From our subscribers' submissions: Woman of the Hour by Claire Polders
And Polders answers our questions on prose technique.
Thank you to the readers who support us by recommending Auraist, restacking our posts, completing our reader survey, or clicking the Like (heart) button to help spread the word about the only publication set up solely to champion beautiful prose and battle the Replicant Voice.
Sixty minutes before she steps in front of a speeding van, she blenders bird seeds with berries for her vegan twelve-yearold, who dirties their kitchen each Saturday for some type of raw bake-off but cannot get up early enough on school days to mix her own shake. As a mother, she practices patience. Her smile tempers yet never quite masks her discontent. She looks haunted by a tampon jingle, smelling her own rancid blood.
Fifty minutes before she loses her breath in a death-threat flash, she secretly dictates a dentist appointment into her husband’s calendar and sets up a reminder for seven days ahead. She should neither startle him with a sudden visit nor let him know about it for too long in advance. As a wife, she protects. If she lets his anxieties spin out of control, the whole household will suffer. There are limits to what their healthy diet can cure.
Forty minutes before the driver hits his brakes with the power of blind rage, she verifies whether her mother’s scheduled caregiver has checked in on time to drive her mother to the oncologist. As a daughter, she’s at a distance. In her early forties, when she herself experienced a cancer scare and filled bowls with vomit, she stopped trying to gain the love she had missed as a child. She’s a confident woman. If only because she refuses to be in a story in which readers see her flattened under a misery the weight of a truck.
Thirty minutes before small-town bystanders look up from their phones and applaud her, she sends an emoji-rich message to her bestie, who suffers from envy as though it were a chronic back pain. As a friend, she condones. Each time she meets with such a special person in her life, she feels as though she’s spreading a picnic blanket under a blossoming jasmine tree and is handed a life-prolonging elixir. The pleasure she derives from holding hands can be greater than from sex.
Twenty minutes before she spots the family of ducks crossing the street in a line, she calls her new team member with detailed instructions on how to prepare the brand-identity presentation later that day. Last but not least: The smell of fresh coffee is key. As an employee, she goes beyond the call of duty. Not in the hopes of advancing her career, but because she cannot bear to witness catastrophes.
Ten minutes before she bursts out laughing at the thought of being a brave woman for the sake of seven ducks, she unintentionally catches a vagrant’s eye and drops her loose change in a held-out hand. As a heroine, she is pathetic. Who has time for saving the world? Her father, apparently, who moved to Oaxaca at the age of seventy-three and became an activist for the Mixtecs. She turned the news of his departure over in her hands, like a sharp thing picked up from the grass. Is it true that she has his jaw?
At the time of her near death, she steps off the sidewalk into traffic, not seeking to shatter her bones, yet distracted by the unexpected image of herself as a broken vase, a woman in jagged pieces. The van screeches to a halt in a cliché she fails to notice. There’s the stink of burnt rubber, and a memory flickers, ghostlike. As a child, she was a theater talent and still whole. She would stand on the makeshift stage of their shoddy living room rug, performing a self-written play in a self-made costume, hair in a ponytail hidden beneath a wig, acting out all the parts and getting applauded by the merry adults, including her mother, for so convincingly being anyone but herself.
More on Woman of the Hour»
Polders’ Substack»
More subscribers’ submissions»
Submitting work to Auraist
We offer writers a fast-growing audience of tens of thousands of discerning readers, including many world-class writers, major publishers and literary agencies, and journalists at the highest-profile publications.
If we publish your work, we’ll invite you to answer our questions on prose style. Your answers will be considered for inclusion in the print publication of these pieces by many of the world’s best writers.
The following submissions are welcome:
Books published in the last year
Works serialised on Substack
Start the process by signing up for a paid subscription below. Then email your work to auraist@substack.com. It’s recommended that you familiarise yourself with the criteria we use for our picks. In submitting to Auraist, you are vouching that the work was not written in part or whole by AI.
We look forward to reading it.
‘Substance and style are not the same thing to me, but ideally they come together as one in the final edit.’
In your early writing career, were there writers whose sentences permanently affected the standards of your reading and your own writing aspirations? What have you learned about prose style from these writers?
Let’s begin here: English is not my first language. I only started speaking it daily when I lived in Paris during my mid-twenties and met the American man who later became my husband.
