And then there are the uses of rhythm.
English speaks in the rhythm of stressed and unstressed syllables (DA da DA da da DA-da da DA da DA-da DA da-da is the rhythm- scape of that sentence). Speech is organised sound, a kind of irreg- ular, semantic music. Literature heightens artistically the natural rhythms of the spoken word.When you write a sentence, you make a storyscape and an ideascape, but you also make a soundscape; you try to shape an apt and elegant topography.
Music, Puccini wrote, is noise organised by wisdom. Writing, if you like, is noise slightly less organised by slightly more rational wisdom.
Poems are made of rhythm—of rhythm and rhyme (sometimes) and image. But this book is not the place for a treatise on iambs and trochees, spondees and pyrrhics, dactyls and anapests, bacchics and anti-bacchics and choriambs; on beat and metre; on pentameter and
hexameter; on feminine endings; on acrostic and villanelle and sestina. These are poetic forms and devices, large and small; and they all have to do with rhythm patterns. If you need to feel footsure among them, read about them in the books I recommend at the end. But no matter what you’re writing, write it by ear. Edit each sentence, and every clause within it, until its rhythm is right. Until then, you won’t have written the right sentence. Sound each one out until it moves just so: ‘All the fun’s in how you say a thing’, wrote Robert Frost. Can you hear it—DA da DA a DA da DAA da da? (A rhythm too metronomic for prose.)
But don’t strain for rhythm; let it come. It’s a thing you hear, not a thing you fabricate—in prose, at least. And in prose it must be loose; but it must be there. It should not rise and fall as regularly as this, for instance:
There was movement at the station, for the word had passed around That the colt from Old Regret had got away.
—AB Paterson, The Man from Snowy River More like this:
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
Hear the rhythm there: da da DA da da DA da DA da DA-da. I could even draw a graph of that sentence, its ups and downs. (The last stressed syllable would be a lower hill, for instance, than ‘lived’.)
I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills.
Karen Blixen’s sentence has a lilting rhythm, too. Reading her book
Out of Africa is largely an experience in topography and rhythm. This one goes: da DA da DA da DAA da da da da DA da-da DA DA.
Hear the prosey gait of Whitman’s line ‘Alone and light hearted I take to the open road’—da DA da da DA-da da DA da-da DA da DA.
Rhythm, Robert Hass has said, is more than a linguistic matter —it is deeply psychological. ‘Because rhythm has direct access to the unconscious, because it can hypnotize us, enter our bodies and make us move, it is a power. And power is political.’ Bad beat can kill your prose or get you killed; good beat can change the world.
‘It is not for me’, wrote TS Eliot, ‘but for the neurologists, to discover … why and how feeling and rhythm are related’. But they are, he asserted. And he’s right.
In the rhythm you’ll find the soul in the voice of the work; you’ll feel its politics and poetry. The writer amplifies the natural rhythms of speech and makes with them art that moves us. So, listen to your sentences as they make themselves out; listen even harder as you revise.
Writing is utterance—chant and rant and litany. So much of it depends upon rhythm.
T RY T H I S
1 Listen to the way people speak. Turn on the radio or go for a ride in the train or the bus. Or wait till your children come home. Listen to the actual sentences people shape. Write some of them down, as exactly as you can, and chart their rises and falls. Do this now. Do it often, and keep note in your journal of what you hear.
2 Specifically, write a two-hundred-word piece sparked by some talking you overhear. It could be a conversation, but it doesn’t have to be. It may just be a phrase.
Character
Capturing the character of a person is like capturing the character of a place. Be who they are. Inhabit them. Write, as it were, from inside their clothes, from inside their skin and mind and memory. Think in their words; move with their gait; sleep in their posture.
Do as little exposition—talking about your character—as you can get away with. Don’t, in other words, explain. And don’t have your cast thinking too long and hard about who they are and how they got that way and how the world perceives them. Have them mostly act and speak in character.
How we speak is who we are; so is how we act. Catch your character at his or her work, in solitude, in flagrante. And know how she speaks. Listen to her (or whoever in the real world resembles her); learn her lines. Ask yourself, when you write them down, if she is in them.
Become his inner life; be his childhood days and nights; be his broken adolescent heart.
Our houses are our souls made manifest. Our houses and the music we play in them, the food we cook (or not), the lighting we favour, the mess we make, the favourite chair, the rug.We can say as much about a person by describing their bedroom as we can by describing their face. Who we are is also where we are—and that, by the way, doesn’t stop at the front veranda. Which takes us back to landscape.
Give me all that, some family history, some enacted relation- ships, and, of course, some strong hints about how your woman looks and what she wears—and I will tell you pretty soon who she is. No need to do that for me.
T RY T H I S
1 Take a person you know. Write a couple of paragraphs in which you have them doing something you’ve seen them do
or you can imagine them doing—getting out of bed, driving a car, teaching a class, repairing their car, pulling on boots.
2 Have that person, or some other, speaking. Write down some actual sentences you’ve heard them utter, exactly as they’ve uttered them. Write it up as a dialogue if you like, or a scene in which the person has to say those things. 3 How does your mother-in-law speak; your father; your
best friend; your worst enemy; your second child? Write down some actual things they say.
4 Did you ever fall in love—or out of love—with someone because of the way he or she spoke, or one thing they said? Write about that.