Best Writing Tips From The Best Prose Books

追加: 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]Last year I read seven books on the craft of writing in what I called the year of prose in efforts to distill the greatest writing advice into one video, one resource, and this is that video.

[00:00:15]>> [music] >> Some of these books were really good.

[00:00:17]Some of them were really not, but in this video I'm going to give you the best of the best, the cream of the crop, the pros advice that you can implement today that will have the most immediate effect on improving your [music] writing. And let's start with what makes good prose because it's not what you think.

[00:00:43]All of this study happened while I wrote my most recent book upon Careless Grey Hills, a murder thriller set in the real town of Whittier, Alaska, where all 200 residents live in one apartment building, and the only way in or out is a 2-mi tunnel under a mountain that closes every night.

[00:01:03]Pick it up in the link below if you're interested. It just came out and it's pretty darn good.

[00:01:08]In writing this book, I had the same questions that you probably do.

[00:01:13]What makes good writing? Like when we talk about the words on the page, what's good and what's bad? And the answer is determined by a few different things.

[00:01:25]Good prose does not mean long words and overly descriptive language, even though I think that's what comes to mind for a lot of people when we hear the word prose, something poetic and descriptive and evocative, like the classic authors.

[00:01:40]And I think that's more of a remnant of studying prose in school than it is a proper definition of prose. So, here is my interpretation.

[00:01:48]Prose is simply the successful, clear, and accurate communication from author to reader.

[00:01:55]>> [music] >> Now, that means that good prose can look a variety of different ways, and we see this all the time within specific genres because science fiction and romance look wildly different. Good prose can look like Jane Austen, or can look like Stephen King, or can look like Brandon Sanderson, or Ernest Hemingway, or Carson Long.

[00:02:19]Yeah. Good prose eliminates as much friction between the story and the reader as possible. So, let's talk about how to do that.

[00:02:29]Maybe the best advice that I got regarding prose and grammar comes from Dryer's English, which you can watch the full breakdown on this book here. And I believe it should be required reading for anyone who wants to take the craft of writing serious and improve themselves.

[00:02:48]Older authors had Strunk and White, we have Dryer's English.

[00:02:54]Oh, Strunk.

[00:02:56]In his book, Dryer presents a list of words that should never be used in professional writing. And of course, yes, rules are meant to be broken in some cases, but largely I agree with this. All of these words only serve as filler or to modify lesser words when better words are available. The way that Dryer phrases it is, "Challenge yourself to go 2 weeks without writing these words."

[00:03:21]There's a blog post by Needless Words that's inspired by Dryer, and they put together this example to showcase the uselessness of these words.

[00:03:32]That said, I'm pretty sure we can almost stop utilizing these, of course, if we just try very hard. Gets rephrased as, "I'm sure we can stop using these words if we try hard." And while this is a pretty on-the-nose example, I do fully agree that none of these words on this list actually add value to your writing.

[00:03:52]SO, GET THEM OUT OF HERE. As for some writing advice that can have immediate improvement on your writing, it doesn't get much better than eliminating these specific useless words. And even better, refining the way that you think about what language is actually useful and appropriate for your book, like this is a great tip to take. You can search your manuscript for these words and rephrase sentences as you edit. And the more that you take the heart of the idea of eliminating these words from your vocabulary, the better your first draft becomes.

[00:04:28]And hey, if you're looking to be a better writer, subscribe to this channel, come join the free writing theory Discord. We have over 700 writers who are sharing resources, giving feedback, and we even do writing challenges a couple times a year. Link below.

[00:04:45]An adjective is a descriptor. It tells us whether the noun you're referencing is pretty or shiny or old or red, right?

[00:04:54]A a pretty necklace, a shiny gem, an old map, a red-headed host of a YouTube channel.

[00:05:03]>> [laughter] >> And you might have come across writing advice that really pushes back against the use of adjectives.

[00:05:08]Well, really the writing advice surrounding adjectives mostly comes down to avoiding decorative adjectives and avoiding overusing adjectives. And for a long time, I had a really hard time wrapping my head around this writing advice. I don't really follow any sort of writing advice, no matter who it comes from, unless I know the reason behind it and the problem that that advice fixes. And all of that finally lined up for me when I was reading On Writing Well by William Zinsser. You can watch me do a full breakdown of that book in this video.

[00:05:44]Zinsser has a ton of great advice for prose in this book, and while Zinsser is mostly a nonfiction writer, the advice he covers is universal. So, first, adjectives. Zinsser believes that writers add adjectives to make their prose sound more lush, but he advocates for using less adjectives so that the ones that you do use stand out more. And a lot of our adjectives can be made redundant by stronger phrasing in our sentences. Instead of saying a yellow flower, consider writing a specific flower that's yellow. A yellow dandelion is redundant.

[00:06:22]They're always yellow.

