Dear Purposeful Prose, I love using flowing, poetic language. It’s part of my style as a writer. Because of that, I like using a lot of figurative language: metaphors, similes, personification, alliteration, anything. My beta readers don’t like this kind of language as much as I do, and they say it comes off as “stilted” and that it takes them out of the story. I thought this had to do with taste, but I asked a friend who does like poetry, and she agreed. Now, I’m questioning

Dear Purposeful Prose,  For as long as I’ve been writing, I haven’t always given much thought to character descriptions. I feel like they’re never as important to my stories, so I allow the character’s actions to do the describing for me. Is this the wrong approach? Should I be doing something else? There should be balance between descriptions and story progression. They impact one another and, sometimes, coexist. One approach isn’t necessarily “wrong”. An evocative descripti

Dear Purposeful Prose,  I’m getting a lot of conflicting advice on this. I’m writing my first novel, and I promise it matters that I’m white and bisexual. My main character is based off of a friend of mine from Mexico, and she said that I could fictionalize her story if she could read it first. Two characters do drag and one of them is trans. I don’t fully understand the experiences of all of my characters, and I’m not claiming that I can, but I want to give good rep. I decid