21.21: Rhythm and Words

Jace Medical Warning

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1:26Apollo gives you access to over 210 million contacts and AI that handles all your busy work, finding leads, drafting emails, and even prioritizing your day. So stop paying for five different sales tools when one does it all. Visit Apollo.io and sign up free today. Most people don't realize how much their personal information is being bought and sold every day. Data brokers are making billions, pulling details about you from public records and the internet, and then packaging and selling it, usually without your consent. That's how your information lands in the hands of scammers, spammers, even stalkers.

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2:32Aura gives you all of it, together, at the same price competitors charge for just one service. Start your free trial today at aura.com slash remove. Protect yourself now at aura.com slash remove.

Writing Excuses Introduction

2:43This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com slash writingexcuses. Season 21, episode 21.

3:03This is Writing Excuses. Rhythm and Words. Tools, not rules. For writers, by writers. I'm Mary Robinette. I'm Dong Wan. I'm Erin. And I'm Howard.

Rhythm in Writing

3:14Today, we're going to kind of continue our conversation from last week about sequencing, where we got kind of micro at the end, by talking about rhythm, which is a form of sequencing, honestly. And as somebody who loves music, I love thinking about sequence, like how rhythm works and how rhythm creates like a sense of movement through a piece. And I'm curious, like how much I think a lot about the rhythm of sentences, like obsessively so. I will change words over and over and over again to get the right emphasis, to find a word that is like, this means big, but I also want a three-syllable word with the emphasis on the second syllable so that the way that I rhythmically wrote it is the way that other people read it.

4:02So my question to you is, am I just controlling or do other people do this too? No, I think you're absolutely spot on to be paying attention and interested in that. I think a real failure, say, to people who are trying to write elevated prose, quote unquote, is they reach for the bigger, more complicated, more flowery language, right? They make it a language thing versus or a descriptive thing. They're just going to go all in on talking about, you know, the architectural details of this mansion or whatever it is.

4:34When one of the main ways to grab your reader and make something feel really beautiful, put us in an emotional state where we really appreciate the thing is to use musicality and rhythm, right? Is to use breaths and pause and word length to pull us through and give us something that feels beautiful. I think a lot about the rhythm and I also think a lot about the syllable sounds. I mean, when you're reading silently to yourself, I suppose it could be argued that there's no noise, but those syllables still have, they still have sounds.

5:13You can have a, you know, a jumping marsupial or you can have a kangaroo and kangaroo is the K and the G just kind of make it a funny word in the same way that jackalope is kind of a funny word. I don't know why, I just know that when I am looking for, when I am looking for the right rhythm to make a point, I am also looking for the right sounds to go with that rhythm in order to make the point even better.

5:51I also think about it as well, going back to what you were saying, I think the issues that a lot of people think more is better and it's not always partly is coming out of puppetry and art. But I think about the negative spaces, that there's a thing with puppets where we have a zero position, the spot that they return to. And, and then the movement comes out from that spot.

6:23So I tend to think about that a little bit on the page about what is sort of the zero position, what's the resting state of this prose, the natural sentence length for this thing. And then using my repetition, not my repetition, my rhythm to break from that. So I'll go into a sentence that's much longer than that for one type of emphasis or a sentence that's much shorter, a paragraph that's much shorter. And likewise, Erin, I also will, will massage the words so that the stress falls into the right spot.

6:59Um, in part because when I'm narrating, I'm sometimes narrating other people's stuff and they have accidental couplets in their fiction. And I, it's like trying to fix that as a narrator is so hard and it's drawing attention often to things that you just don't want attention drawn to. It's just a hundred percent an accident. Accidental couplets in their fiction? Oh my goodness. I can see how that causes friction.

7:26Good Lord.

7:29Uh, anybody want a peanut?

Negative Space in Writing

7:32One thing I think about a lot when it comes to this as well is, um, negative space, right? There's this Japanese concept of ma, which is sort of the space around the thing or the, considering the negative space as its own thing that should be considered and has value and weight in, in, um, a scene. And this can be applied in a number of ways, both in terms of like thinking about what you're not describing, think about where the breaths are in your sentence. And then literally think about how it looks on the page, right?

8:03One thing I see a lot is really dense blocks of text. If you have like, um, an entire paragraph that's just dense description with no line breaks, with no paragraph breaks, it's very hard to ingest, right? Um, my, one of my deep interests and my sort of academic background is in British modernism. It's like one of my favorite periods in literature. I'm endlessly fascinated with the modernists. They, one of the things they really did was start to play with that negative space in very deliberate ways.

