Rhythm in prose

[khiemtran]

I've been thinking a bit about rhythm lately, and particularly about how you can often tell at a glance that an unpublished writer is missing something. It's not something that I often see discussed, but it does seem to be something fundamental. Once you start looking for it, it's easy to spot just why one piece sounds "right" and another doesn't, and why you can often tell just from a single paragraph whether a writer has got it.

Here's a selection of opening paragraphs from books plucked from my shelf.

EXAMPLE 1: Swallowdale, Arthur Ransome, 1940

"Wild Cat Island in sight!" cried Roger, the ship's boy, who was keeping a look-out, wedged in before the mast, and finding that a year had made a lot of difference and that there was much less room for him in there with the anchor and ropes than there used to be the year before when he was only seven.

This is an especially interesting example because, even though the sentences are quite complex, the book was actually written for children. At first glance, it seems like an awful lot of effort for a child to read, but, once you look closer, it turns out to be not as complex as you might think.

Although the first (and only!) sentence is long, it is divided into short segments by the punctuation, especially at the start.

"Wild Cat Island in sight!"/ cried Roger,/ the ship's boy,/ who was keeping a look-out/, wedged in before the mast...

After the rhythm has been established, a natural beat begins to emerge, even as the segments get longer.

and finding THAT a year had MADE /a lot of diffeRENCE and that there WAS much less ROOM for HIM in there with the anchor and ROPES than there used to BE the year beFORE when he was only SEVen.

The way the paragraph is structured, with the rhythm established early, and then a long run-on sentence, helps to make the prose fly by as the reader gradually picks up speed and races on and on. Note that at the very end of the sentence, we're left slightly hanging, ready for the next.


EXAMPLE 2: Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer, 2001

Ho Chi Minh City in the summer. Sweltering by anyone's standards. Needless to say, Artemis Fowl would not have been willing to put up with such discomfort if something extremely important had not been at stake. Important to the plan.

Another children's book. This time shorter sentences, in keeping with the modern style. But, if you notice, they start off short and then get longer and longer, mirroring the same structure Arthur Ransome used in 1940.

It's not very elegant. But it is easier to read. Maybe children in 1940 were just a tiny bit more patient than they are today. Adults too.

EXAMPLE 3: American Gods, Neil Gaiman, 2001

Shadow had done three years in prison. He was big enough, and looked don't-fuck-with-me enough that his biggest problem was killing time. So he kept himself in shape, and taught himself coin tricks, and thought a lot about how much he loved his wife.

Another modern novel, this time for adults. Here we have a short sentence at the beginning, then a regular rhythm established early as the sentences get longer. Some of the pauses are marked by punctuation, others are just made by the natural pauses in speech. Try reading it out aloud and see where the pauses lie. Note how the last sentence uses a deliberate pattern to build up to the conclusion.

EXAMPLE 4: Anna Karenina, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude, 1995

Everything was upset in the Oblonsky's house. The wife had discovered an intrigue between her husband and their former French Governess, and declared that she was not continue to live under the same roof with him. This state of things had now lasted for three days, and not only the husband and wife but the rest of the family and the whole household suffered from it.

Okay, so this obviously isn't still in Tolstoy's original meter. I chose it because it was one of the more demanding books I had on my shelf in terms of keeping your eyes fixed on the page. The rhythm is slower here, but it is still audible. First we get a short sentence, then a longer, more flowing section, which can be divided up into segments, roughly equal sized, sometimes marked by punctuation and sometimes not and running faster and faster until a nice conclusion at the end.

It's interesting that all four of these disparate books share the same pattern. Use a relative short interval (maybe four to six syllables), establish the pattern early, then let your sentences expand and run on. There's a lot more to it than just this pattern of course, there are plenty of examples of unpublished prose, both my own and other peoples' where I could point at a particular part of a sentence and say "this just doesn't feel right" without really being able to express why.

I'd be very interested to what other people think about it, particularly if you're more familiar than I am with how rhythm and prosody are supposed to work, and whether there were ever simple guidelines for it that I simply managed to miss.

Comments

[zeborah]

Rhythm is important, both for opening scenes and (where I think about it more) for closing scenes and chapters and, eventually, the book.

One trick is something a linguistics lecturer mentioned once, which is that if you have two things (parallelism) it sort of carries the flow, but three things is final. "Here and there" vs "hook, line, and sinker". The Gaiman example above is great: the first sentence is a single clause; the second sentence has the He was big enough, and looked don't-fuck-with-me enough parallelism; and the third sentence lists three things he did.

When doing the three-things trick, there are two additional techniques. Gaiman in this example uses short-short-long, but you can also do long-long-short: She had hair the colour of beaten gold, eyes as clear and deep as a sapphire's blue, and buck teeth.

It would be cool to create a catalogue of all the tricks of rhythm that are out there, but a lot of work and I wouldn't know where to start thinking about how to classify them. Most of it I do by feel: that's not quite right; how about... hmm, no; how about... ugh, that's even worse; then maybe... yes, that's it!

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's a good point. I use all those patterns in my own writing, but here's an example of when I get it wrong..

The lowlanders were strangers indeed in the land of Kor. Their clothes, muddied and torn, were simply preposterous, made of fabric of all sorts of colours and not just the blue and white that normal people wore. They looked as different from each other as they did from the Kor, their faces alien in every way – eyes, noses, cheeks, mouths.

