Wordy vs. Lyrical

Wordy vs. Lyrical

With Frederick Meyer

Overview — 0:00:03

Two topics that feel related but aren’t quite—overwriting, and lyrical or flowing prose—and the way they connect to each other: lyrical ambition can make overwriting possible. The session works through a sequence of passages, from a young fantasy novelist to Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf to Joyce, looking at what separates writing that breathes from writing that suffocates, and what the most accomplished lyrical prose actually does.

The framing concept is economy rather than concision. Strunk & White’s Elements of Style was formative but its word—concision, from the Latin root for cut—implies a bias toward spare, minimal prose. Economy is more neutral: a rich dish with many ingredients, every one of which is singing, is just as economical as a spare dish with few. The preference isn’t for fewer words; it’s for every word doing something.

The Eragon Passage — 0:07:00

The first example is from Christopher Paolini’s Eragon—a fantasy series remarkable for having been written when the author was a teenager. The passage describes Saphira the dragon breathing, as observed by Eragon:

Saphira’s muscled sides expanded and contracted as the great bellows of her lungs forced air through her scaled nostrils. Eragon thought of the raging inferno that she could now summon at will and send roaring out of her maw.

The group’s immediate responses: it reads like an old dime-store novel; the second sentence is wordy; it doesn’t evoke any imagery beyond the physiology; it doesn’t move you. One participant felt she couldn’t breathe while reading it—ironically, as the dragon breathes.

Breaking down why:

Adjective monotony. Almost every noun is immediately preceded by an adjective—muscled sides, scaled nostrils, raging inferno. This creates a rhythmic heaviness at the sentence level, and more than that, everything has an exclamation mark in front of it. The effect is like being yelled at: there’s nowhere to relax.

Intensifiers masquerading as information. Raging inferno, great bellows—these adjectives don’t tell you something distinctive (it’s not a green inferno, or a poisonous one; it’s just raging). They turn up the volume rather than adding meaning. As Frederick put it, they’re mostly just exclamation marks.

Clichés as dead spots. Great bellows, raging inferno, summon at will are all phrases you’ve heard before without quite knowing when. They’re like being served a Snickers bar at a seven-course tasting menu: classic, yes, but you came to connect with this author’s mind, and these phrases belong to everyone. When you hit them, the immersion breaks.

The letter vs. the spirit of show-don’t-tell. The passage is trying to show: here’s what the dragon’s breathing is like, here’s what her fire is like. But show-don’t-tell doesn’t exist as an end in itself—its purpose is immersion, making readers feel what the character is feeling. Eragon is a boy gazing up at a dragon; we should feel like a boy gazing up at a dragon. What we get instead is a catalogue of physical details at such pitched intensity that there’s no room to drop in. The letter of show-don’t-tell; not the spirit.

A stripped-down alternative passage was shared—something like: Saphira breathed heavily, expelling air through her nostrils. Eragon sat watching her, marveling at her power. The group’s response: it breathes, but it’s gone 180 degrees in the other direction. The detail is cut so far that you lose Saphira entirely. Participants felt like they could get immersed if sentences like this were strung together—but they’d want scaled nostrils back, because that actually tells us something: it’s not a human nostril, it’s a dragon’s. The question is how you choose which details to keep and how to carry them without the exhausting relentlessness of the original. The right answer isn’t the stripped version; it’s something in between, where selected detail is chosen for what it contributes rather than piled on for intensity.

The Austen Passage — 0:25:04

The second passage is from Pride and Prejudice. Frederick admitted to mixed feelings about it and wanted the group’s honest response first.

The passage describes a dinner at Lady Catherine’s: the dinner was exceedingly handsome, all servants in attendance, the articles of plate promised by a certain character now fulfilled exactly as foretold—everything handsome and plentiful, Mr. Collins seated contentedly at the end of the table.

Responses: it’s wordy and dense by contemporary standards, but participants accepted that as the voice of the period. One offered a more engaged reading: the setting reveals character with remarkable economy for its style. The dinner was exceedingly handsome is interesting—a dinner described as handsome, a word normally reserved for people. All the servants are present, which signals status. The plates promised by a character arriving just so tells us something about that character’s relationship to power. Collins seated at the end of the table signals his subservience to Lady Catherine without saying so directly. There’s a very rich subtext operating through apparently decorative description. The reader who puts the pieces together is engaged.

Frederick’s own response: he admires it, but there’s something in the rhapsodic quality—the breathless wow, everything was as promised, the servants were delighted, life could furnish nothing greater—that forces him out as a modern reader. Not the density or the semicolons, but the mind of it: a sensibility that can render a dinner in those terms, without irony or complication, without a servant who finds the whole thing tedious, without Collins sitting at the end of the table feeling the complicated mix of gratitude and humiliation that would be more true to life.

This led into a broader observation: a lot of writers who read 18th and 19th century literature in school unconsciously dust off that old top hat when they start writing. They internalize this is what writing sounds like from sources that don’t quite translate to contemporary sensibilities. It’s not about grammar or craft—it’s about which era’s mind is operating in the prose. When you write from a pre-Freudian sensibility, where characters are simply miserable or simply delighted, where situations are externally good and psychologically good simultaneously—where there’s no complex PTSD for the orphan, no ambivalence in the rich man who adopted him—that can create writing that contemporary readers call purple or wordy, not because the sentences are technically wrong, but because the emotional register is foreign.

