Jacob Szymanski

No more terrible disaster can befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a hero.

The first sentence here, no more terrible disaster can befall your people, has two words with three syllables, terrible disaster.

And then the second half of that sentence, then for them to fall into the hands of a hero, no longer than two syllables.

And it kind of makes you focus on the first one.

And then the switch up to shorter words speeds the pace a little bit, doesn't it?

Because three syllable words take longer to process.

Because, correct me if I'm wrong, the definition of prose is essentially writing that is explicitly not poetic.

That's the very short version, right?

That's the feeling of reading good prose is that it almost disappears, right?

I get the same feeling when a narrator is doing a really good job.

You forget that it's a person in a booth.

The words just exist on their own and you can live in the moment being fully absorbed by the story and taking off your critic hat and just sitting in a moment.

But you're talking about the consistency of the prose and its quality in that an author will always develop their own personal voice and idiosyncrasies and, you know...

patterns that you can pick up on and sometimes those patterns are very enjoyable sometimes they're not and the author often has to choose a tone do you want to write more formally are you going to utilize more modern language are you going to be more colloquial you know you have to make these decisions but you have to stick to it otherwise you're reading something that feels like it's jumping all over

in space and time, you're not really sure what it's supposed to be.

That's why I know exactly what you mean by that consistency.

This is fascinating to me as someone who doesn't write.

I've never really done creative writing.

You have, on the other hand, and so I'm sure you've found all sorts of writing advice, the common writing advice.

And I profess that I have done some research going into this episode.