Janny Wurts

[Lermontov]

I'm coming late to her stuff but I'm relieved and encouraged to be reading something that isn't of the 'clear pane of glass' prose school.

She overloads her palate sometimes (she's an accomplished artist, too - and she plays the bagpipes!!!!).

This perhaps belongs to another thread, but I'm wondering how far you can express complex emotional, psychological and downright speculative and fantastic states inside a person, never mind one who is a sorcerer, with 'clear pane of glass' prose?

I'm sure there are examples.

But I know I couldn't be of the 'clear pane of glass' prose school if I tried. And there is something almost of the thought police about this in most writing schools.

Something else: she certainly knows how to administer a detailed and prolonged good kicking to her main male character (like Robin Hobb). In fact with her two main male characters in the space of the first 100 pages! Definitely deadlier than the male! Watch out for those bagpipes...

[Lindsay Lloyd]

What do you mean by 'clear pane of glass'?? That you're told straight rather than more poetical, or merely that the language is plainer, but doesn't necessarily tell you anything or everything, only gives hints to read into.

I would probably fall into this category, if I get what you're saying!

I've never read any of her work, I write fantasy, but I read little (Mieville, Tim Powers, Gaiman, Grrrr Martin). I prefer science fiction, horror and whatever trash makes me forget myself for a while.

[Lermontov]

What do you mean by 'clear pane of glass'??

An almost fascistic denial of the existence adjectives and adverbs, Lindsay! I'm all for the adage: 'let the verb carry the load' but at it's worst, it's journalese prose as in the Da Vinci Code.

There ought to be some poetry in prose, even if just in the cadences of the sentences, fantasy is ideal territory for it. As poetic as Brown gets is 'he gunned the car over the rise in the road' - infact he used 'gunned' about half a dozen times in the course of that book. You can get away with anything if you sell! A first-timer's efforts would be thrown out for less! And what the hell was the editor up to?

Or this example from Robert Ludlum's 'The Tristan Betrayal' (pointed out to me on another forum):

He was an obese middle-aged man with plucked eyebrows and a shiny bald head named Ernst Gerlach.

As was pointed out: what's the rest of him called?!

Matter of fact prose, nothing but a faceless engine for narrative movement - 'clear pane of glass' prose. Bores me rigid, no matter what's going on.

I like to see a writer cast a little stardust across the page now and again.

[Bryn Llewellyn]

... An almost fascistic denial of the existence adjectives and adverbs, Lindsay! I'm all for the adage: 'let the verb carry the load' but at it's worst, it's journalese prose as in the Da Vinci Code.

Brian Stableford remarked a while ago that "science-fiction" and "fantasy" authors above all writers should not be concerned by occasional patches of purple prose. I would agree with him.

LLEWELLYN

[Lindsay Lloyd]

Okay, I see. No I don't write quite like that! I thought you meant clear for our genre not mainstream, which is much more straightforward!