"With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed"
About this Quote
“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 |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Morgan, Robert. (2026, January 17). With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/with-prose-you-can-incorporate-more-details-75349/
Chicago Style
Morgan, Robert. "With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/with-prose-you-can-incorporate-more-details-75349/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/with-prose-you-can-incorporate-more-details-75349/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.



