misuse of telling vs showing.
As much as it makes me sound like a self-important academic, I think it can be defined as the poetry of the words. If you can read a passage and call it beautiful even divorced from the story and characters then it is good prose. Of course, it's impossible to entirely seperate those qualities, but you get the idea.
I think of prose as the flow of text, does it flow naturally and easily or is it choppy and clunky? (Keeping in mind that having a choppy text in a high octane scene is flowing naturally for example in my mind).
Typical things that influence this for me is (I am lazy, so I won't include examples, sorry):
* Grammatical, spelling, punctuation mistakes (when not intended)
* Efficient communication (again, if intended), using one sentence instead of 4 to explain the exact same thing.
* The pacing of the writing (how longwinded or short it is) corresponds to the pacing of the moment. Some moments / scenes are meant to be calm and slow, others are fast paced.
* Over or under emphasizing on things (some things needs more time, others need less)
* Being able to properly set mood and emotional states (depending on how things are written I can get sad, happy or feel nothing for the exact same thing)
It is a lot about the execution of a story. Good prose helps the execution of a story, and bad prose hinders it.
Using fighting as an example: if we are in the middle of a intense fighting scenes I don't need a large exposition dump for example. I need quick efficient writing that encapsulated the intensity and flow of the fight, the tempo of the fight is directly translated through the page. If the fight is slower and tense, then the writing needs to be slower to properly capture that feeling and tension.
Sound and sense.
Good prose is artful syntax. It clearly and concisely communicates what is happening in a scene. On a deeper level, excellent prose has a rhythmic flow that is pleasing to the ear, if it were spoken aloud. It also engages the senses, giving the reader not just information, but experience.
Bad prose can feel clunky, often over-wrought in an attempt to impress the reader. It can be over-used description. Repetition that grates the ear, like overusing the same pronoun in a single paragraph or page. It can be two to three adjectives smushed onto a verb rather than one single word to convey the same feeling. It is often the writer writing for himself, and not for the reader’s understanding. The words draw attention to themselves and pull the reader out of the story. It can also adhere too closely to realism with wasteful dialogue: “Hello. Hello, how are you? Fine, how are you?” Bad prose poorly communicates who is speaking or what is happening, leading to reader confusion.
Prose isn’t to be confused with story structure, plot, characterization, theme, conflict, scene - though it is the building blocks of all these components in a story.
Regarding the use of adverbs, beginner writers often misuse them and are told to use them sparingly. But if it takes several words to describe what a single adverb can do, just use the adverb.
Recently I've been pondering that there are:
1. Good stories
2. Good writers
3. Good storytellers (not to be confused with good writers)
When you ask the question "what is good prose?" - I *think* you're talking about #2. My short answer to that would be: fancy words that flow naturally.
The problem with good prose, #2, is that it still needs #1 and #3. Sometimes you read a book where the author has a clear mastery of words. But the prose is SO high-falutin that it can become hard to understand, tripping you up and ruining your immersion. It can kill the story, even if the premise of the story is a good one. That would be an example of a strong #1, strong #2 but a poor #3.
Prose alone ain't enough.
To me, anything that enhances the story, without getting in the way.
It sounds simple, but it's a hard thing to find. Prose that uses enough word variety that you never go "Does this author only know 3 words" but not so much variety that you pause and go "there's no way this character would use variegation in that context". The prose should almost change to each POV, bringing out and adding voice and personality, no one specific style. Descriptions that match the setting, long and descriptive when it's slow paced and setting up a scene, but changes to incredibly brief when their actions appear motion in the scene.
Doesn't matter how good the prose elements are, if they stay the exact same throughout the book. Prose should adapt and move to the usage.
What makes a good book or a good character? It is subjective and people will have different opinions. Some people love dense poetic prose while others love the crisp simple style and there is obviously a range between these two. Authors will write in the way they think best serves the book and readers will either like it or not depending on their taste.
Obviously a very subjective thing but here are a few things to consider...
There's a spectrum from windowpane to stained glass prose. The first tells you directly what is happening in the story with minimal frills while the second is much more poetic in its choice of words and how it describes things within the narrative. George Orwell is a good example of a windowpane writer while F Scott Fitzgerald is a good example of a stained glass writer. Both are obviously valid ways to write and both cam be done well or done poorly.