I wrote my first four novels in Dutch, and although I published newspaper articles in English during my college years, I didn’t dare write fiction in English until about ten years ago. I feared I would mangle the language I revered and ridicule myself, throwing words on the page without truly knowing their connotations. I believed it was pretentious: I wasn’t Nabokov!
When I finally gave myself permission to write fiction in English, I made the mistake of starting a novel before I felt comfortable in the language. I could neither focus on the story nor the prose: all my attention went to avoiding mistakes. When I asked my screen-writing husband for feedback, he corrected my grammar instead of commenting on my ideas. Frustrated, I paused the manuscript and explored a more accessible genre: flash fiction, stories of less than a thousand words.
I read the contemporary flash masters—Kathy Fish, Thaisa Frank, Lydia Davis, Etgar Keret—and the classics, such as Italo Calvino, Yasunari Kawabata, and Jorge Luis Borges. How were they able to say so much in so few words? How did their sentences make me imagine the parts of the story they hadn’t written?
While I wrote my first flash fictions, I studied the prose of many other authors. I learned to use alliteration effectively from A.M. Homes, write flowing run-on sentences from Javier Marias and W.G. Sebald, construct declarative sentences with multiple clauses from Renata Adler and Joan Didion, experiment with voice from Zadie Smith and Clarice Lispector, be more poetically from Anne Carson and Maggie Nelson, and write more clearly with strong nouns and verbs from John Berger, J.M. Coetzee, and James Salter.
I forced myself to write in complete sentences at first. There’s a rule about not being able to break the rules unless you know them well. My style became more natural when I added sentence fragments that didn’t contain a subject or verb.
I still don’t have the rich understanding of native speakers, yet what I lack in immersion, I can make up for in awareness. I don’t write on automatic pilot. After each sentence, I reflect: Am I saying what I want to say? Can I say something more unique or interesting by replacing my words?
I’ve grown as an author since I switched to writing in English because I’ve slowed down. My prose may never be as powerful as that of the authors I admire, but I can live with that. I don’t need to be the best. I just need to express myself with as much nuance, appeal, and clarity as possible. That’s enough for me.
You obviously believe that the quality of prose matters. Could you explain why this is so?
Good prose is like a magic trick. It draws readers to the text without drawing attention to itself. Perhaps the sentences have a cadence that puts readers under a spell. Perhaps an unexpected adjective awakens something in the mind.
Style is a language of evocation: we want to call up what we don’t want to state literally. If we do it well, our stylistic choices can express a character’s anxiety, embarrassment, or excitement, even if we’re only describing the sky.
Our prose can also prepare readers for what’s to come. I learned about priming from attending an interview with David Mitchell in the Netherlands after his Cloud Atlas became a hit. When we want to create tension and make readers feel scared even though there is no apparent danger yet in the scene, we can prime readers by using words such as red and sharp when describing the napkin next to the protagonist’s plate. That’s magic, isn’t it?
Talk us through the stylistic choices that mattered most in the opening to WOMAN OF THE HOUR:
Sixty minutes before she steps in front of a speeding van, she blenders bird seeds with berries for her vegan twelve-year-old, who dirties their kitchen each Saturday for some type of raw bake-off but cannot get up early enough on school days to mix her own shake. As a mother, she practices patience. Her smile tempers yet never quite masks her discontent. She looks haunted by a tampon jingle, smelling her own rancid blood.
Fifty minutes before she loses her breath in a death-threat flash, she secretly dictates a dentist appointment into her husband’s calendar and sets up a reminder for seven days ahead. She should neither startle him with a sudden visit nor let him know about it for too long in advance. As a wife, she protects. If she lets his anxieties spin out of control, the whole household will suffer. There are limits to what their healthy diet can cure.
In the title story “Woman of the Hour,” I wanted to sketch a portrait of a woman as a broken vase. She crosses the street in a hurry without paying attention to the traffic, because she feels fragmented. She’s playing all these different daily roles. She’s a mother, a wife, an adult daughter, a friend, an employee, a heroine, and, in her memory, a child.
For each of these roles, I wrote a slice-of-life paragraph. But, just like my protagonist, the story wouldn’t come together as a whole. So I made two stylistic choices: I repeated the long structure of the first sentence for the opening of each consecutive paragraph, and I copied the short structure that names the role inside each slice of life. As a result, the story got a rhythm. All I had to do next was fine-tune the piece by cutting out everything that didn’t sound right.
