Writing Excuses Transcripts

Writing Excuses 21.21: Rhythm and Words

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-21-rhythm-and-words

Key Points: Rhythm, a form of sequencing. Accidental couplets! Negative space. Blocks of text. Put the reader on a horse. Iamb. Spondee. Trochee. Read your work out loud. Internal rhymes. Swearing.

[Season 21, Episode 21]

[Mary Robinette] This 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/writingexcuses.

[Season 21, Episode 21]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Rhythm and words.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Howard] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Erin] Today, 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. So my question to you is, am I just controlling or do other people do this too?

[DongWon] No, I think you're absolutely spot on to be paying attention to that, interested in that. I think a real failure state of 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 the architectural details of this mansion or whatever it is, when one of the main ways to grab your reader and make something feel really beautiful, make... Put us in an emotional state where we really appreciate the thing is to use musicality and rhythm. Right? Is to use breaths and pauses and word length to pull us through and give us something that feels beautiful.

[Howard] I think a lot about the rhythm, and I also think a lot about the syllable sounds. And 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. You can have 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'm looking for the right rhythm to make a point, I'm also looking for the right sounds to go with that rhythm in order to make the point even better.

[Mary Robinette] I also think about it, as well. I... Going back to what you were saying, I think the... As you said, a lot of people think more is better, and it's not always. Partly it's coming out of puppetry and art, but I think about the negative spaces. There is a thing with puppets where we have a zero position, the spot that they return to. And then the movement comes out from that spot. So I tend to think about that a little bit on the page, about what is the zero position or 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, or a paragraph that's much shorter. And, likewise, Erin, I also will massage the words so that the stress falls into the right spot. 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 off into things that you just don't want attention drawn to. Just 100% an accident.

[Howard] One of...

[Erin] Accidental couplets in their fiction?

[Mary Robinette] Oh, my goodness.

[Erin] That causes friction.

[choke]

[DongWon] Good Lord.

[laughter]

[Howard] Anybody want a peanut?

[DongWon] One thing I think about a lot when it comes to this as well is negative space. Right? There's this Japanese concept of ma, which is sort of the space around the thing, or considering the negative space as its own thing that should be considered and has value and weight in 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 sentences. And then, literally think about how it works on the page. Right? One thing I see a lot is really dense blocks of text. If you have, like, an entire paragraph that's just dense description with no line breaks, with no paragraph breaks, it's very hard to ingest. Right? My... One of my deep interests in 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 did was start to play with that negative space in very deliberate ways. You'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 breaths in it. Right? And so, when you think about how to use that negative space, when you think about sort of, like, poets who started to break traditional line structure, and sort of give that blank space for half of a line, or breaking in the middle of a word, those kinds 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.

[Mary Robinette] 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.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Like, you can set up your word processor so that you can see multiple pages all at once. And if you look at it, and there's, like, a... There's a certain sameness to it, to your paragraphs, then you're using the same rhythm over and over again. There are times that's actually 100% 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.

[DongWon] 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? 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.

[Mary Robinette] And I'm just going to flag that this is definitely a tool for submitting to a specific agent...

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] And that other agents may have different preferences.

[DongWon] Always. They are wrong...

[laughter]

[DongWon] And they should feel bad about it.

[laughter]

[Howard] There is... 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... I 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, they'll be contained by an ellipse, or be... 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. And that there won't be rivers and valleys, 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. Which 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.

[Erin] 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.

[DongWon] Oh, yeah, let's go.

[Erin] And I'm going to explain why that's totally okay, using poetry, after the break.

[Howard] The cruise ship sailing up to Alaska this summer is completely sold out, except for the cabins we'd reserved for Writing Excuses attendees. These cabins are only available until June 4th. On June 4th, any cabins not reserved by Writing Excuses attendees will revert to the cruise line, and will be sold to the general public. If you want to join the Writing Excuses hosts and 100 new friends on our final annual cruise as we read, write, critique, and learn while reveling in the stunning scenery, visit writingexcuses.com/retreats. Don't delay. We're holding the very last unreserved cabins on the entire ship, and they will not stay unreserved for very long. Again, that's writingexcuses.com/retreats.

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[Erin] As 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.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] And so, one of the ways that I do this...

[DongWon] Once again, I feel like I need to not be sitting next to Erin anymore. I feel very stressed.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Yes. [garbled] 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's 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 in the butt. Is that how you get horses to go?

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] And then sometimes it's 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.

[Mary Robinette] Why were you galloping on a horse when you were three?

[DongWon] Three is so young to be galloping on a horse. [garbled]

[Erin] Anyway...

[Mary Robinette] That's true.

[Erin] But anyway, so what you are doing is, the horse has some sort of rhythm and it's just carrying you along.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] I want my story to be your horse.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] That sounds weird. And so I like to think about it, like, some of the things that poets use. Which are like the actual, like, if you ever talk to poets, they will explain, like, this is in, like, trochaic foot...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Or iambic pentameter, or all of these other things, and I'm going to share with you some of my favorites, because I want to...

[okay]

[Erin] Okay, so iamb. Iamb's from Shakespeare. That's dahdum, dahdum, dahdum, which is... My favorite two examples of this are, but soft what light through yonder window breaks, but also, thank God Almighty, we are free at last. And I think there's something about them... I don't know, somebody 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. Dadum, dadum. There's a lot of feeling like you're leaning in to what the other person is saying, and you need to understand what's going on. And so it makes sense when you're speaking to Juliet on her balcony or trying to convince a large number of people, as the second example, like, that this is... Like we have made it to the promised land. Preachers love a good iamb... And preachers love rhythm in general. If you want a good example of rhythm, listen to a Southern Baptist preacher.