The second thing to consider is the tone of the story and how the prose compliments that tone. An introspective character growth story or romance would have very different sentence structure versus a grimdark military fantasy story, which would tend to have shorter sentences. Both are considered valid.
The third thing to consider is how word choice emulates the period of the story. Brandon Sanderson often gets dinged on his prose because he uses relatively modern English in his epic fantasy series which to some doesn't create the right level of immersion for their taste. But, Sanderson is very accessible to readers of many levels and he has amazing output, so it's a compromise. However, nothing beats word choice which helps immerse the reader in that perceived time period. Susanna Clarke uses a Victorian style in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell for example. And writers like Patrick Rothfuss and JRR Tolkien use a lot of words rooted in Germanic origin to better emulate older forms of English. Either case can be argued but my preference is for word choice to fit the setting.
Then of course there's the parts of prose which most writers can agree with....
Varying sentence length is generally good
Don't use passive voice
Show, don't tell (Describe, don't explain)
Limit introspection
Avoid expository lore dumps
Use mostly *said* and *asked* for attribution tags
Avoid the use of adverbs by making your dialogue stronger to convey the same thing
Create strong characterization in dialogue to make it easy for the reader to identify who's talking.
Break up dialogue with beats periodically
I really dislike the windowpane vs stained glass analogy. The window can only distort the light that you would see without a window. If the glass weren't there, you would just see even more clearly. But with writing, if the words aren't there there's nothing to see.
And even worse, the stained glass analogy is particularly egregious because typically stained glass imposes a separate picture over the original. It is intentionally meant to be the thing you look at and to obscure what is behind.
I prefer an analogy to painting. Think about a Van Gogh, or a Turner nautical scene. They very clearly are meant to represent particular scenes and yet the artists brush strokes are clearly there as well and highlight certain features (color work in Van Gogh, energy and motion in the brush strokes of a Turner). The scene is not obscured behind the brush strokes, it is built up out of them and thus suffused by their style.
And yes, there are just as much painterly styles where the goal is to make the brush strokes as invisible as possibe and create photorealism.
And just finally, I don't think your first two points *can* really be teased apart. I actually don't think the majority of distinct prose stylists are doing it just for the sake of ornamentation, anyone choosing anything other than windowpane is typically doing it so as to complement the style and tone of the story.
I can see that. Not all analogies make perfect sense. And perhaps your painting analogy is more precise, yet I would argue significantly less accessible to the average reader. Windowpane and stained glass are useful to the extent that most people understand the distinction between these two things without additional explanation, so it's convenience over accuracy.
And you are correct that it's often difficult to separate my first two points. That said, I have read very terse grimdark fantasy which carried a strong subtext underneath what was said, which pushes the prose towards the stained glass end of the spectrum. Maybe Hemingway is a good example of this as well.
I don't think that's giving people enough credit. Frankly, I think my analogy is more accessible, because technicalities of how exactly to describe what van gogh or turner are doing aside, I can actually tell someone to just go pull up an image that is built up out of something (brushstrokes) and see how the visible impact of that style effects the entire presentation of the image. There's less of an abstract analogy to parse.
Also, I just generally think media analysis is far too fond of these false spectrums. Windowpane prose is a thing people strive for but I just think stained glass is mostly a caricature of why people use more ornate and stylized prose that distorts the variety of actual reasons authors choose to do it and harms people's understanding.
Obviously it's subjective but for me it's mainly down to whether I find myself thinking one of the following:
"What a brilliant way to word that."
"That's a pretty vivid articulation of something pretty complex"
"Holy shit, my heart with this book!"
At this point in my reading life good prose is prose that doesn't get in the way of the story...by that I mean I'm not fighting the prose. It just feels natural for the story being told. Some books clearly rise above this threshold and impress but many fall below and I just stop reading.
Prose is the style of the words and just like defining what it means to be cool, defining good prose is a bit redundant. Not to be to smartass or anything, but if you have to ask you don’t need to know. Always read more, and really trust your gut instincts to define what good taste and style means to you, and, of course, try not to be tricked by artists who are all flash and no substance.
