:O fun!! i’ll definitely be posting some things on here later >:D

This is such a silly question (please don’t think I’m stupid!!), but…what is prose, exactly?? I know the basic idea of it, but I was wondering if someone who writes prose could go into a further explanation of it for me. I write poetry, and I don’t think I’ve ever tried prose, so I’m just wondering what differentiates the two. If that makes sense.

Anyways…yeah!

No, that’s a good question! The dictionary I use defines prose as “written or spoken language in its ordinary form, without metrical structure”

For example, you just talked in prose and most books are written in prose. I think that anything that doesn’t look like poetry or have a rhythm/meter is prose (the only exception I know of is Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell Tale Heart”–it seems like it should be prose, but I’ve seen it labeled as a poem before.)

This seems like a great place to post a snippet of writing (which I put in the old random thoughts thread since I couldn’t find the regular writing thread) so:

Far away, across the galaxy, a fesoale stood on a star, staring at a faraway blue dot, gazing at it in wonder. “Wow!” exclaimed the fesoale. “I want to go there!”

However, someone next to h3r, a kaethio, disagreed, saying, “No, Nyleve, that place must be dangerous! Who knows what kind of ferocious creatures live on that planet?”

“How would you know that they are dangerous, Sirrah?” Nyleve the fesoale countered. “I’m sure they are friendly! I’ll use my farsight to see what they are doing!”

“Ha, it’s not gonna go well,” muttered Sirrah.

Nyleve used h3r farsight and zoomed in on the blue planet, noticing that there were green patches throughout. Sh3 zoomed in closer and closer, through the atmosphere and clouds and mountains, until sh3 found a place filled with strange upright walking creatures with faces a variety of colors from beige to pink to brown. “Wow,” Nyleve gasped. “How peculiar. They walk…upright.”

“I shall see for myself!” Sirrah exclaimed, not believing it. Th37 used th31r farsight to confirm if what Nyleve was claiming was true. Sirrah found th3ms31f staring at a mass of upright walking creatures, pieces of what appeared to be seveal thrown into the air. “Indeed…how strange,” Sirrah agreed.

Suddenly, there was a gasp from Nyleve. Sirrah turned to Nyleve, turning off th31r farsight to ask, “What is it?”

“F-fire,” Nyleve explained between gasps. “They’re throwing fire into the air! In colors I have never seen before! It must be poison! And…there are fortresses made of glass, giant creatures with long gray noses, and a group of those strange upright creatures gathered around a fire like a cult, muttering something about summoning…story ideas?”

Sirrah looked worried, but also as if th37 expected this. “You see, this is why we never try to explore Earth.”

~
fesoale – An alien creature, similar to a gazelle in appearance
kaethio – Another alien creature, similar to a fox in appearance
sh3/h3r & th37/th3m/th31r/th3ms31f – alien pronouns with closest english translation

I wrote this one a little while ago — I hope you all enjoy 🙂 Feedback is appreciated! It’s called “May This Be a Memory.”

I took the recording yesterday. I don’t know if to record it was to take myself out of the moment, but I just knew it needed to be remembered. Too cold, in May, for an atmosphere of perfection, yet it managed to become so perfect that it will live, I hope, in my mind forever. But I didn’t know if it would, so I started recording. I had been watching the rain, had seen how darkly vibrant it turned the trees, this before-dusk storm. The clouds were rimmed with silver and gold, and you could see little bits of sky peeking through. The rain was coming down heavy and gentle, making ripples on the deck. The air didn’t smell like ozone, but did have a heavy, springy, deep scent to it – fresh in the way of a humid morning mixed with a mountain stream, but really neither of those. It was its own, cold and warm and wet at once. I took one photograph of the colors that showed up like wet laundry – a little darker and a little richer. I spoke to the rain, in Spanish and immediately ran into the living room to tell my mother – what might the neighbors think? – with a laugh. You were there, and I see myself even now describing it as I would a dream, but it was so deliciously real. You started playing your guitar – one of my favorites, a song that went, “Can I be close to you?”, backed by a sweet, calm little pattern that made me feel as though I was sitting in the woods around a fire. I, meanwhile, had been grabbing slippers and an umbrella that I ought to step outside and hear and see and smell the rain in person, and around me, without getting sick. Well, I put on the slippers and bade you come with me and we never stepped outside, just sat on the kitchen floor by the open door. It was cold, for May, and my flannel did virtually nothing, but I was so warmed by my own romantic notions and wild heart – and, of course, the house’s heat, that I could feel rushing out the door and hoped Mom wouldn’t chastise us about – that I just sat there with my knees snug against my chest, wrapping my arms around them. You played guitar and I stared out into the evening, thoughts and gaze flitting between everything. The rock on the railing-post, the ripples on the deck’s boards, my mother’s potted plants, the way the rain jumped up in places when it fell down, the lone evergreen in view that reminded me of Maine – of the place I felt most at home, except didn’t I have home right here? I was at peace, and it was one of the rare times I didn’t have to convince myself of contentment so I could keep pushing through the tedious slog. Strangely, I did not consider for much time the girl I loved, or the boy who’d left me, or any other of the million things that always seemed to take over my thoughts. Instead, my head was right where I was – you, your guitar, the rain, the kitchen floor, the cat who’d come to join us. I buried my slightly damp hands in her fur, harmonizing to another of about ten or a dozen songs that I normally tired of hearing. I marvelled at how well you could play, how well you could pick up an instrument just by picking up the instrument. I recalled, then, how you practiced any chance you got, morning, noon, and night, regardless of my griping or our mother’s urging you to come feed the pets, come get some dinner, go and get some sleep. I wondered if I could ever do such a thing, with such conviction, then brushed it aside and kept singing. The smell of clean, drying laundry wafted in, and I wondered again if I was dreaming. I said it to you with such a small and pure delight, as if trying not to break the delicate moment. As the rain tapered off, the cat wandered outside, and I followed to demand her return, but I saw her staring off into the garden from the edge of the stairs, and decided to leave her alone. “She’s contemplating,” I said, and if any animal could contemplate it would be a cat. You kept playing, and I kept singing and seeing and smelling and smiling, and I knew when Mom finally called us for dinner that I wouldn’t regret recording, even if it meant removing a part of myself from the moment, because it meant that I could always return. I took the recording yesterday. It was 23 minutes long.