"With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed"
About this Quote
Prose, in Morgan's framing, is less a container for story than a piece of field equipment: a tool designed to manage time. The line doesn’t romanticize writing; it treats it as logistics. “Incorporate more details” reads like a veteran’s respect for specifics that aren’t decorative but survival-grade - the exact angle of a road, the sound that means you’re late, the pause before something breaks. Detail, in this sense, is intelligence.
“Develop scenes” and “sustain the tension” point to prose’s defining advantage over the burst-fire of lyric compression: it can keep you inside an unfolding moment without releasing you. That’s a soldierly understanding of suspense, too. In combat (and in memory), tension isn’t a single spike; it’s duration. Prose can mimic that long, grinding stretch where nothing happens and everything might.
The quietly radical claim is the last one: “Prose has its own speed.” He’s arguing against the default assumption that speed belongs to action and slowness to reflection. Prose can accelerate through time, or it can throttle down to the granular, forcing the reader to inhabit each second. That control is power: the writer decides what the nervous system feels. Coming from a soldier, it also carries subtext about narrative authority. War reduces you to other people’s timelines - orders, clocks, waiting. Prose offers a counter-command: the ability to pace experience on your own terms, turning chaos into a sequence you can bear to look at.
“Develop scenes” and “sustain the tension” point to prose’s defining advantage over the burst-fire of lyric compression: it can keep you inside an unfolding moment without releasing you. That’s a soldierly understanding of suspense, too. In combat (and in memory), tension isn’t a single spike; it’s duration. Prose can mimic that long, grinding stretch where nothing happens and everything might.
The quietly radical claim is the last one: “Prose has its own speed.” He’s arguing against the default assumption that speed belongs to action and slowness to reflection. Prose can accelerate through time, or it can throttle down to the granular, forcing the reader to inhabit each second. That control is power: the writer decides what the nervous system feels. Coming from a soldier, it also carries subtext about narrative authority. War reduces you to other people’s timelines - orders, clocks, waiting. Prose offers a counter-command: the ability to pace experience on your own terms, turning chaos into a sequence you can bear to look at.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|
More Quotes by Robert
Add to List