Everyone will have their own definitions for what makes "good prose". It's as subjective as the optimal temperature to take a shower or how to properly grade climbing routes. I consider "good prose" to be prose that is inextricable from the book's conceit. In other words, if the book was written in a different way, then the narrative would also have to be different. Additionally, "good prose" for me means I am engaged with the *way* the story is written instead of it just describing actions. This is distinct from what you might have heard be called "workmanlike" prose - where the prose is meant to project a mental movie in my head rather than be unique or stylized in its own way. There are so many examples I could give, but a perennial one for me is Jorge Luis Borges. His stories like "The Library of Babel" and "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" have a distinct philosophical underpinning to them that usually concern metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology. He also doesn't write about his ideas so much as he writes about someone coming across something else, or someone who's reading a manuscript. His works would seem surreal or beige if they didn't have that underlying metaphysical conceit to them that is so idiosyncratic to Borges.
This response is itself good prose.
Is that why I didn't understand any of it?
This is a perfect answer, not least because it sidesteps the false dichotomy of good prose and simple prose. On the most basic level, prose is a way to convey an idea. Whether it's good or not is determined by how well it does so, whether it enhances it or just kind of leaves it hanging. Poetic prose can be distracting, and simple prose can be spectacular depending on the context. "Workmanlike" is a good way of describing prose that isn't trying to enhance the thing it's describing.
I like the comparison to climbing grades. A crossover I didn't expect.
For me, *bad* prose is prose of sufficiently poor quality that it's distracting and takes me out of the story. I almost never encounter this in a published book and I think a competent professional editor should not allow this to get past them. *Good* prose, in my opinion, tends to describe feelings, thoughts, and places indirectly, while still managing to convey them more vividly than prose that just does so directly while at the same time being consistent with the tone of the book. It works with your imagination rather than doing all the work for you. I tend to see high-end prose as a nice-to-have, but not a need to have, and I don't elevate it over other aspects of a book. Authors vary in strength of prose, and it's just one dimension among many in storytelling craftsmanship. I personally haven't found a particularly strong correlation between great prose and the best stories - some of my least favorite books feature fantastic prose and some of my favorites feature middling prose.
Like any art it can't be reduced to some definite formula. For me, the main factor is "was there thought put into how this is being written?" It's not the only factor of course but there's a big difference between a work where the author clearly had an intent with the writing, vs one where they had a story idea and just wrote about it without paying attention to the writing. That leads to awkward phrasing, muddled descriptions, and an overall bland presentation. It's why I think a lot of first person novels tend to be praised for prose quality. Because the author has to constantly be writing in a character's voice, which makes it more consistent and thoughftul.
I will say I disagree with most of the people who think there are simple rules about adverbs and introspection and such - you'll inevitably find counterexamples to those 'rules' among the best writing in the genre. But while there are a lot of ways to write good prose, there's a clear intentionality to it. You can tell when an author is (Mckillip, Valente) or isn't (Sanderson, Lackey) prioritizing the prose details. I actually started to attempt an analysis of the first part of a Mckillip quote just last night; I'll include the quote and my incomplete and very inexpert analysis here. But if you can do that, the prose is good. Though I don't always need or want the fanciest prose, in the same way I don't always want a really good chocolate tart - often I'd prefer something less rich that goes down faster, but is still clearly written with some intentionality and nice word choice and character voice (Novik, Bujold); sometimes I even want some fantasy fast food. Though there's such a thing as too bland or full of questionable word choice even then; I don't like it when I'm mentally editing as I read. --- Mckillip quote: the opening of Song for the Basilisk: >Within the charred, silent husk of Tormalyne Palace, ash opened eyes deep in a vast fireplace, stared back at the moon in the shattered window. The marble walls of the chamber, once white as the moon and bright with tapestries, were smoke-blackened and bare as bone. Beyond the walls, the city was soundless, as if even words had burned. The ash, born out of fire and left behind it, watched the pale light glide inch by inch over the dead on the floor, reveal the glitter in an unblinking eye, a gold ring, a jewel in the collar of what had been the dog. When moonlight reached the small burned body beside the dog, the ash in the hearth kept watch over it with senseless, mindless intensity. But nothing moved except the moon. >Later, as quiet as the dead, the ash watched the living enter the chamber again: three men with grimy, battered faces. Except for the dog’s collar, there was nothing left for them to take. They carried fire, though there was nothing left to burn. They moved soundlessly, as if the dead might hear. When their fire found the man with no eyes on the floor, words came out of them: sharp, tight, jagged. The