The last sentence clearly isn't final enough. If I was rewording it now, I could simply reverse the order of the last section.

The lowlanders were strangers indeed in the land of Kor. Their clothes, muddied and torn, were simply preposterous, made of fabric of all sorts of colours and not just the blue and white that normal people wore. They looked as different from each other as they did from the Kor - eyes, noses, cheeks, mouths, their faces alien in every way.

[zeborah]

Yes, or you could add a descriptor to the final item in the list:

eyes, noses, cheeks, and always-laughing mouths.

[tychist.livejournal.com]

It's also interesting to note that the overall rhythm of a book might reflect the same thing. Short first chapter introducing protagonist, short second chapter introducing parallel theme, longer third chapter getting into the meat of the story.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I haven't thought about that before.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I seem be much more aware of rhythm in prose than I used to be. When I was young I'd happily read anything, however clunky and my own fiction was clearly written but plodding.

I don't know whether I'd want to make a study of rhythm in fictional prose for fear of inducing the centipede problem, but I'm about to embark on the poetry part of the creative writing course and I think that doing the earlier introductory poetry course did improve the quality of my prose.

Interestingly, the first paragraph of the short story I'm working on (must finish it by Monday!) follows the pattern of your examples above. I am heartened!

In case anyone's interested, here it is.

Blood had soaked through the dressing again. Dave untied the bandage and eased the pad from the wound. It had stuck in several places where the blood had dried and clotted. Breath hissed through his teeth as he pulled it free.

The next paragraph has longer and more descriptive sentences, though the short opening scene ends with two quite short sentences.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Okay, this is interesting. Remember once I read something of yours and said it sounded awkward on the first reading and then okay afterwards? Well, reading this, I felt sure that the first sentence was a beat too long. When I read it the first time, it sounded clunky, but once I had the whole sentence in my head I could mentally speed it up as it rad to make it fit.

Deleting one syllable makes it read far more naturally for me:

Blood soaked through the dressing again. Dave untied the bandage and eased the pad from the wound. It had stuck in several places where the blood had dried and clotted. Breath hissed through his teeth as he pulled it free.

[zeborah]

But that changes the meaning!

Blood had soaked suggests that it's taken a period of time for it to happen - hours or more (which explains the clotting).

Blood soaked suggests it's doing the soaking right now, in a matter of seconds or possibly a minute or two - certainly not enough time to allow clotting.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

True, but it's the rhythm I'm mostly interested in here.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

[Back from shopping and yum cha now...]

I should point out that I wasn't trying to "correct" heleninwales's text, I was just observing that whatever it is that makes some prose sound right and some awkward, the original text fell just on the wrong side of that line (close enough that a single syllable deleted made it "right").

It's more than just syllables, of course. There's the stress of the words and the places the accents fall.

If you read it as "Blood soaked THROUGH the dressing AGAIN", then there's a nice short pulse that flows through it. But if you (I) read it cold, without that meter established first, it seems to run on too long without any rhythm established.

OTOH, something that breaks the first sentence into separate chunks sounds better to my ears.

Blood. Soaking through the dressing again. Dave untied the bandage and eased the pad from the wound.

Okay, that last example is in a rather idiosyncratic voice, but I'm sure you could think of other ways of breaking it up.

The next question, I guess, is whether this is just me, or whether other people notice it too.

[zeborah]

Right, I get what you were doing now.

For me, I read it naturally the first time as "BLOOD [beat] had SOAKED through the DRESSing aGAIN," though "BLOOD had soaked THROUGH [beat] the DRESSing aGAIN" is another possible reading. The [beat] isn't really a whole beat, it just feels like it a bit depending on which word in the sentence one stresses the most. Either way, it's a good... um, dactyl or trochee or something, I can never remember which is which.

So I do think about rhythm in this kind of way but I don't get the same judgements as you. Cf your

and finding THAT a year had MADE /a lot of diffeRENCE and that there WAS much less ROOM for HIM in there with the anchor and ROPES than there used to BE the year beFORE when he was only SEVen.

This makes no sense to me; you're putting stress on syllables that I'd never stress in contexts like that ("that", "was", "be") and syllables that I've never heard stressed at all ("diffeRENCE"). I'd read this sentence more like:

and FINDing that a YEAR had made a LOT of DIFFerence / and THAT there was MUCH less ROOM for him in THERE , with the ANCHor and ROPES , than there USED to be , the year beFORE , when he was ONly SEVen.

(/ being about a comma's worth of pause and , about half a comma's worth)

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I was thinking about this. As you say, it can't be Blood soaked through... because the verb tense is all wrong. It's something that's been going on for a while and keeps happening repeatedly. (So I can't lose the "again".)

Grammatically it could be: Blood was soaking through the dressing again, but that rhythm is too bouncy to my ear, which doesn't fit the story.

Perhaps it's my particular British accent? Perhaps if you write prose in one accent and it's read in another, it doesn't work so well?

The rhythm I would use to read the sentence aloud is exactly what you wrote out above with the heavy emphasis on BLOOD and SOAKED and with that infinitesimally small pause after the first word. Likewise I would stress the Ransome as per your version rather than khiemtran's.