haowjy/prose-writing

Prose Writing

How prose pulls readers in. Style files carry the project's specific voice; read them before writing. This skill covers the patterns that create immersion regardless of project.

Psychic Distance

The distance between the reader and the character's consciousness. Gardner's continuum runs from far ("It was winter of the year 1853. A large man stepped out of the doorway.") to close ("Snow. Under your collar, down inside your shoes, freezing and plugging up your miserable soul.").

Control this deliberately. Move closer for emotional peaks, character-defining moments, and interiority. Pull back for transitions, time compression, and establishing context. The rhythm of close and far gives prose its emotional shape.

Default AI prose sits at a flat middle distance: close enough to seem personal, far enough to feel safe. Push past that. Go closer when it matters.

Free Indirect Discourse

Blend the narrator's voice with the character's perspective so third-person narration is colored by how the character thinks and sees.

Conventional: "Connie thought she was pretty and she believed that was the most important thing she could be."

Free indirect: "She knew she was pretty and that was everything."

The narrator doesn't announce the character's thoughts. The narration itself carries the character's voice, vocabulary, and judgment. This is the primary technique for close-third that actually feels intimate. Use the character's words, not the narrator's, when psychic distance is close.

Sentence Rhythm

Rhythm pulls readers along like a current. Vary length, structure, and pattern to match the moment.

Short sentences for tension, shock, emphasis. Longer cumulative sentences for immersion, reflection, complex emotion. Fragments for intimacy, interrupted thought, the feeling of a mind catching up to what just happened.

When every sentence follows the same pattern, such as subject, verb, object, repeat, the prose flattens regardless of content. A devastating scene and a mundane scene should not read the same way.

Sensory Grounding

Ground scenes in specific sensory details filtered through the POV character's attention. "The forest" is nowhere. "Pine needles crunching underfoot, the smell of wet bark" is a place.

What a character notices reveals who they are. A chef notices smells. A musician notices sounds. A soldier notices exits. One or two vivid, specific details do more work than a catalog of all five senses.

Interiority

The POV character's inner life distinguishes prose fiction from screenplay: thoughts, reactions, memories, associations. "She felt sad" is a label. "She kept reaching for her phone to text him before remembering" is interiority that shows the reader something about grief.

In high-action scenes, interiority contracts to fragments: quick reactions, snap judgments. In reflective scenes, it expands. Match the depth of inner experience to the pace of the scene.

Show Through Action

Demonstrate character states through behavior, dialogue, and physical response.

"He was nervous about the meeting" is a label. "He checked his watch for the third time, then straightened a tie that was already straight" lets the reader see the nervousness and interpret it.

Tell for logistics, show for moments that matter. Summary narration works for transitions, routine actions, and time compression. Showing everything is as exhausting as telling everything.

Point of View

Stay in the established POV. In first person, the narrator can only report what they perceive, think, and feel. In third limited, access one character's interiority per scene.

Convey non-POV characters through observable behavior. Write "Her jaw tightened" rather than "She felt angry." The narrator can't know what's happening in someone else's head.