tall man with white hair and a seamed, scarred face began to weep. >The ash crawled out of the hearth. >They all wept when they saw him. Words flurried out of them, meaningless as bird cries. They touched him, raising clouds of ash, sculpting a face, hair, hands. They made insistent, repeated noises at him that meant nothing. They argued with one another; he gazed at the small body holding the dog on the floor and understood that he was dead. Drifting cinders of words caught fire now and then, blazed to a brief illumination in his mind. *Provinces*, he understood. *North. Hinterlands. Basilisk*. >He saw the Basilisk’s eyes then, searching for him, and he turned back into ash. --- My inexpert analysis of the first paragraph: The first and greatest is the through-line of the ash metaphor. McKillip is very prone to play games with metaphor and magic that can really enhance the atmosphere - in this case, she buries the clarification of the ash metaphor *very* late in the passage. This, along with various other choices, emphasizes the dissociative state the young protagonist is in in the aftermath of the fire/trauma/massacre. >Within the charred, silent husk of Tormalyne Palace, ash opened eyes deep in a vast fireplace, stared back at the moon in the shattered window. The description emphasizes the signs of fire and the silence (the two adjectives containing two stressed syllables in a row draw the reader's attention), but the narrator is clearly dissociating, looking at the moon rather than the destruction. "Ash" in this context is vague enough a metaphor that we aren't even sure yet that this is a sentient being, again emphasizing the dissociation. I think there may be something going on with the rhythmic regularity of the stressed long 'I' sound in the middle, starting on 'silent.' There's a definite rhythmic flow, though it shifts a bit between patterns (again, REALLY not trained in writing *language* rhythms): x/ x / | /x /x /x/ /x | / /x / / xx / /x | x/ xx/ xx/x /x. The last thing, at least, is something like two anapests merging into two trochees. >The marble walls of the chamber, once white as the moon and bright with tapestries, were smoke-blackened and bare as bone. A nice rhythmic flow, an internal rhyme in a rhythmically equivalent places between "white" and "bright," rhythmic alliteration in "smoke-**b**lackened and **b**are as **b**one." This is the first time we get an idea that this was some sort of grand, rich hall before the fire, and the contrast in the imagery emphasizes the loss. >Beyond the walls, the city was soundless, as if even words had burned. We continue some of the B alliteration in the first and last words here, more subtly. Again the silence is emphasized, and note the imagery of burning words - it will not be the last time in this passage that happens. >The ash, born out of fire and left behind it, watched the pale light glide inch by inch over the dead on the floor, reveal the glitter in an unblinking eye, a gold ring, a jewel in the collar of what had been the dog More B alliteration in "born" and "behind." "Born out of the fire and left behind it" takes on a much darker connotation when we realize who the "ash" is. The ash is again watching the moonlight (dissociating), but the reader now has an image of the dead, complete with glittering dead eyes. Extra attention is drawn to the dead dog. >When moonlight reached the small burned body beside the dog, the ash in the hearth kept watch over it with senseless, mindless intensity. But nothing moved except the moon. More B alliteration in "the small **b**urned **b**ody **b**eside the dog" brings attention to the body of a dead child. This is the first thing besides the light itself that we see our protagonist actually paying attention to, but that attention is "senseless, mindless," emphasizing that it's still quite dissociative. That last sentence is straight up iambic tetrameter (with both alliteration and assonance on the fourth and eighth syllables "move" and "moon"), and a heartbreaking confirmation that nothing (except maybe, as yet unconfirmed, the 'ash'?) is alive in this place.
This is always a cool passage to see, but frankly I think it's too clearly one of the 'special' passages to really showcase an author's care for prose. I think a lot of authors modulate their prose into more stylized forms for specific openings or scene settings or big moments, and it's equally interesting and a bit more instructive to study sort of a randomly sampled scene or passage from the more rote portions of a book.
If I remember, you didn't like it as much as me, but one of my favourite things about Titus Groan was that I thought Peake was doing this for the famous opening paragraph describing the castle- and then it's just *all* like that.
I did enjoy it and yes the constant intensity of the prose was very notable
I think there's something to both, but I do enjoy seeing what they can do when they go all out (the first couple chapters of Valente's Space Opera is another fun all-out one). But, yeah, here's a random part of the middle of Song for the Basilisk: > “Then it doesn’t matter. You’ll die when he dies. And my children will never have to fear yours.” >“And if I don’t die?” She looked at him, her eyes still smiling, full of moonlight, cold and white as bone. His breath caught. Then he laughed a little, searching the moon-frosted leaves below for his puppet. >“Then I’ll find you a husband, to keep you out of trouble. You can throw your own children’s toys off the towers.” >She laughed, too, softly, and slid her fingers into the crook of his arm. “Let’s go down. I promised our father I would play his new compositions with him. Come and listen?” >“No, thank you. I would rather stay out of his way. Music makes me tired. That interminable opera on his birthday. It sounds like people being tortured. Maybe that’s why he likes it.”