The Austen passage works because it is authentic to its context. The question for contemporary writers is whether they’re choosing that register intentionally or unconsciously borrowing it.

Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway — 0:44:27

Two passages from Mrs. Dalloway, taken almost at random.

The first passage describes dawn on the water—something like: the sea slightly creased, light beginning to move across it, the horizon dividing sea from sky, waves following one another beneath the surface perpetually.

Immediate responses: beautiful; biblical in rhythm and repetition; easy to read, easy on the spirit; the movement of water beautifully rendered. As a painter, one participant found it remarkable that the visual and lyrical could coincide so completely—graphically defined and lyrically evoked at once.

What Frederick noticed in close reading:

The structure enacts what it describes. The passage has a long comma-free section early on—difficult to read quickly because there’s no breathing room—and this is intentional. It gives you the darkness before dawn: formless, undifferentiated. Then the commas appear: one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, perpetually. The comma-to-comma rhythm is waves. You feel the undulation in the punctuation. The prose has risen to the level of poetry by finding ways in language to give the body the feeling of the rhythm of waves.

The structure also enacts the temporal movement of sunrise. There’s something that hasn’t yet happened, then something about to happen, then something happening—short then longer then fuller. It builds the way sunrise builds: quiet expectation, then gathering momentum, then everything at once.

The Genesis reference. The horizon dividing the sea from the sky is a paraphrase of Genesis 1—the original act of creation, the line set between water and sky. Woolf doesn’t call attention to it; it sits there quietly. But the effect is to suggest that what’s happening on this particular morning in this novel is what happens every morning, has always happened. It’s a small passage about a sunrise that quietly says: this is how things always are. Creation is happening all the time.

Perpetually. The word that closes the passage. An adverb—technically a red flag, and you might not expect a long lyrical sentence to end on one. But this was what the passage needed: to tell you that all this beauty, all this wave-rhythm, this daily Genesis, is not a particular moment. It’s always. Woolf goes beyond the rules of thumb when she needs to.

One rough patch. As if a cloth had wrinkles in it—a simile for the slightly creased surface of the sea. The group had divided reactions: a seamstress found it perfectly precise (specific wrinkles, tight creases, immediately visual); others found the phrasing slightly clumsy—not the image, but the words had wrinkles in it, which don’t quite have the lyricism of the surrounding prose. Frederick’s reading: as if a cloth were wrinkled might preserve the lyrical length while losing the ungainly ending. Small imperfection in a great passage.

The second passage, from the closing pages of the novel—Gabriel is at the window, watching snow fall on the Shannon:

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Note: Frederick attributed this to Mrs. Dalloway but it is in fact from Joyce’s “The Dead” (the closing line of Dubliners). The discussion treated it as a closing paragraph in its own right.

The passage is written in free indirect style—third person, but infused by the consciousness of the character. His soul swooned slowly is the kind of thought that only exists in a semiconscious mind; the circularity of falling faintly… faintly falling is how thought loops when you’re between sleep and waking.

The ending—upon all the living and the dead. This is what Frederick called the cosmic close: taking the power of the words that have just built up and applying them to everything. The snow isn’t falling on Gabriel’s town; it’s falling on all the living and all the dead. Whatever this feeling is—desolate, tender, inevitable—it isn’t local. It covers everything. And this, Frederick noted, is what both the Woolf passage and this one do at their endings. The Woolf closes with perpetually: the waves pursue each other perpetually, Genesis is happening perpetually, this beauty is always. Both paragraphs zoom out from the particular to the cosmic, and that’s where they get their hit of power.

It’s a hard thing to manufacture deliberately—you can’t decide to end every paragraph at the cosmic level. But the conditions that produce it: genuine engagement with what is being described, language that has been doing real work, and then a final gesture that opens outward rather than closing down.

What Separates These Passages — 0:57:29

A few things stand out across the whole session:

The Eragon passage tries to generate excitement through accumulation and intensification. The Woolf and Joyce passages generate feeling through precision and structural alignment between form and content. One approach trusts the reader to feel something if you show them enough; the other trusts that the right detail, in the right rhythmic context, will produce the feeling without needing to announce it.

Lyrical prose isn’t the opposite of economical prose. Mrs. Dalloway is not spare—it’s dense, long-sentenced, rhythmically intricate. But every element is working: the commas are doing temporal work, the Genesis reference is doing thematic work, perpetually is doing both, the waves-as-syntax is doing structural and sensory work simultaneously. There’s nothing that’s simply there for the sound of it, or to signal this is beautiful writing.

The Eragon passage wants to be beautiful. The Woolf passage is beautiful. The difference is in the relationship between the writer and the experience being described—whether the language is reaching toward something real or decorating something imagined.

And what makes the Joyce close so powerful—upon all the living and the dead—is that it earns its scale. By the time you arrive there, the whole weight of the passage, and of the story behind it, comes with it. That’s what Frederick called a phrase that should have become a cliché but didn’t: compact enough, true enough, original enough that it stays alive. A little nugget of gold still sitting in the California hills.