<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"  Alyssa could barely keep up, her heart gasping for circulation; yet she felt the usual pleasure, looking Josh in the face: his dimples, the constant wattage of his smile, his air of couldn&amp;#039;t-be-better. Why he wrote the last line: This sentence comes from my new novel, More Than It Hurts You, which is hitting the shelves in May. It&amp;#039;s about Munchausen by Proxy -- the syndrome by which parents hurt their own kids -- and how a husband has no idea what his wife is capable of. I worked on this for a long time. I always try to make sure my prose has as little of what I call &amp;quot;stage-direction&amp;quot; writing in it as possible. This gets me into a lot of scrapes at the keyboard. How do you know if what you are writing qualifies as good prose? Of course, you want it to have &amp;quot;style&amp;quot; (which I tried to provide in the bit: &amp;quot;her heart gasping for circulation&amp;quot;). But, first and most important, good prose -- unlike stage direction -- should give information about the character. When you&amp;#039;re really cooking, you do this by providing specificity and abundance of detail.  An ex-professor of mine, Lee K. Abbott, had a system. He&amp;#039;d ask each sentence the question: &amp;quot;So what?&amp;quot; If the answer revealed something about the character, it&amp;#039;s a good bet that he&amp;#039;d written an effective bit of prose. For example, He lit the cigarette tells you nothing. It&amp;#039;s a stop-gap line on the page; if you ask of it &amp;quot;Well, so?&amp;quot; -- you&amp;#039;d get very little of note in response. But if the sentence were something like: He put the cigarette lovingly in his mouth, hoping to recapture the first smoke he shared with his mother -- now you&amp;#039;d have something.  Stage direction, on the other hand, tells us little about character (&amp;quot;They walked quickly across the room&amp;quot;; &amp;quot;He was handsome,&amp;quot; etc.). That&amp;#039;s not to say simple, declarative writing can&amp;#039;t be very effective, too.  One line I&amp;#039;ve always remembered, and that Abbott pointed out to me, is: &amp;quot;She looked so good it made me want to hit her with a hammer,&amp;quot; from The Postman Always Rings Twice. While this is not Nabokov, it does tell the reader more than &amp;quot;She looked good&amp;quot; would. What it reveals may be unpleasant, it may tell you that the character is demented, but it gets information out in an interesting, useful way. And that is, finally, is the most important function that prose serves: it helps in the revelation of character, which is the main job of all fiction.  About the author: Darin Strauss is the author of the international bestseller Chang and Eng, and the New York Times Notable Book The Real McCoy. He teaches writing at New York University and was awarded a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction writing. As told to Anya Yurchyshyn "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a3484/lastline092507/>