Prose that cares as much about how something is said as what's being said, prioritizing language, style, and thematic depth.
Literary prose is writing where the language itself carries weight and meaning beyond simply moving the plot forward. It pays close attention to word choice, sentence rhythm, imagery, and thematic resonance. While commercial fiction often prioritizes pace and plot, literary prose slows down to explore ideas, emotions, and the texture of human experience through carefully crafted sentences.
Understanding literary prose helps you make conscious choices about your style rather than writing on autopilot. Even if you write genre fiction, knowing how to deploy literary techniques - a perfectly chosen metaphor, a sentence that mirrors its meaning in its rhythm - elevates your work. It's the difference between telling a story and making the reader feel it in their bones.
Morrison's prose operates on multiple registers at once - historical, mythic, and deeply personal - with sentences that feel carved rather than written.
Woolf dissolves the boundary between character thought and narration, creating prose that flows like consciousness itself.
Robinson finds profound meaning in ordinary Midwestern life through prose so careful and luminous that each sentence feels like a small prayer.
Literary doesn't mean obscure. Some of the most literary writers - Hemingway, Carver, Robinson - use simple language with extraordinary precision.
Beautiful sentences that don't serve the story are decoration, not craft. The best literary prose is inseparable from what it's saying.
Even in literary fiction, prose needs to breathe. Vary your intensity. A page of dense, poetic prose hits harder after a stretch of clean, direct sentences.
Take a paragraph from something you've written recently and rewrite it three times: once stripping it down to bare facts, once loading it with sensory imagery, and once focusing on your character's inner world. Compare all four versions. Which moments benefit from literary attention, and which work better lean?