8:34You'll have, I mean, Ulysses famous, or James Joyce famously in his books, will have entire pages that are just one sentence with no breaks, which was designed to create a very deliberate emotional effect in the reader, which is one that is a state of complete overwhelm and being subsumed in the interior monologue of a character. Because there are no breaths in it, it is incredibly difficult to read and overwhelming to try and process what he is talking about because there's no space for breath in it, right?

9:07And so when you think about how to use that negative space, when you think about sort of like poets who started to break with traditional line structure and sort of give that blank space for half of a line for, you know, breaking in the middle of a word, those kind of things, you'll start to sort of see the potential of using the physicality of the page, using those points where you can take a breath as active things that you are including in your fiction. I'm glad that you talked about the visual aspect of the negative space on the page, because even if you're not doing poetry or you're not doing something that's experimental, you can still sort of get a sense of the rhythm of your piece by just backing the view away.

9:54Like you can set up your word processor so you can see multiple pages all at once. And if you, you look at it and there's like a, there's a certain sameness to it, to your paragraphs and to, then you're using the same rhythm over and over again. There are times that's actually a hundred percent appropriate, but as we've talked about with other forms of pacing, when you're rhythmically all the same, it can become fatiguing without anyone knowing why it is fatiguing. A very simple example. It makes me insane when somebody sends me jacket copy, that is one big paragraph, right? Or if you're writing a query letter, here's my biggest query letter pitch or my pitch sort of note for you, right?

10:39The simple tip, make sure no paragraph is longer than three sentences. Make sure each paragraph is short and to the point and give me negative space so that I can read it quickly and process it quickly. If you give me one long paragraph, it's so hard to process it when you're trying to go fast as one is when reading jacket copy, when reading a pitch. And I am just going to flag that this is definitely a tool for submitting to a specific agent and that other agents may have different preferences.

11:12Always. They are wrong and they feel bad about it. There are circumstances in which the words that you put on the page, you have 100% control over the way they flow, where the line feeds are, where the breaks are. The most common case of this is squarely in my wheelhouse, and that's in comics, a comic dialogue bubble.

11:44I find that most of the skills that I have for wordsmithing something, for massaging the text grew out of necessity because when I'm trying to put things in the bubble, I want to be able to break the words so that they will easily form an ellipse or be contained by an ellipse or be, you know, if they're up in a corner, that they will be kind of an elliptical shape on one edge and a corner shape on the other.

12:18And that there won't be rivers and valleys, you know, the spaces between the words, you won't have a stack of O's or E's or I's right on top of each other. And this seems like a really silly thing for a writer to need to think about, but there are definitely circumstances in which you realize that what you've written won't work because the way it is being printed on the page, it is full of rivers and valleys and stacked letters.

12:48Which creates a distraction and it will no longer be read the way it would be spoken if you didn't see it on the page.

Rhythm in Comics

12:58You know, I find it really interesting that we've been talking about these like blocks and blocks of text on the page because I recently went to a writing group and somebody noted that one of my sentences was 87 words long. Hell yeah, let's go. And I'm going to explain why that's totally OK using poetry after the break. The cruise ship sailing us to Alaska this summer is completely sold out, except for the cabins we've reserved for Writing Excuses attendees.

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14:10Again, that's writingexcuses.com slash retreats. Thanks to HomeServe for sponsoring this episode. The little kids were giggling downstairs and I heard something about catching raindrops. Sure enough, the ceiling was slowly dripping water and the kids were delighted. I was not. An upstairs toilet had overflowed. The floor and ceiling both needed repairs, but the kids were okay despite having caught raindrops in their mouths.

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17:33A warning from Jace Medical. Even if the war stops, the shortages won't. Because ships move slowly, the U.S. has been running on oil that set sail months ago. But that buffer is running out. Asia is already feeling it. Europe is feeling it. Africa is feeling it. Demand is increasing as supply tightens, and it's what's been raising your power bill and gas prices. But those last ships to the U.S. just arrived, and even if things stabilize, the ripple effects will last much, much longer.

18:04Because oil doesn't just power your car. It powers the systems that make and deliver your medications. And when supply slows, shortages begin. The difference between panic and peace is preparation with Jace. The Jace case is a doctor-prescribed emergency supply of essential medications and prescription antibiotics delivered right to your door so you're ready before you need it. No waiting, no scrambling, just control.