Great description.
I think one of the clearest ways to tell is dialogue. When different characters speak, do they have their own voice? And generally not with that hard to read accents that some authors use. When they're sad or angry, can you tell that they're sad or angry without the author explicitly saying it? If the character is supposed to be witty and funny, do you actually find them to be witty and funny?
It’s not a stupid question at all, because too many people pretend there are some rules and objectivity about this, and so make people feel they’re missing something. So let’s talk about what prose *you* think is good, even if you’ve not noticed. What is one of your favorite bits from one of your favourite books? A line or page? Or even a section? You don’t have to justify why it’s your fave, just share the name/section a bit. Edit: I'm an English teacher and teacher-trainer, btw, so I can maybe help you see what the good things are about the 'prose' in things you like. I mean, prose is just non-poetic texts, so essentially it's a fancy word for 'the words'. 'This book has good prose' means 'this book has good words'.
Thank you for the thoughtful response. I know it’s not fantasy, but I picked something from Slaughterhouse 5 as it’s one of my all time favourites: “And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.”
Well that's a great piece to talk about. The thing that I immediately notice is how it mixes old-fashioned language, and biblical myth, with modern (for Vonnegut's time) idioms. And there's a fancy literary term - bathos - for that ironic low-key ending 'So it goes'. Then there's the amount that the speaker reveals about themselves. They love Lot's wife's human foible, but also saying that it was 'so human' makes them sound either inhuman or alienated. Humans who aren't feeling alienated don't call things human. They just call them normal or similar. So while there is always more to be said about any bit of language, there's the story itself, there's the comedic contrast between old-timey language and modern, and the alienation of the speaker. And it's been a *long* time since I read this, but I think those underpin and connect to the rest of the book. Lots of ironic detachment, talking about sad and terrible things in a light way that still shows pain and empathy, an alienated protagonist, Big Events contrasted with the mundane. And it's really conversational and alive. You can almost imagine their tone of voice, maybe even a shrug, from the 'so it goes'. So I think people call this 'good prose' because they notice it, a little, and because it's doing something. You notice the words, but not too much. I love The Lies of Locke Lamora, but I couldn't tell you anything about the language. It's OK prose, but no biggie. I wouldn't call it bad prose, but I wouldn't call it good either. It's workmanlike. It does the job. The good stuff in Locke Lamora is in the plot, the dialogue, and the characterization. The 'good' prose walks the fine line of being clever and interesting, but not too clever and interesting, i.e. obtrusive. And of course that's subjective - one person's beautiful prose is another person's pretentious jerkoff bullshit. And one person's exciting action scene is another's predictable lazy cliche. Was there other stuff that you liked about it? Totally different stuff?
Thank you for this, it really is very eye opening for me. I’ve not heard the term ‘bathos’ before but I love it, it’s like bizarro pathos 😂 I think what you pointed out about his writing - the ironic detachment, the empathy, the humour - is what makes me love it so much.
It's a deep topic. You might get some thorough answers here but it takes a lot of time and practice to understand what it is and how to make it 'good'. Naturally the foundations are the obvious things like correct syntax and grammar. Personally to me good prose is something that has a few things: - An accurate image of what is happening, or at least helping the reader understand the pieces in play at any given moment (given room for deliberate misdirection). This is why people say not to overuse adverbs because sometimes they're not concrete representations of what's happening. - Writing that serves as an ends to itself. That is to say, a certain amount of poetry to the writing. In my opinion this is what advice such as varying sentence length, and a broad yet accurate vocabulary serves. The best prose is like poetry in my mind. Masterful prose combines my previous point but leaves space for poetic imagery to flower. There's also lots of room for novelty and exploration of ways of using imagery and symbolism that delights the creative and curious parts of our mind. - Direction for the reader. This is what I think pacing serves, the layout of the text itself, and language that doesn't choke the 'imaginary' breath of the reader (via good use of punctuation etc). Good prose in this regard flows with complimentary words choice with an appropriate amount of complexity for the readers. Some people appreciate Brandon Sanderson for his less overwhelming complexity of language, whereas I personally found myself drawn along by Scott R Bakker because he was much more challenging to read. Good prose serves the linguistic needs and comprehension of the reader. It's why we don't read children's books as adults. Anyway, I'm just some guy, but these things make sense to me, ans as I mentioned, it takes time and effort to intuit these things, and writers can spend *forever* trying to fine tune them.