[DongWon] Oh, my God.

[Erin] They are great at it. Like, they will take everything and make it sound rhythmic. They'll be like, I went, to the grocery store. And you're like, oh, my gosh.

[DongWon] I mean...

[Erin] This is amazing.

[DongWon] Rap and hip hop as well. Old school boom bap. That's an iamb. Right?

[Erin] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Speaking of, actually... I'm going to skip ahead to a spondee, 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 is, that butt was stuffed.

[laughter]

[Erin] [garbled] because he's doing all this other rhythm, but then he stops and he uses equal emphasis because all of those words are important.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And also because it draws attention, much like the butt does to Sir Mix-a-Lot to that section of the rhythm.

[DongWon] 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? [garbled]

[Erin] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] As opposed to if it had all been straight emphasis all the way through.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] You would have not... Who would have cared?

[Erin] Yeah.

[DongWon] Who would have noticed that butt?

[Howard] Stuffed or unstuffed.

[Erin] Wow.

[laughter]

[Erin] I'm sorry. I've taken us off the... We're on a horse now.

[Howard] This epo... Are we in Mississippi or is the horse named Mississippi?

[Erin] I'm so glad...

[DongWon] We've been from James Joyce to Sir Mix-a-Lot, and I'm delighted. Yeah.

[Erin] And then, the other one, the last sort of, like, doublet that I really like is the one where your emphasis is first. So, datum, datum, datum. This is the Poe.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And so it's also used... Taylor Swift, was it? Like to meet you, where you been...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I feel like there's a lot...  Taylor Swift often uses those things because I think it... I don't know, it makes it pop more.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] It's in your face a little more, and it feels a little more... I don't know...

[Howard] Like the trochaic tetrometers of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Is that the same?

[Ooh!]

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I like that. It is...

[Howard] Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble... Where the accent is first.

[Mary Robinette] Double Trouble.

[Howard] Double, double... Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I mean, Double Bubble, I guess, if you're doing...

[Howard] Double bubble chewing gum.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] But Shakespeare, there was a... There's a great TV show called 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 Lear, and this older Shakespearean actor 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 is important. It's... Shakespeare would put the emphasis on the important words, and... But soft, but is not important, but soft, what light... And that is kind of an interesting thing when you're thinking about your own prose, where do you want to throw the emphasis, and when do you want to break that rhythm to draw people's attention to it?

[DongWon] Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow... It's... Are the and's important or is the tomorrow important? Right? And how you read this, standing on that, changes the meaning of the lines wildly. Right?

[Mary Robinette] There's also really fantastic hilarious thing where diff... Where there's an actor who's attempting to do Hamlet, and different things, people who have played Hamlet, come out and give him a, like, read on, to be or not to be, and each of them takes a different word to emphasize, 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 with rhythm, not only are you looking at these beats, but you're also looking at italics as a tool that you can use or wildly misuse.

[DongWon] It is worth sitting down with a breakdown of a [Ken Meyer? Garbled] 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. Like, the number... The complexity of what he's doing with rhythm. Same with M&M. If you go and look at the complete breakdown of how they're using 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... 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 that [garbled]

[Howard] Knowing the names of them, knowing that a trochee is double, accent unaccent. That a spondee is all the same, that an iamb 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.

[DongWon] I will say your mileage may vary on that.

[Erin] Yeah. Yeah.

[DongWon] For me... 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 relationship to the rhythms of it and... But for a lot of people, learning the structure and the names will be very helpful.

[Mary Robinette] And you don't have to, either, because again, most of this is stuff that we have actually internalized...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And then reverse engineered to come up with names for. But the simplest thing you can do to check the rhythm is to read your work out loud.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And if reading your workout loud is not something that works for you, have a machine read it out loud, because if it is possible for that machine to get it wrong, and it is, it will do it.

[DongWon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] So, reading out loud is a very, very useful way... That's where you will stop [garbled] oh, I do have an accidental couplet here, or I've... Like, internal rhymes can be really... We didn't talk about this much, but internal rhymes can be a really. really powerful tool, but you can also, like, completely break things by... I'm constantly accidentally writing, she rose on her toes. I'm like, oh...

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] It's like drawing attention to something that I...

[Howard] As long as she doesn't do anything with her nose at the same time.

[DongWon] I think one thing that's also really useful to think about is think about cussing. Like, where... Basically, swearing is all about rhythm.

[laughter]

[DongWon] Like, where you're putting the cusses in your sentences, where you're putting that, or how you're sequencing and ordering them. Someone who's bad at it is always putting them at a 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 so dependent on the musicality of the words that we choose. And that's why certain swear words are just more fun than other ones.

[Mary Robinette] 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 knave, a whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue, one that I will beat into clamorous whining, if thou denies the least syllable of thy addition.

[DongWon] You can say that one more time.

[Mary Robinette] That's...[garbled]

[Erin] [garbled] your face.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, I know. King Lear. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not surprised, I don't think. King Lear, Act 2, scene 2. Kent to Oswald, and I have it a little bit wrong, but it's pretty close.

[Erin] I will say that... Before we head to the homework or start insulting each other...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] That I also like, in addition to looking at hip hop, looking at covers.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] We see an artist, like a really well-known song, like, 10,000 people have done this same jazz song. One way to distinguish it is by playing with the rhythm. If you ever have a song and you're like, wow, this new interpretation made me think about the meaning of the song differently, because the emphasis is in a different place, you are actually seeing what is happening when rhythm is tweaked in real time. And so, with that, I'm going to take us to the homework.

[Erin] 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. 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 changes, like, a piece of description that you have in your own writing

[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.