As authors, we sometimes hear that repetition is boring and must be avoided. We may try out awkward synonyms just because we’re afraid to repeat the same noun. We may even come up with unnecessary prepositional clauses so as not to start three sentences in a row with “She.” But repetition in other people’s work rarely bothers me and I’ve come to embrace it in my own, especially when repetition comes with varieties that keep readers alert.
‘I often put all sentences on their own line to see which ones require improvement. Or I change the font to trick my brain into thinking I’m reading a text I’ve never seen before.’
Aspiring writers are usually told either that style and substance are in fact the same thing, that they are ‘one’, or they’re advised to look at these two qualities separately. What guidance can you give such writers about the relationship between substance and style?
Substance and style are not the same thing to me, but ideally they come together as one in the final edit. It’s normal to conceive of a story without immediately knowing how best to tell it, or start writing in a distinctive voice without knowing what kind of story will emerge. Substance and style can each be the spark of inspiration. But once we’ve written a first draft, it’s a good idea to question whether the voice matches the story.
When I’m unsure whether a piece is finished, I sometimes rewrite it from a different point of view, go from first to third person or vice versa. I may also replace all words a child of eight wouldn’t know or add jargon to create distance. Experimenting with style often gets me closer to the substance.
Once a story is nearly finished, I read it at least once for substance only. Style is, like I said, a magic trick and can be beguiling for even the author. We can fall under the spell of our own words and stop paying attention to what’s actually on the page. To ensure I’m not publishing anything with which I disagree, I try to be blind to the style and check for meaning only. Of course my characters can say and do things I condemn, but as the author I want to stand behind the story’s message. Especially when I never intended to have a message and it seems to have come about on its own.
When planning WOMAN OF THE HOUR, to what extent did you disconnect substance from style? And when editing it?
I created each piece in this collection as its own universe. I’m telling fifty stories in fifty voices. My challenge was to sequence the stories in such a way that the voices could talk to one another and would pull readers from one story to the next.
I paid attention to substance first. Sometimes it was best to put two stories with similar themes back to back to create a thread. Other times I preferred to let readers jump to other topics before revisiting a theme.
Style determined the sequence even more. I listened for echoes and contrasts, eliminated unwanted iterations and brought desired ones to the forefront. A dreamy, interior piece with long flowing prose was, for example, best followed by an action story with clipped sentences. I’ve tried to create a flow that would keep readers engaged.
Should writers always avoid cliché? If not, could you quote for us a use of cliché that you admire?
Authors are at risk of falling into habits of language, and it’s a good practice to be on the alert for clichés. Similes and metaphors are meant to awaken a reader’s imagination and enrich their experience of the text. Overused comparisons are inert. They don’t evoke much anymore.
But there’s nothing wrong with smartly using clichés in dialogue. We can try to show the uniqueness of our characters in the way they speak, yet when we make our characters too clever or literary, they come across as fake. Most people use clichés in their speech. We can sometimes save a particularly stiff dialogue by using a cliché.
Similes and metaphors work best when they’re character- or story-specific, when they don’t seem invented by the author but come from circumstance or backstory.
“Smooth like butter,” usually seen as a cliché, works for me when the story is about a kitchen maid who often has her hands in the pastry dough.
I love originality. Miranda July should win a prize just for the comparisons she makes in All Fours. What might seem farfetched in other novels fits her strong, quirky character brilliantly. She writes: “False modesty is one of those things that’s hard to go easy on, like squirting whipped cream from a can.”
Yet I also deeply admire the simpler comparisons in Madeline Miller’s Circe, where she seems to take us back to the source of images we already know well. She writes: “All around me indrawn breaths hissed like water on hot rocks.” Considering that the protagonist Circe is witnessing Prometheus being led to his own personal hell, the sentence is perfection.
Freshness, virtuosity, wit, and that elusive stylistic quality known as charm: how might a writer whose prose lacks these qualities go about learning them?
By reading a lot and copying what speaks to you. I’m not advocating plagiarism. We should never publish the writing of other authors as our own. But we can learn from copying the work of writers we applaud, get a feel for their style, and educate ourselves on structure, variation, and word choice.
I used to keep a long list of interesting word combinations (adjectives and nouns & verbs and adverbs) that struck me as original. Whenever my own prose lacked vibrancy, I would browse my list to see what variation might enliven my writing.
For metaphors and similes, I did something similar. I never copied and pasted from the original, but I noticed what worked and why and then tried to incorporate an element of what I admired into my own work.