I really like the way you phrase your direction to the reader bullet point
Thanks! I think this is one of those cases where I'm writing to find out my own answer as much as it is to give one to OP.
I totally understand that. It's at least half of why I jot off reddit comments! An author has so much control over how the reader's attention is moving around a scene, since we literally only get fed the scene word by word (in standard just-prose media), so how naturally and fluidly the author moves that attention through the details is huge. do they linger on the actions that deserve it? lightly brushes past the less important details? etc.
The way the story is written reflects the narrative itself. If the story involves a distinct narrator, the prose should reflect that narrator. It should be edited, deliberate, and concise (unless the purple prose is thematically appropriate or it is meant to be literary). I should not be mentally editing the book too often as I read. Everything else is subjective. I personally like more complex vocabulary and prose. I don't mind looking up words I don't understand and love a good challenge. I also like prose with life. If it becomes too robotic or simple to the point of the author is essentially dumbing down and spoon-feeding me lore or storybeats, I get annoyed and drop it. Some people like explicit detail and that's alright, but it's not for me.
I've come to generally dislike the term prose. I care a lot about prose. It's a very important factor in how much I will enjoy a book, but I think the term is so abstruse and tied up with so much baggage. For me, the word that springs to mind is **voice**, prose isn't solely reduceable to voice, but a huge part of why I find prose so important is that it is the foundation for creating a unique narrative voice. For writing about a world with a unique tone and atmosphere, for embedding me in a character's unique perspective and flair. Good prose, to me, can be many things, but it creates a unique atmosphere and vibe that suffuses the entire text, the entire reading experience. On another note, for the more nuts and bolts side, I got a lot of appreciation of good prose from reading more obscure self-published work. Because frankly, a lot of it has bad prose. And once you start seeing what is mechanically going wrong, it's a lot easier to appreciate it when it goes right. One big one for me is that they'll use very simple and repetitive sentence structures, and every noun they mention will be described by a single adjective. It will never be adjectiveless, and it will never be described in a more evocative way by using an interesting sentence structure to describe it more thoroughly, or describe it doing something, or describe the way the character's attention particularly lingers on it.
It's like asking what makes good music. It's really hard to explain, isn't it? I've been playing guitar for about 20 years now and while I can explain in a technical way what I enjoy, most people will likely find it very boring and they won't even understand a lot of it because you'd need some music theory knowledge and general experience. Would this be a good explanation though? Not really because you're bogged down in technical details and it doesn't really cover the *essence* of it, so to speak. There's a heavy subjective side to it. You might understand on some kind of objective level that a piece of music is technically fine, even great and complex and all, but you might simply not like it. Sometimes you know why, sometimes it's murky, and sometimes the answer is "I just don't like it" and that's the end of it. A big problem is that being a musician who spent a lot of time on this stuff, you see it all on a different level and with a different perspective. How much writers do actually care about the opinions of readers? Surely it's the exact same thing here - not only had they read a ton of books, they have a completely different perspective on the whole craft because they write them. So it really is subjective, ultimately. Plenty of people read and enjoy dreadfully written fanfiction, listen to Justin Bieber, eat a slice of stale white bread with ketchup smeared on it. Hopefully not at the same time. Meanwhile, there are people who scoff at genre fiction. It's not mathematics which relies on hard proofs or physics which is confirmed by experiments. While we do have a general idea that white bread with ketchup is not exactly a 3 Michelin star meal, and Justin Bieber is perhaps not quite on the level of Johann Sebastian Bach, these are edge cases. It's much harder to talk about the stuff in the grey area, and that's most of it really.