18:31Get your Jace case today at Jace.com. Tired of juggling sales tools or spending hours on prospecting just to book a few meetings? Meet Apollo, the go-to-market platform for finding leads, connecting with buyers, and closing deals, all in one place. Apollo gives you access to over 210 million contacts, and AI that handles all your busy work, finding leads, drafting emails, and even prioritizing your day. So stop paying for five different sales tools when one does it all. Visit Apollo.io and sign up free today.

Poetic Rhythm in Prose

19:02As promised, one of the reasons that I love rhythm is that I love long blocks of sentences. I want to beat you over the head with large blocks and large blocks on the page. And so one of the ways that I do this... Once again, I feel like I need to not be sitting next to Erin anymore. I feel very threatened.

19:23Yes, mission accomplished. And one of the ways I do this is if you can create a rhythm in the way in which somebody will read something. This is why I think so much about stress. It sort of, you don't notice it. It's sort of the way that, like, I feel like sometimes I'm just putting my reader on a horse and then just, like, hitting the horse on the butt. Is that how you get horses to go? Yeah. And then, like, and they're just galloping off. And when you're galloping on a horse, something I haven't done since I was three, but I'm going to assume there's some sort of rhythm.

19:53When were you galloping on a horse when you were three? Three is so young to be galloping on a horse. Anyways, continue. It was Mississippi. Anyway.

20:01It's true. But anyway, so what you're doing is the horse has some sort of rhythm and it's just carrying you along. Yes. So I want my story to be your horse. That sounds weird. And so I like to think about, like, some of the things that poets use, which are, like, the actual, like, if you ever talk to poets, they'll explain, like, this is in, like, trochaic foot or iambic pentameter or all these other things. And I'm going to share with you some of my favorites because I want to. Okay, so iambes, you know iambes from Shakespeare, that's da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, which is, you know, my favorite two examples of this are, but soft what light through yonder window breaks.

20:41But also, thank God Almighty, we are free at last. And I think there's something about them. I don't know. Tell me if you think this is true. That, like, makes you feel there's something about them that is a lean in because the emphasis is on the second syllable and because it's a double, which is, like, a lot of, like, just like a horse. Da-dum, da-dum. Da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum.

21:29Da-dum, da-dum, da-dum. Da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum. Speaking of, actually, I'm going to skip ahead to aspandi, which is where both have the same, so as opposed to emphasis being on the front, which I'll get back to, or emphasis being on the back, it's like, everything is the same. it's paired but it's like there's no emphasis one way or the other and my favorite example of this

21:59is that butt was stuffed so the end of sir mix a lot because he's doing all this other rhythm but then he stops and he uses equal emphasis because all of those words are important and also because it draws attention much like the butt does to sir mix a lot uh to that section of the of the rhythm and it brings it to a screeching halt in that moment and we have to take a beat to process it and then it picks up again right like yeah exactly yeah as opposed to if it had all been straight

22:32emphasis all the way through yeah you would have not who would have cared yeah who would have noticed that but stuffed or unstuffed wow i'm sorry i'm taking us off the we're on a horse now are we in mississippi or is the horse name we somehow got from james joyce to sir mix a lot and uh i'm delighted yeah and then the other one the last sort of like double that i really like is the one where your emphasis is first so dadum dadum dadum this is the po uh once upon i don't

23:08once upon a midnight jury while i what pondered weak and weary um and so it's also used taylor swift loves it nice to meet you where you've been i like there's a lot taylor swift often uses those things because i think it i don't know it makes it pop more yeah it's in your face a little more and it feels a little more i don't know it's like the troteic tetrameter is that the teenage mutant ninja turtles is that the the same oh yeah i like that it is bubble bubble toil and trouble where the accent

23:42is first double double double double yeah i mean bubble bubble i guess if you're doing double bubble chewing gum yeah um but shakespeare there was a there's a great tv show called um slings and arrows i think they only had three seasons and it's following a theater company but in one of the episodes they're doing leer and this older shakespearean actor um is railing at one of the younger actors who is trying to ignore the meter and he's like no the meter tells you where it's

24:15where it is important the shakespeare would put the emphasis on the important words um and you know but soft you know but is not important but soft what light and and that that is kind of an interesting thing when you're thinking about your own prose where do you want to throw the emphasis are and and when do you want to break that rhythm to draw people's attention to it tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow it's it are the ands important or is the tomorrow right and how you