[00:06:25]A steep cliff is redundant. Cliffs are always steep.

[00:06:30]So, by being mindful of more specific word choice, the problem of useless adjectives almost fixes itself.

[00:06:37]Decorative, or at least less useful, adjectives are replaced by stronger word choice.

[00:06:43]He also talks about adjectives to communicate something the noun by itself cannot. A yellow dandelion doesn't pass the sniff test. I don't know if you've heard dandelions are yellow.

[00:06:54]But, you'll probably write about a wilted dandelion, or dead dandelion, or crushed dandelion. That's when you should be using adjectives, when you need to impact that noun in a way it can't do by itself. And that's when I finally understood the advice surrounding adjectives, and now I'm a believer. And no one before had really helped me understand this advice until now, so I hope that helps you, too.

[00:07:18]Now, along the same lines, Zinsser had another piece of advice that I've taken to heart, and I find it to be universally true, and it has to do when you get stuck on a sentence.

[00:07:30]All right, this one's really short, but it makes so much sense. Have you ever been writing, and you're halfway through a sentence, and you just stop because something about the wording just doesn't quite click, and you're searching for the right words or word to make this half-finished thing come together. In the past, I would have thought that this was just the puzzle of the writer. It's part of our job to stumble into these messes and pull from our huge vocabulary for the perfect word that fixes that sentence.

[00:08:01]But Zinsser says otherwise.

[00:08:04]Simply put, his advice is pretty clear.

[00:08:07]If you get stuck on a sentence, don't treat it like a puzzle to solve, just change the sentence. If the meaning of your whole sentence relies on this one precarious word, then maybe it's not a strong sentence.

[00:08:21]And that makes more sense to me. So now, when I'm writing and this happens, I just delete the half-finished sentence and I completely change it. We're writers, that is our skill. Now, I extrapolate this advice even further into whole paragraphs, especially in the drafting process. We're uncovering the story one word at a time, and sometimes it takes 50 words into a paragraph to find out that what you were trying to say didn't need a whole paragraph's worth of attention. And I think we all ramble a bit in that first draft. So, especially I I find myself doing this a lot more when I have characters entering into a new place and I'm creating that descriptive language about their setting. Sometimes I end up focusing too much on a specific detail trying to create this image for the reader before I realize that it's not really important enough to the story. So, I reduce that paragraph down to a sentence and I keep on going.

[00:09:20]The aptly named Francine Prose, and yes, that is her real legal government name, has a writing book called Reading Like a Writer.

[00:09:29]I did a breakdown of that book here, and while the book largely wasn't my favorite, there are, of course, a few pieces of advice that I pulled from it.

[00:09:37]So, let me ask you, how long should a sentence be?

[00:09:42]Uh of course, there's no right answer in terms of a word count, but there is a right answer in terms of context and impact.

[00:09:50]Don't let your writing become repetitive. You can use sentence length to control the flow of your book.

[00:09:56]Sentence length is an important aspect of your prose and it's one of the easier things you can do today to improve your writing.

[00:10:05]In fact, there's a famous quote by Gary Provost Provost about this.

[00:10:12]This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine, but several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening.

[00:10:22]The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. [music] It's like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety.

[00:10:30]Now listen. I vary the sentence length and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences and I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes when I'm certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length. A sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals, sounds that say, "Listen to this. It is important."

[00:11:06]So, write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. [music] Create a sound that pleases the reader's ear. Don't just write words, write music. [music] There's no greater example of the power of sentence length than this quote. It's amazing.

[00:11:23]Sentence length is a style choice as well, and it's a way for the writer to control rhythm and melody and inflection, ideally. And upon careless I adopted a style that was very direct and full of rather short sentences. But it was a choice that I made to reflect the genre and the topic of the story, but that also meant I could lean into longer sentences that stood out not just against the surrounding text but against the overall style of the novel.

[00:11:52]And if you read [music] this book and you come across a really long sentence, then you read something very important to the story. That's the power of prose.

[00:12:01]You get to control the reader like this.

[00:12:03]I'm the puppet master. And that's because I'm writing trying to write good prose. And when you're writing good prose, you get to control the communication from writer to reader in a successful, clear, and accurate way.

[00:12:19]>> [music] >> These are just the tips that I think are immediately useful. Things you can start to implement today. It doesn't require studying the great authors or reading a bunch of old classic paragraphs while someone says, "You should never write in a run-on sentence, but also here's a great passage by Charles Dickens that's a run-on sentence."

[00:12:38]I hate that. I hate that so much. That does not help me learn at all.

[00:12:43]Sorry.

[00:12:44]>> [clears throat] >> Okay, so anyways, check out this playlist where I do these writing book breakdowns for more advice. Uh let me know some of your favorite prose tips.

[00:12:52]And as always, thank you for watching.