I also repurposed long sentence structures. I took out all the nouns and verbs and added my own while keeping the clauses the same. Nina Schuyler has a fantastic Substack newsletter in which she teaches authors to do something similar.
What do you understand by the term overwritten, and could you quote an example for us? Do you consciously avoid overwriting?
Many writers, me included, are insecure and feel the need to impress readers with an elaborate style: Look at me, I’m a literary author, see what I can do!
But when a story is overwritten, the prose draws attention to itself, which puts readers at a distance. There are also cases in which overwriting makes a scene incomprehensible.
I picked up a debut novel this year that I put aside after reading the first chapter. I won’t quote the book here because I believe it would be unkind to the author. The opening action sequence was full of beautiful words and complex sentences, but after reading it twice, I still wasn’t sure what was actually happening. I saw fragments of a fight in my mind yet couldn’t picture the actual scene and felt no connection to the protagonist. For me, the story lay dead on the page.
Prose should be as alluring as possible to have the strongest effect on readers, yet when a text is overwritten, it can ruin everything. For a story to work, readers must understand and feel what the characters (real or imaginary) are going through. Ultimately, that’s more important than style.
How close did you come to headbutting your keyboard in frustration at certain minuscule prose issues you were working on in WOMAN OF THE HOUR, and what were those issues?
How close I came to headbutting:
The issues: sly weasel words, the overuse of three-item list sentences (he came, he saw, and he conquered), run-on sentences that don’t mimic stream of consciousness and are just plain awkward, and the need to put the conclusion into words, as though I had no confidence that readers would make that extra step on their own.
Is this headbutting business why relatively few authors obsessively polish their writing?
Some authors may be lazy or unprepared to search for flaws in their own work. But I think more authors genuinely try yet remain blind to their weak spots. They only see what they think they’ve written and not what’s actually there.
I find it easier to write than to self-edit. Writing I can do on a plane, when I’m tired or drunk, when there’s noise. Editing requires more concentration and alertness. It’s a time-consuming process that kills the high we get from writing and forces us to examine a text on its own merits. The grand idea that gave birth to the story cannot hold it aloft: the words alone must do the trick.
The brevity of flash fiction makes repeated editing possible—one of the reasons I love this genre. In a story of 300 words, I can examine each word and decide whether it’s the right one or whether I need it at all. I often put all sentences on their own line to see which ones require improvement. Or I change the font to trick my brain into thinking I’m reading a text I’ve never seen before. It helps that I enjoy the polishing.
Do you see published prose adapting to the writing people read online, much of it written in the characterless bloggy style established twenty years ago? Has published prose adapted to the reduced attention spans that apparently result from heavy internet use?
I pay most attention to what pleases me, so my observations are skewed. I forget characterless writing and quickly put it aside, because there is plenty of gorgeous, personal, and poetic prose published everywhere.
I am a reviewer for the 100 Notable Small Press Books and requested multiple ARCs from publishers. Almost none were disappointing to me.
Here on Substack I can recommend Beth Kephart, Paul Crenshaw, Sari Botton, Laura Kennedy, Steve Edwards, Fiction Attic Press, and others.
Is there anything else you’d like to tell aspiring writers about prose style?
What worked for me is not going to help everyone, but I wouldn’t have been able to write WOMAN OF THE HOUR without the following three strategies:
Experimentation
Try many different styles, structures, voices, themes, and perspectives. Learn from the masters by mimicking what they do, then give things your own unique twist. See what feels good to you and what stories get most traction.
Defamiliarization
Go further than describing the world in which we live. Observe with so much detail that new meanings emerge. Zoom in so close that reality warps. Give readers fresh perspectives and exceed their expectations. Aim to unwrite the worlds we know and create ones that startle us.
Simplification
Write complex, layered, and strange texts, but always check in the end whether you can simplify the prose without sacrificing meaning. Simplicity carries weight.
We’re running a series on the best-written works of fiction of the 21st century to date, and the best-written works of nonfiction. Could you nominate one or more of each for us?
There are so many works who deserve to be mentioned, so this feels kind of random, but off the top of my head:
The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy for nonfiction.
Parade by Rachel Cusk for fiction.
I reread both works for the prose.
Best-written books of the century
Recommended Substacks
Thanks for reading and helping to support fine writing.
Sean McNulty
 | A guest post by
|