Have you ever gone back to read your old work, the stories you wrote way back when? I have. Let me tell you, that stuff is terrible reading. Oh, I still like some of the core ideas, some of the images I sought to conjure, but the execution, both on a macro and micro scale…. It’s like watching a car trying to run when all the gears are half an inch out of position. For a while, after I figured out that stories actually needed to get from Point A to Point B in order to work (I put a lot of work into dilly-dallying with my first attempt at a novel), after I decided plots needed complexity beyond ‘go to place, kill thing, almost die, get back’ (with random encounters for filler), I started writing what I now call ‘functional writing’ or ‘functional prose’. Don’t misunderstand the name. The ‘functional’ refer not to whether it work or not (from an artistic perspective, it doesn’t); it refers to the fact that the writing was written to fulfil a certain function- moving the plot forward- and it fulfilled that function, technically. It just didn’t do much else. Functional prose accomplished the plot the author (me) had in mind and little or nothing more.

The problem, fundamentally, with ‘functional prose’ is that it does one job, maybe two, when it needs to be doing a lot more than that, and it accomplishes that job through ‘tell’, not ‘show’. Functional prose might move the story forward; it might brute force some character exposition; it might establish a part of the setting’s mechanics. It just doesn’t do all the things which make the plot progression, character arc, or setting actually interesting.

(For the curious, I’ve included an excerpt of a 5 year or more old rough draft of a probably-defunct story as an example of ‘functional prose’ in the first footnote, here¹)

A scene’s prose has a lot of jobs. It needs to provide the reader with the basic facts. It needs to provide him also with those details which enliven those facts, details which provide an impetus to the reader to form the muscle and tendons and skin around the skeleton of the scene. It needs to carry a certain tone- triumphant, tired, sad, angry, humorous, you name it- and retain cohesion with the preceding and succeeding scenes. The characters too must be sketched out; if the reader already know them, their trait must be maintained and hinted at and put into play to affect the narrative, and if the reader does not, their trait, physical and mental, must be established, important and pertinent ones first, accompanied by the details which, though not central to the character, allow the reader to get an understanding of what’s central to the character, like the shaky hands of the 2^nd Lieutenant when he’s lighting his pipe, hands which make the reader understand, in a way which simply explicating the emotion never could, how his nerves are shivering like a June-bug on a timpani. Setting should pop up too, whether in an explicit statement or a significant detail or in a passing mention that creates color. And I’ve just touched the surface. You can get fancy, once the basics are locked down: symbolism, motifs, themes, and more.

Obviously we can’t go over all these parts right now, but we can go over a one: the small details.

Functional prose, written with a minimum of sense (judging by my own work, the assessment of which produced the term), will get across the extreme basics of the scene- who is doing what (though only the important things; background characters are a haze at best), blunt core-ideas of the characters, and the mechanical impact the scene has on what comes next. It misses the little details which bring life to the story, the subtleties which make its characters human rather than Plot Accomplishing Automatons™.

The art of figuring out what detail to put in a story is, perhaps, a large part of what differentiates decent prose from exceptional prose. It is the difference, to paraphrase an author I rather dislike, between the lightning bug and its eponymous lightning. Some details are obvious in their inclusion, necessary to make anything make sense. Others are more finicky, but these cases are the truly interesting ones, in my opinion.

For an example, consider a paragraph from page 334 of Tim Power’s Declare²:

(Instructing Hale) “’And not get off your camel,’ added bin Jalawi. He had often told Hale that his huge English feet left monstrous footprints in the sand.”

The paragraph revolves around a small detail- the size of Hale’s feet as compared to the Arabic standard more appropriate to the Hejaz- and while hardly integral to the plot or even character progression, this small detail is yet another way in which Powers makes the desert come alive, the kind of detail which turns the desert from a sandy backdrop into a real setting, from a green-screened picture to an active part of the story.

