A Quote by Laurie Alberts

Good prose almost always requires both showing and telling, scenes and summary, the two basic components of creative prose.

Laurie Alberts

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Almost Always Basic Both Components Creative Good Prose Requires Scenes Showing Summary Telling Two

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Laurie Alberts
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Born: January 11, 1953

Inexperienced fiction and creative nonfiction writers are often told to show, not tell - to write scenes, dramatize, cut exposition, cut summary - but it can be misguided advice. Good prose almost always requires both showing and telling, scenes and summary, the two basic components of creative prose

Laurie Alberts

Poetry has an indirect way of hinting at things. Poetry is feminine. Prose is masculine. Prose, the very structure of it, is logical; poetry is basically illogical. Prose has to be clear-cut; poetry has to be vague - that's its beauty, its quality. Prose simply says what it says; poetry says many things. Prose is needed in the day-to-day world, in the marketplace. But whenever something of the heart has to be said, prose is always found inadequate - one has to fall back to poetry.

Rajneesh

With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed.

Robert Morgan

In high school, in 1956, at the age of sixteen, we were not taught "creative writing." We were taught literature and grammar. So no one ever told me I couldn't write both prose and poetry, and I started out writing all the things I still write: poetry, prose fiction - which took me longer to get published - and non-fiction prose.

Margaret Atwood

I've already written 300 space poems. But I look upon my ultimate form as being a poetic prose. When you read it, it appears to be prose, but within the prose you have embedded the techniques of poetry.

Story Musgrave

For me a page of good prose is where one hears the rain. A page of good prose is when one hears the noise of battle.... A page of good prose seems to me the most serious dialogue that well-informed and intelligent men and women carry on today in their endeavor to make sure that the fires of this planet burn peaceably.

John Cheever

Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence. It is no fun to write lumpishly, dully, in prose the reader must plod through like wet sand. But it is a pleasure to achieve, if one can, a clear running prose that is simple yet full of surprises. This does not just happen. It requires skill, hard work, a good ear, and continued practice.

Barbara Tuchman

There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.

Eugenio Montale

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.

Samuel McChord Crothers

That prose is a verse, and verse is a prose; convincing all, by demonstrating plain – poetic souls delight in prose insane

Lord Byron

The simple Wordsworth . . . / Who, both by precept and example, shows / That prose is verse, and verse is merely prose.

Lord Byron

The more prose I wrote, the more the pendulum swung back toward the middle, merging some poetic sensibilities with the more fundamental elements of creative prose.

Alex Lemon

I'd rather call prose poems something else, for clarity - something like "poetic prose," prose that contains a quality of poetry, but not poems.

Pattiann Rogers

It may be safely affirmed that there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition.... They both speak by and to the same organs; the bodies in which both of them are clothed may be said to be of the same substance, their affections are kindred, and almost identical, not necessarily differing even in degree; Poetry sheds no tears "such as Angels weep," but natural and human tears; she can boast of no celestial ichor that distinguishes her vital juices from those of prose; the same human blood circulates through the veins of them both.

William Wordsworth

You don't have to be as good a writer to write a song; it's a very different process to writing straight prose. To learn how to write prose takes a lot of years of practice.

Tom Odell

I'm often a little perplexed, when I read a review of a book, by the quotes that are pulled out as evidence of excellent prose. I don't think great novels are necessarily composed of great prose, or that there's a correlation between beautiful prose and the quality of a work of fiction. A really good, interesting novel will often let a little ugliness get into its words - to create a certain effect, to leave the reader with a certain sense of disorientation.

Katie Kitamura

A Quote by Laurie Alberts

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