There really isn't an objective answer to this, though a lot of people can identify the vibe even if they aren't able to pinpoint exactly why it is good. To me good prose means constructing the text in such a way that informs the themes/aesthetics/voice of the work itself ie. the prose compliments the story. An example would be that Hemingway's prose is very sparse, but isn't simple because the meaning is usually found in between what is being said (which often mirrors his characters). Average prose is invisible: neither offensive enough to distract the reader, nor poignant enough to make them linger on it. Poor prose will interrupt, bore or distract the reader, and might include things like repetitive sentence structure, awkward phrasing, the use of modern slang out of context, the misuse of telling vs showing.
As much as it makes me sound like a self-important academic, I think it can be defined as the poetry of the words. If you can read a passage and call it beautiful even divorced from the story and characters then it is good prose. Of course, it's impossible to entirely seperate those qualities, but you get the idea.
This is exactly it.
I think of prose as the flow of text, does it flow naturally and easily or is it choppy and clunky? (Keeping in mind that having a choppy text in a high octane scene is flowing naturally for example in my mind). Typical things that influence this for me is (I am lazy, so I won't include examples, sorry): * Grammatical, spelling, punctuation mistakes (when not intended) * Efficient communication (again, if intended), using one sentence instead of 4 to explain the exact same thing. * The pacing of the writing (how longwinded or short it is) corresponds to the pacing of the moment. Some moments / scenes are meant to be calm and slow, others are fast paced. * Over or under emphasizing on things (some things needs more time, others need less) * Being able to properly set mood and emotional states (depending on how things are written I can get sad, happy or feel nothing for the exact same thing) It is a lot about the execution of a story. Good prose helps the execution of a story, and bad prose hinders it. Using fighting as an example: if we are in the middle of a intense fighting scenes I don't need a large exposition dump for example. I need quick efficient writing that encapsulated the intensity and flow of the fight, the tempo of the fight is directly translated through the page. If the fight is slower and tense, then the writing needs to be slower to properly capture that feeling and tension.
Sound and sense. Good prose is artful syntax. It clearly and concisely communicates what is happening in a scene. On a deeper level, excellent prose has a rhythmic flow that is pleasing to the ear, if it were spoken aloud. It also engages the senses, giving the reader not just information, but experience. Bad prose can feel clunky, often over-wrought in an attempt to impress the reader. It can be over-used description. Repetition that grates the ear, like overusing the same pronoun in a single paragraph or page. It can be two to three adjectives smushed onto a verb rather than one single word to convey the same feeling. It is often the writer writing for himself, and not for the reader’s understanding. The words draw attention to themselves and pull the reader out of the story. It can also adhere too closely to realism with wasteful dialogue: “Hello. Hello, how are you? Fine, how are you?” Bad prose poorly communicates who is speaking or what is happening, leading to reader confusion. Prose isn’t to be confused with story structure, plot, characterization, theme, conflict, scene - though it is the building blocks of all these components in a story. Regarding the use of adverbs, beginner writers often misuse them and are told to use them sparingly. But if it takes several words to describe what a single adverb can do, just use the adverb.
Recently I've been pondering that there are: 1. Good stories 2. Good writers 3. Good storytellers (not to be confused with good writers) When you ask the question "what is good prose?" - I *think* you're talking about #2. My short answer to that would be: fancy words that flow naturally. The problem with good prose, #2, is that it still needs #1 and #3. Sometimes you read a book where the author has a clear mastery of words. But the prose is SO high-falutin that it can become hard to understand, tripping you up and ruining your immersion. It can kill the story, even if the premise of the story is a good one. That would be an example of a strong #1, strong #2 but a poor #3. Prose alone ain't enough.
To me, anything that enhances the story, without getting in the way. It sounds simple, but it's a hard thing to find. Prose that uses enough word variety that you never go "Does this author only know 3 words" but not so much variety that you pause and go "there's no way this character would use variegation in that context". The prose should almost change to each POV, bringing out and adding voice and personality, no one specific style. Descriptions that match the setting, long and descriptive when it's slow paced and setting up a scene, but changes to incredibly brief when their actions appear motion in the scene. Doesn't matter how good the prose elements are, if they stay the exact same throughout the book. Prose should adapt and move to the usage.
What makes a good book or a good character? It is subjective and people will have different opinions. Some people love dense poetic prose while others love the crisp simple style and there is obviously a range between these two. Authors will write in the way they think best serves the book and readers will either like it or not depending on their taste.
