I think there's something quite interesting about the almost tragic quality of a lot of overwrought prose, because it has a much more self-conscious awareness of its own failure to touch the real.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
A lot of times you get people writing wonderful sentences and paragraphs, and they fall in love with their prose style, but the stories really aren't that terrific.
Let's say I find a lot of current American fiction too overwritten for my tastes, too self-conscious; I like something that's simpler and more direct. The story is what matters to me. I hope to make it seem real to readers, as if it happened just like this - so I don't want fancy descriptions getting in the way.
For me, as a writer who comes from quite a naturalistic tradition, British screenwriting is quite delicate, quite small, and rarified in a way.
I think fiction lends itself to messiness rather than the ideal, and plays well with the ironies surrounding what happens versus what should happen.
I want prose fiction to be recognized as that, and I'm not interested in writing as it becomes more personal.
Most writers spend their lives standing a little apart from the crowd, watching and listening and hoping to catch that tiny hint of despair, that sliver of malice, that makes them think, 'Aha, here is the story.'
I have always tended toward a lush prose style, but I take care to modulate it from story to story and to strip it down entirely when necessary.
The older I get, the more I seek to use a plain prose style, concentrating more on story.
When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it. All elegant passages, all the curious details, all the so-called beautiful writing - if they are not truly relevant to what I am trying to say, then they have to go.
For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle. It has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty.