What's more important, prose or plot?

I've been thinking about this lately, and I wanted to hear what you all think. What's more important, the story itself or the way it's presented to you?

In my personal opinion, I believe plot is more important than the prose, although the latter should not be sacrificed for the former's sake. If a good plot is a delicious cake, then prose is its frosting and decoration; It is meant to give the story its identity.

It's not like they're on some sort of opposite side of the spectrum. It depends on who you talk to and what they want.

Well, I guess the OP is trying to determine where his focus should lie? I understand they're not mutually exclusive, but the amount of effort required for both "mind-blowing prose" + "awesome story" will definitely be more than "decent prose" + "awesome story".

edited 28th Sep '14 11:32:36 PM by Elfhunter

It's not like you ever actually sacrifice one for the other is it? They're completely different skills. Coming up with good plots requires you to have good ideas and to sort between and arrange those ideas in a good way. Writing good prose is more of a craft, requiring you to have experience writing and to put in effort when you write.

I'd say prose, though. A nonsensical but well-written book is hella more enjoyable than the opposite.

...I seriously just saw this exact topic on /r/fantasywriters.

To me, presentation plays pretty heavily into how we enjoy fiction. Presentation has the power to turn Cliche Storms palatable or make fresh, inventive material offputting. Keeping with the cake analogy, I wouldn't call good prose the icing on the cake, rather, I'd call it the salt you're supposed to add to cake batter that elevates the flavor of all of the other ingredients. If your prose sucks, ergo, you leave the salt out, the whole piece tastes flat.

I've put useless ranting in spoilers. Also, I feel like I'm being argumentative, so just let me know if I'm not supposed to be doing what I'm doing.

Well, I just went through that post and it looks the majority are on my side. Yay! Although its weird, the people arguing for prose are using uneven scales. The guy who writes good prose "Knows how to tell a good story" and "Knows what he has to work on" while they make it seem like the guy who's good at plot is the literary equivalent of Robin Williams in Flubber.

Well, now I need to change the analogy a little then. I'll call the overall story a cake, the batter is the plot and the salt is the prose. But what's the frosting going to be? The cover art? The cinematography of the eventual movie adaptation?

Anyway, with that analogy established, yes, I agree with you on the role of salt in the cake...because it seems like you and I are saying the same thing with it. The salt elevates the flavor of all the other ingredients. I'm not sure the best quality, high iodine, triple-refined salt is going to help the cake if the batter tastes like wet mud.

edited 29th Sep '14 10:17:47 AM by Elfhunter

Plot for me, but I'm coming from pretty far on the beige side in the beige-versus-purple prose debate, so that should be taken with a grain of salt. At any rate, I don't think either is as important as characterization.

I will forgive more sins in the prose in the service of a plot I appreciate then I will forgive sins of plot in the service of prose I appreciate. Far more.

I've never met anyone this wasn't true of, even when they claimed good prose was more important.

Given that I plan on publishing most of my work in comic form, prose would be replaced by "art". Even still, plot takes priority, though not by much.

Just pointing out that 'beige' prose can still take plenty of work, so it's not necessarily between purple prose and beige. The point of beige prose as I understand it is usually to be unintrusive and transparent so the reader is focusing on the picture you're painting rather than the fact that it's words on a page that they're reading. To be immersive.

And both are of course different from just plain bad writing... which I would say is unintentionally unintelligible and doesn't support what the writer is trying to do.

So my answer, I suppose, depends on how bad the prose is. I like ideas in my writing, so I'll easily read a pulpy and relatively unrefined style if it's got good ideas behind it. But if it actually gets in the way? Yeah. Bad.

I think it really depends on the nature of the story you are writing. And I think someone touched on this, but I really don't think you can separate one from the other if you want your story to be worth reading.

In my own writing I find myself more "prose-focused" because I think that the way you say something can impact the conclusions that a reader gets about a certain character or scene. I liked the analogy of prose acting as the "salt" for food. I see prose more as herbs and spices, though, in that you can get a lot of variation for a particular food (e.g. tumeric chicken as opposed to thyme chicken...very different!). There are a lot of similar plots out there, but the ways they are written distinguish them from one another.

I would say that normally plot is far more important, but it depends on the type of story. If the whole point of the story was to be nonsensical, then prose may be more important.

We need to find a better way to describe the good kind of Purple Prose, because it's certainly not a bad thing. Beige Prose can work awesomely as well. And then there's prose-poetry, which often has the brevity of beige-prose with the imagery/elevation of purple-prose.

Barring the obvious "both are important," I'd say prose is narrowly more important than plot. It doesn't do anything to have a fantastic, intriguing plot if you don't know how to tell it, or at least don't have the skills to do so. To use fanfiction:

There's a pan-fandom plot of "3-5 Times A Character Did _____, and 1 Time S/He Didn't." That is literally the entire story summed up in one sentence, for hundreds if not thousands of fanfiction works. However, I love that shit because you can tell it at least eighty different ways, to whatever length you want, depending on the character and setting.

Therefore, prose is narrowly more important than plot.

Plot is generally more important, plot is harder to change whereas prose can be easily edited and improved later.

I'd go with plot being the more important of two extremely important things.

I've canned a lot of stories I was working on because the plot wasn't working out, all I've ever done when my prose didn't satisfy me is: "edit".

I also find plot to be the more difficult of the two. I have to spend more effort to come up with an engaging plot than I require to write prose with which I'm satisfied.

Define important first. As it stands, I'd say that it depends which one you're worse at, at the moment, to the point that it would lose you readers. Some would say, "Ooh, the writing style is so pretty but nothing is happening." Others would say, "I like where this is going, it could be interesting, but I can't stand the writing style anymore."

Others still might think it's all right but has no overarching themes and therefore isn't stimulating or worth their attention.

If a character is too annoying to bear reading with, is that because of the plotless purposelessness of their presence in the story, or is it because of prose that makes them out as annoying? If characterization is a different aspect entirely, then maybe what we call prose or plot could have a similarly mutable nature depending on the context.

edited 9th Apr '15 1:34:25 AM by Faemonic

I'm a very detail-oriented thinker so I tend to notice plot more than prose, but both are needed for a truly enjoyable experience. And with the rise of objectively bad but extremely popular books, it is shown that sometimes prose is more important than plot to certain parties.

Obviously, we all like stories with good plot and good prose.

A story with good prose and little to no plot can still be interesting, depending on the storytelling. As can a story with a nonsensical or headbanger plot. They may or may not be worth rereading.

A story with an amazing plot and poor prose might be worth the effort. Personally, I find it extremely hard to read stories like this, because I have a strong Grammar Nazi streak, and I keep mentally stumbling when I hit misspellings, dropped punctuation, and poor phrasing.

It's also easier to fix poor prose than poor plot; the former can be done with a few simple changes, the latter can often require taking entire chapters and setting them on fire.

Generally speaking I find that I prefer a good plot with average prose to good prose and an average plot.

I'd say plot. Because I've forced myself to read through poorly written stories just because the characters and plot were interesting and I wanted to see how it ended.

Judging by the comments so far, I'd say it depends not just on what you are writing, but on the preferences of individual readers as well. If you let either one suffer, you will be losing a portion of your audience.

As for me, I think the plot needs to be good, and the prose needs to not be bad. In other words, as long as the prose isn't distracting me from the story, it's fine, but if the plot isn't good, I may start to lose interest and move on.