24:46read the scanning on that changes the meaning of the line wildly right like yeah there's also a really fantastic hilarious thing where different where there's an actor who's attempting to do uh hamlet and different famous people who have played hamlet come out and give him a line read on to be or not to be and each of them picks a different word to emphasize um which changes the meaning and that's something that's very easy to do in spoken word but on the page when you're playing

25:18with rhythm not only are you looking at these these beats but you're also looking at italics as a tool which you can use or or wildly misuse it is worth sitting down with a breakdown of a kendrick lamar song and just see how he uses rhythm to shift your attention and your emotional state when he moves from doubles to triplets when he moves back you know like the the number the complexity of what he's doing with rhythm same with eminem you know if you go and look in at the complete breakdown of how they're

25:49using rhythm when they're using twos when they're using threes things like that can be so useful for understanding the musicality of prose right once you i mean it sounds like we're getting you know we're talking shakespeare we're talking literature we're talking music like all these different things that may feel far from trying to write contemporary science fiction or fantasy prose but i promise you that the more you internalize these tools the more you can apply them unconsciously in moments where you need knowing the names of them knowing that you know a trochee is double you know accent unaccent that a

26:29spondy is you know all the same that an i am is unaccented accented just having words for it means that when you are troubleshooting what you are writing you have names for the problem you're trying to solve and you can sort things out in your head more quickly i will say your mileage may vary on that right for me you know i i struggled when i was being formally taught poetry because i had to learn all the names of things once i learned to sit and appreciate poetry then i had a very different

27:04relationship to the rhythms of it and you know but for a lot of people that knowing the structure of the names will be very helpful and you don't have to either because again most of this is stuff that we have actually internalized and then reverse engineered to come up with names for the the simplest thing you can do to check the rhythm is is to read your work out loud and if reading your work out loud is not something that works for you um having a machine read it out loud because if it is possible for that machine to get it wrong and it is uh it will it will do it um so reading it out loud

27:37is a very very useful way that's where you you will spot the oh i do have an accidental couplet here or um i've i've like internal rhymes can be really we didn't talk about this much but internal rhymes can be really really powerful tool but you can also like completely break things by you know i i i'm constantly accidentally writing she rose on her toes and i'm like oh it just it's like drawing this attention to something that i as long as she doesn't do anything with her nose at the same time

28:08i think one thing that's also really useful to think about is think about cussing you know like where basically swearing is all about rhythm like where you're putting the cusses in your sentence where you're putting that or how you're sequencing and ordering them someone who's bad at it is always putting them in the wrong place and you can feel it and there's no impact to it when you get someone who's like phenomenal at swearing this is why shakespeare swearing is the best thing in the world because when you can just like get the rhythm of it right it's so dependent on that it's swearing is

28:40so dependent on the musicality of the words that we choose and that's why certain swear words are just more fun than other ones thou art a knave a rascal an eater of broken meats a base proud shallow beggarly three suited hundred pound filthy worsted stocking knave a lily livered action-taking horse on glass gazing super serviceable finical rogue one that i would speak into clamorous whining if thou deniest the least syllable of thy edition people say that i might meet you all the time that that's uh very hurtful but rarely to your face i know uh king yeah yeah i'm not surprised honestly

29:13uh king lear act two scene two kent to oswald and i i have it a little bit wrong but it's pretty close i will say before we head to the homework or start insulting each other for real um that i also like in addition to looking at hip-hop looking at covers yeah um you see an artist like a really well-known song that like 10 000 people have done this same jazz song one way that people distinguish it is by playing with the rhythm and if you ever hear a song and you're like wow this new interpretation made me think about the meaning of the song differently because the emphasis was in a different place

29:47you are actually seeing what is happening when rhythm is tweaked with in real time and so with

Homework Assignment

29:55that i am going to take us to the homework and your homework for this is to listen to a piece of music that you really like and think about how does the rhythm work within that uh are they emphasizing the first word or the second word does it get faster and then slower you can use really official terms and be very poetry class or you can just be like fast here many words yay and then i want you to take a piece of your writing and see what happens if you use that same rhythmic structure in your own piece and how it

30:30changes like a piece of description that you have in your own writing this has been writing excuses you're out of excuses now go right writing excuses has been brought to you by our listeners patrons and friends for this episode your hosts were mary robinette kowal dong one song aaron roberts and howard taylor this episode was engineered by marshall carr jr mastered by alex jackson and produced by emma reynolds for more information visit writing excuses dot com

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