Figured we’d start this week by looking at the prose of A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan, which is a fictional memoir of Lady Trent, a dragon researcher. I’ve always had a soft spot for stories that ape documentaries or memoirs and this is easily one of the best I’ve experienced. Thanks in no small part to writing that does everything it can to sell this illusion.

We had chosen for our destination the nearest and most isolated of the dragon lairs the smugglers had identified, in the hopes of only disturbing one beast. (While we might have gotten a great deal of observational data from having three or four wyrms descend upon us at once, I feared it would all be lost to science ten minutes later.)

Since the books is supposed to emulate a real memoir, little asides like this help sell the narrator as a character. The author could have gone for a more immediate 1^st person view, but instead has little asides like the one in brackets that make it clear the narrator is writing about them after the fact. The language here is also very formal, even when its joking. Something that speaks to Lady Trent’s upbringing and how she see’s the world.

Also, the punctuation of the whole book is amazing. Like in this section describing a dragon in flight:

Then it caught an updraft and skimmed up the mountain’s slop, barely above the trees and that gave me a better view: the blocky plates of the hide; the close-tucked legs and trailing tail; the enormous expanse of wings dwarfing the body they bore.

As someone who’s terrified of using semicolons, the ease at which Brennan employs them so skillfully floors me. It would have been easy to just use a basic list formatted with commas and a couple of adjectives slapped in there. Instead, the semicolons allow for more detail to go into each part of the dragon listed. What makes it stand out even more is that the language used isn’t poetic. There’s no “swooping tails” or “plates like diamonds,” the descriptions used are simple and academic. It still manages to convey to the reader that Lady Trent is in awe of the dragon, but that her interest is in the science of the creature. I could gush for hours about how good this sentence is but then we’d be here all day.

Also on my reading list for the week was Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey. This is one of those series that I’ve always heard about, but never read until now. One of my favorite things about the prose of the book is that a lot of the sentences are extremely short and to the point, but that doesn’t keep the authors from flexing their skills at using metaphors and similes.. 

One of the security men was also far too wide for his gear, the Velcro fasteners at his belly reaching out for each other like lovers at the moment of separation.

Would have been so easy to just go “the Velcro fasteners at his belly were near bursting” but this wonderful simile breathes life into the image. It also fleshes out the POV character, Miller, by giving having this kind of specific image be what comes into his head. In story context, this detail also helps fuel the uneasy atmosphere being built as all sorts of tiny details start to come together to say, “something’s wrong.” 

The prose is also excellent at helping the shocking moments linger in your mind, even after they first hit the reader.

Arterial blood pumped out in a read cloud, pulled into two thin lines, and whirled to the holes in the walls of the room as the air rushed out.

This sentence shows that you don’t need a lot of detail to sell the gruesomeness of a scene. There’s no need to describe what the stump of the missing part looks like, just the strange after effect of the moment. It’s the kind of thing that would likely linger in the minds of those involved as their brains struggled to process what happened. The way the blood moves also demonstrates the low gravity of the setting and that the room the characters are in isn’t just a separate set for this scene. This is the kind of sentence I envy because it’s doing so much all at once.

Finally we get to Wonderbook by Jeff Vandermeer, an excellent book on writing speculative fiction. While that might give you the impression that the writing is very formal and academic, one of the goals of the book is to inject inspiration into the reader using both art and some excellent writing.

What’s important is that some initial irritant, some kind of galvanizing and enduring impulse, combines with the need to communicate, to tell stories… leading to inspiration, then that first story, and all that follows after.

This is one of those sentences that I think is gonna be an eye opener for any new writers reading it because it manages to succinctly describe a feeling that they have no doubt felt, but struggled to put into words. Words like “irritant” really get to the kind of itch inspiration can bring and the italicized portion is just a beautiful condensing of the way a new idea can get you anxious to start creating. The ellipses also adds just a bit of a buildup to the final part of the sentence. Maybe a bit dramatic, but it’s a nice bit of flair.