Small details like these are one of the author’s most powerful tools in illuminating the world around the characters. Now, I, as the hypothetical author, could choose to go in a different direction. I could choose to describe everything, to paint an exhaustive picture of what’s going on around the characters, from the precise color of the curtains to the pattern of the carpet to the furnishing of the doors directly before him. Of course, the reader would be asleep at the end, no matter how vivid my description; the precise coloration of the curtains is of no real interest to him (unless I’ve intentionally made it so- and if I have done that, the rest of the details will still lack that excuse). This tactic kills the pacing as quick as a .50 BMG to the brainpan³. I must choose, therefore, the right details, the ones that make the world come alive.

It turns out that you don’t need all the details anyway; at a certain point, most readers will just forget them, will hold onto at most a fraction of the mass to make their picture of the story. If, instead, we choose the right details, calibrating what we say to produce the right impression without bogging down the narrative, we’ll get much better results. Every reader will have slightly different impressions, but that was going to happen anyway. You can’t control your readers and shouldn’t try to. As an author, your job is to tempt them down your chosen path, not shove them down it by force. Therefore, choose a few sharp details, a few details which induce an atmosphere conducive to the story, and use those details to illustrate the setting⁴.

Functional prose doesn’t include those small details, and that’s just the start of its failings. Remember when you’re writing to consider not only the bare minimum required to achieve one goal but the other goals you need to be driving towards in the same passage- character, setting, tone, etc. Then, once you’re done, take some time away from that particular passage, think about something else, and come back to it. Read it like you’re the audience, not the author, and mull over what goals it accomplishes, what goals it tries to accomplish, what missed opportunities lurk in its words and phrases. Even just assessing how it flows will help a lot. Good prose reads like the story is moving down the stair with intention, whether its running or walking or dancing; functional prose reads like the story knows it needs to get down the steps and has decided the best way to do that is to trip repeatedly, or perhaps dive headfirst and roll down, bump-a-thump, bump-a-thump⁵.

1 – The promised excerpt, with gratuitously omitted spaces re-introduced:

“Well, Sir Dalton,” spat Sir Wordon, “what are you doing in Modoral’s service? Traitor, eh?”
“No. I was taken prisoner, and when they offered me freedom as a knight under probation without any vows of service, I decided to accept the offer. Sir Fleuron was my guide,” answered Sir Dalton, lowering his shield and sheathing his sword.
“I believe you,” returned Sir Wordon and silently started up again. After this encounter, the knights of Modoral were unsuccessful in their search for Sir Wordon, who seemed to become part of the landscape like a grain of salt in the ocean.  During the journey, Sir Wordon taught and tested Sir Dalton and found only integrity, grit, and excellence. Two days later they reached the advance guard of Lord Adramil. When had left Dalton to the care of his lieutenant, Sir Wordon gave Adramil his report and defended Dalton, saying that he believe him to be sincere.
“Well, if you believe him sincere, apprentice him,” tested Lord Adramil.
“I will!” replied Wordon without any hesitation.
“I am surprised at you,” huffed Adramil, “You never took on an apprentice before without extensive testing!”
“He has had a test and has stood up to it.”
“When did he get the test, If I am permitted to ask?”
“On the way back here.”
“Fine,” puffed Adramil, “Go apprentice a traitor and assassin. I’ll let you kill yourself. O yes I will. And by the way, he did disobey his mother and father- very insolent in fact, though they begged me not to take notice. O yes, indeed, he’s a fine person.”
“My lord, have I ever been killed by the multiple assassins sent by Modoral?”
“No,” replied Lord Adramil grudgingly.
“Then will you trust me to take care of myself?”
“Oh, I guess I must.”
“Thank you” (SCENE END)

2 – Find a review here.

3 – More on pacing here!

4 – Think of how metaphors and similes work: they present two dissimilar things in order to highlight their similarities, often using the connotations of one to influence the received understanding of the other. For a bit more on such matters (symbolism, typology, etc.) go here.

5 – A line that got cut from the blog for being unnecessary: ‘Functional prose is literature’s version of brutalist architecture, except some people actually like brutalism.’