As a veteran of many writing workshops, critique groups and seminars, I am repeatedly reminded of the importance of character, plot and dialogue and of balancing these factors. And I have also been schooled in the importance of the “top story,” that is, the action that propels the narrative—what happens—and the “bottom story,” or the underlying theme that may be hinted at in the beginning and that sneaks up on the reader as the story progresses. I have also discovered another factor that is important in prose, but that only became clear to me through studying and writing poetry: the rhythm of the language.
That rhythm, which often goes undetected on the surface and of which the reader might be unconscious, is vitally important in the readers’ engagement in and enjoyment of the text.
Writing, especially nonfiction writing that needs to present facts, figures and dates, can come across as dry, and, as much as a reader might be interested in the subject matter, which motivated him or her to pick up the book or article in the first place, a reader can easily lose interest if the subject is presented in a dull, boring or tedious fashion. What engages the brain, on a subconscious level, is the music of the language: the rhythm, the beat, the flow. To develop a sensibility for this, I have found it useful to turn to other sources of literature, like fiction and poetry, and try to apply it to my nonfiction writing.
I attempted to communicate that principle through the words of a character in my own novel, Splintered River. In one scene, Vice President Reginald Taylor attempts to tutor police officer Mike Hargreaves in the fine art of riling up a crowd through his speeches. He hands Hargreaves a recording of a blues song and a speech by the Reverend Digston Barnes, a prominent civil rights leader, as examples to follow:
“ … You hear the notes, but do you hear the pauses … it’s not filling every audible space with sound … It lets you experience the feeling by letting your mind fill in the spaces between the notes … You become part of the song … That’s why it’s so seductive. If you pay attention to what you don’t hear, there’s music every second but half of it is created by you … Listen to the cadence, listen to the volume, listen to the pauses … That’s why he’s a ‘reverend;’ not because of what he says but because of how he says it … It’s how he works the cadence so the heart, the soul, the mind of the listener enters the rhythm. That’s hypnotic. It’s not just the message, Mike, it’s the medium … ”
This rhythm can be conveyed, for example, by the repetition of a two-syllable pattern that creates a beat, as in this passage from Anna Kavan’s novel Ice:
“An insane impatience for death was driving mankind to a second suicide …”
Note the repetitive use of two-syllable words and word combinations: insane, for death, driving, mankind, second. Breaking and re-starting the pattern is another skillful way that Kavan engages the reader’s brain, so that the rhythmic pattern itself does not become tedious: the three-syllable words impatience and suicide are just slight deviations that break the pattern just enough, but in a very gentle way. Add to that the alliteration of insane impatience and second suicide, and the passage becomes very pleasing to the reader.
Another example of this type of rhythm through word choice can be seen in Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay when he describes the crowd disembarking from the ferry into Manhattan in the WWII era:
“… taut-jawed men in stiff hats and suits and obsidian shoes, newspapers pinned under their arms; brusque, brick-lipped, hard-heeled women in floral dresses …”
There are some interesting things to note here. First, the bam-bam-bam, bam-bam-bam rhythm of “taut-jawed men in stiff hats” [emphasis mine], which is then followed with “and suits and obsidian shoes,” which starts to replicate the pattern but then disrupts it, similar to what we saw in Kavan’s piece. Then, there is the tight, hard, two-syllable pattern with brick-lipped, hard- heeled women that has three consecutive two-syllable words with hard consonants. The sentence ends with another set of two-syllable words, floral dresses, but this time the pattern is both replicated (consecutive two-syllable words) and broken (softer consonants).
Rhythms can be altered in subtle ways depending on what is being described. Note the different rhythmic patterns in how Graham Greene, in The Quiet American, has his protagonist describe a woman and a man in his life. First, the woman:
“I shut my eyes and she was again the same as she used to be: she was the hiss of steam, the clink of a cup, she was a certain hour of the night and the promise of rest.”
Note the repetition of the soft “s” sound, and the way he presents his list of attributes that forces you to pause after each one. Then note the following description of a male acquaintance:
“Democracy was another subject of his — he had pronounced and aggravating views on what the United States was doing for the world.”
Notice how the repetition of the hard consonants—d, p, g and v—add a different kind of rhythm, a harder, less flowing but more drum-like beat. It creates a different engagement in our impression of the man compared with that of the woman he describes.
A great example of how varying sentence length within a paragraph, as well as the suggestive use of certain words, can be found in Ocean Vuong’s autobiographical novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous:
“Because something in him knew she’d be there. That she was waiting. Because that’s what mothers do. They wait. They stand still until their children belong to someone else.”
Vuong skillfully alternates long and short sentences, and the short sentences, That she was waiting, and They wait, makes your mind pause and wait, prompting your brain to do what it is reading about. And then the finish with the longest sentence, which seems to represent a moving on, a flowing into the future, which is just what the passage is about.
While Vuong’s book is a love letter to his mother, Chuck Pahlaniuk’s Fight Club is a brutal depiction of a violent pastime among alienated young men, and the rhythm he adopts reflects that brutality. Take this passage for example:
“A rubber band.
You’re in Ireland.
You’re in fight club.
You’re at work.
You’re anywhere but here.”
The repetition of short sentences, one after another, and the repetition of certain words, creates a blunt intensity and forces the mind to pause at the end of each sentence. These pauses compel contemplation. The bluntness and directness of the sentences mimic the aggressive nature of the story.
Once you train yourself to notice rhythmic patterns in prose, you will become more conscious of the reasons some writing engages and pleases you, and the reasons you lose interest in and become fatigued by others. This awareness will seep into your brain and impel you to write passages that come alive not by what you are describing but by how you are describing it, and will, I hope, make writing a more enjoyable and enriching enterprise for you and for your readers.
E.H. Jacobs is a New England-based psychologist and writer. He is the author of the novels “Splintered River” and “Into a Wider Sky.” His work has appeared in Hippocampus Magazine, Penstricken, Santa Fe Literary Review, Permafrost Magazine, Hawaii Pacific Review, Streetlight Magazine, Bryant Literary Review and elsewhere. He was a finalist in the Derick Burleson Poetry and the Phil Heldrich Nonfiction Contests and was a nominee for the Nina Riggs Poetry Award. He has published two books on parenting, was a contributing book review editor for the American Journal of Psychotherapy and served on the clinical faculty at Harvard Medical School. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Vassar College and a Ph.D. from Temple University. His work can be seen at http://www.ehjacobsauthor.com.