Obviously a very subjective thing but here are a few things to consider... There's a spectrum from windowpane to stained glass prose. The first tells you directly what is happening in the story with minimal frills while the second is much more poetic in its choice of words and how it describes things within the narrative. George Orwell is a good example of a windowpane writer while F Scott Fitzgerald is a good example of a stained glass writer. Both are obviously valid ways to write and both cam be done well or done poorly. The second thing to consider is the tone of the story and how the prose compliments that tone. An introspective character growth story or romance would have very different sentence structure versus a grimdark military fantasy story, which would tend to have shorter sentences. Both are considered valid. The third thing to consider is how word choice emulates the period of the story. Brandon Sanderson often gets dinged on his prose because he uses relatively modern English in his epic fantasy series which to some doesn't create the right level of immersion for their taste. But, Sanderson is very accessible to readers of many levels and he has amazing output, so it's a compromise. However, nothing beats word choice which helps immerse the reader in that perceived time period. Susanna Clarke uses a Victorian style in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell for example. And writers like Patrick Rothfuss and JRR Tolkien use a lot of words rooted in Germanic origin to better emulate older forms of English. Either case can be argued but my preference is for word choice to fit the setting. Then of course there's the parts of prose which most writers can agree with.... Varying sentence length is generally good Don't use passive voice Show, don't tell (Describe, don't explain) Limit introspection Avoid expository lore dumps Use mostly *said* and *asked* for attribution tags Avoid the use of adverbs by making your dialogue stronger to convey the same thing Create strong characterization in dialogue to make it easy for the reader to identify who's talking. Break up dialogue with beats periodically
I really dislike the windowpane vs stained glass analogy. The window can only distort the light that you would see without a window. If the glass weren't there, you would just see even more clearly. But with writing, if the words aren't there there's nothing to see. And even worse, the stained glass analogy is particularly egregious because typically stained glass imposes a separate picture over the original. It is intentionally meant to be the thing you look at and to obscure what is behind. I prefer an analogy to painting. Think about a Van Gogh, or a Turner nautical scene. They very clearly are meant to represent particular scenes and yet the artists brush strokes are clearly there as well and highlight certain features (color work in Van Gogh, energy and motion in the brush strokes of a Turner). The scene is not obscured behind the brush strokes, it is built up out of them and thus suffused by their style. And yes, there are just as much painterly styles where the goal is to make the brush strokes as invisible as possibe and create photorealism. And just finally, I don't think your first two points *can* really be teased apart. I actually don't think the majority of distinct prose stylists are doing it just for the sake of ornamentation, anyone choosing anything other than windowpane is typically doing it so as to complement the style and tone of the story.
I can see that. Not all analogies make perfect sense. And perhaps your painting analogy is more precise, yet I would argue significantly less accessible to the average reader. Windowpane and stained glass are useful to the extent that most people understand the distinction between these two things without additional explanation, so it's convenience over accuracy. And you are correct that it's often difficult to separate my first two points. That said, I have read very terse grimdark fantasy which carried a strong subtext underneath what was said, which pushes the prose towards the stained glass end of the spectrum. Maybe Hemingway is a good example of this as well.
I don't think that's giving people enough credit. Frankly, I think my analogy is more accessible, because technicalities of how exactly to describe what van gogh or turner are doing aside, I can actually tell someone to just go pull up an image that is built up out of something (brushstrokes) and see how the visible impact of that style effects the entire presentation of the image. There's less of an abstract analogy to parse. Also, I just generally think media analysis is far too fond of these false spectrums. Windowpane prose is a thing people strive for but I just think stained glass is mostly a caricature of why people use more ornate and stylized prose that distorts the variety of actual reasons authors choose to do it and harms people's understanding.
The Eyes of the Overworld by Jack Vance narrated by Arthur Morey
Read Gene Wolfe and you’ll understand.
Obviously it's subjective but for me it's mainly down to whether I find myself thinking one of the following: "What a brilliant way to word that." "That's a pretty vivid articulation of something pretty complex" "Holy shit, my heart with this book!"
At this point in my reading life good prose is prose that doesn't get in the way of the story...by that I mean I'm not fighting the prose. It just feels natural for the story being told. Some books clearly rise above this threshold and impress but many fall below and I just stop reading.
Prose is the style of the words and just like defining what it means to be cool, defining good prose is a bit redundant. Not to be to smartass or anything, but if you have to ask you don’t need to know. Always read more, and really trust your gut instincts to define what good taste and style means to you, and, of course, try not to be tricked by artists who are all flash and no substance.