Writing Vivid Prose
Make your writing vivid, by choosing words that invoke a rich sensory experience: colors, textures, flavors, sounds, smells, and sensations.
What’s the most incredible novel you’ve ever read?
Can you still imagine the colors and textures of that story? Can you still hear the soundscape of that world, or conjure up the memory of the aromas and flavors all around you, as you followed your favorite characters on their wildest adventures?
Vivid writing always invokes a sensory experience, summoning a world of images, sounds, smells, flavors and textures, and bringing the reader viscerally into the hypnotic trance of the story.
For example, here’s a paragraph from of Max Gladstone’s latest novel, Ruin of Angels, with all the most vivid words highlighted:
Each of the highlighted words in this paragraph has a certain degree of vividness — some words are, of course, more vivid than others — making the sensory regions of your brain light up with excitement!
When you read a paragraph of prose like this… rich with vivid imagery and suggestive of so many intense sensory experiences, the theater of your mind comes to life and transports you viscerally into the world of the story.
Here at Shaxpir, our entire goal is to help writers tell better stories, so we want to help every author make their writing more vivid.
So we developed a suite of cutting-edge linguistic algorithms and applied it to our library of literature, analyzing more than a half a billion words of prose. We analyzed more than 5,000 different novels, by more than 2,800 different authors, and used that analysis to create a dictionary of more than 10,000 vivid sensory words.
Next, we calculated a numerical score for each of those words (on a scale of 1 to 10), depending on the intensity of the sensory experience it invokes. Here’s a tiny sample of 160 words, extracted from the full vividness lexicon, along with each of their intensity scores:
Typical color-words (like “black” or “red” or “blue”) have lower intensity scores, while more unusual color-words (like “honey-colored” or “periwinkle” or “cyan”) have higher intensity scores. You’ll also see scores for food items, body parts, natural phenomena, household goods, architectural features, etc, etc, etc. Basically, any word that tickles your senses…
The scores of all 10,000 words in the lexicon are based on millions of contextual observations from our gigantic library of literary prose. And as we continue adding more and more books to our library, over time, our linguistic algorithms get smarter and smarter.
For each novel in our library, we calculate its average vividness, by adding up the sum of all the scores for all the vivid words in the novel, and then dividing by the total number of words in the book. Novels with more vivid words (and with more intense vivid words!) end up with a higher average vividness score.
Finally, we rank every book in the library by its average vividness score, and then published the rankings on the free public Prosecraft.io website, here:
prosecraft.io/analysis/vividness/percentile
As you can see, the average vividness of our library of novels is distributed according to a typical bell curve. You can click around on the top chart to see which novels have average vividness (at the 50th percentile) or which novels have an unusually high degree of vividness (for example, at the 99th percentile.)
One of the most vivid books in our library, in the first row of our 99th percentile results, is A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, by George R. R. Martin. If you click on its link, you’ll see a high-level linguistic summary, which includes the average vividness score for this novel:
But if you scroll down a little bit, you’ll also see a set of text-clippings, which include the page of the book with the highest intensity of vivid words (as well as the greatest density of passive voice usage). Vivid words are highlighted in shades of red (while passive voice is highlighted in blue, and adverbs are highlighted in yellow):
By exploring these pages, you can see how your own favorite authors use vivid sensory language to create a rich detailed world within their stories. Prosecraft makes it possible for any author to research the prose metrics of the authors they admire, and use those metrics to inform the craftsmanship of the prose in their own stories.
Analyze your own writing.
The Prosecraft database is a goldmine of useful information for any working author. But the real magic comes from being able to apply these metrics to your own writing.
The latest version of our professional writing platform Shaxpir 4: Pro lets you apply each of these kinds of linguistic analysis to your own writing, in real-time as you write.
You can use our linguistic highlighting engine to show you exactly which words make your writing the most vivid, and you can use the linguistics panel to show you a high-level summary of your language metrics, telling you how your writing stacks up, compared with the rankings of the books in the Prosecraft library.
These features are only available in Shaxpir 4: Pro, so if you haven’t tried Shaxpir yet, now is the perfect time to get started with a free 30-day trial.
