Deeper Stories: Learn to Hear Your Own Song

Chapter Three in a book on the art of prose in fiction.

This rewrite of the material has inspired me to begin work on a new novel, using techniques and inspired by ideas shared in the previous two chapters. One repeated idea has been not to try to be the writer’s you admire, and then Hemingway talked about taking from popular fiction, the kind of works your friends might sneer at. For some reason, this time, that really hit home. I’m also building a Pratchett Draft, which isn’t like me, but I think it will help the book. I thought maybe it would be a good idea to journal that journey here, but I’m not sure how to do that in a way that will help the material not hurt it. I already worry about the pacing of this book, but no matter how I write, I’ll think I should have done it differently.

If you haven’t read the first two chapters, you can find them here:

Deeper Stories: Clarity with Conviction

Deeper Stories: The Pratchett Draft

Learn to Hear Your Own Song

“What nobody tells people who are beginners... is that all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, and it’s just not that good... But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.”

—Ira Glass

I haven’t read The Obscene Bird of Night, but Pablo Báez has. He made note of certain effects he saw present in Donoso’s book which helped inspire his own short story Cavadonga. Then he asked for my feedback. I sent him my response that night. It was a quick turnaround for an essay-length critique, but Cavadonga had become my new obsession and nothing else could be accomplished until the critique was finished.

The next morning, Pablo sent me a passage from The Obscene Bird of Night, and I read it, but not being familiar with the book, I couldn’t see the technique employed that he so wanted to achieve.

This is what I told him:

I know you saw something and were inspired, but I see what you’ve done as something much more challenging. The best way to ruin everything is to insist on following an initial inspiration. It’s time to step back and see what you’ve built and what it needs.

We are inspired by what we read. We see in those stories something we want to embody as a writer, but there comes a time when our greatest inspiration should be what we’ve written and what it wants to become.

As a fan of a writer’s work, we have a tendency to view the author as approaching his work the way a fan would: I want to be quirky like Charlie Kaufman. I want a idiosyncratic literary style like Cormac McCarthy. Then we hear them talk about their work. Kaufman isn’t trying to be quirky. He’s just trying to tell the story he wants to tell in the best way he knows how. McCarthy’s stylistic idiosyncrasies are often his attempt at making his stories easier to read. They usually aren’t trying to be the thing they become. They’re just trying to tell a story.

There are exceptions. In the art world, Salvador Dali was an example of someone intentionally setting out to be what they became, but this is not the norm.

The first suggestion I want to take from this is to embrace our rough edges. Be who we are. Tell the truth in fiction. Kaufman isn’t trying to be quirky; he is quirky. We might want to write like Kaufman, but I suspect there are many days when Kaufman would rather be us.

Embrace the cringe. Write the cringe, and discover who you are on the page instead of desperately trying to hide it. You are the artist. Well before you’ve finished the first draft, the story you’re writing, the effects you’re achieving, take precedence over what inspired you to conquer the blank page. You are no longer trying to be something, you are something. Your work exists, and your primary goal is to understand that work and what it wants to be.

There are many reasons to love a book, and each reason has those qualities it holds most important. You love books. The reasons you do will be based on a few consistent qualities, and in that realm, you’ve become something of an authority. If you’re really into science fiction, you’re probably into a particular type that approaches its storytelling in a particular way, and you know who does it best. When it comes to what you love, you have good taste.

If one of the reasons you love literature is the quality of the prose, you’ll have developed good taste in the particular types of prose you enjoy the most.

Whatever they are, in the qualities that matter to you, you’ll have very high standards. The Glass quote reflected on the distance between taste and artistic skill when we’re novice writers. As we grow, the distance closes, but we’re not meant to be tracing the work of other authors. We’re different people, and the qualities that sing in our work won’t always be the qualities that sing in what we’ve admired.

Learn to hear your own song.

I’ve never really considered the downside of being Samuel Beckett, James Joyce’s protege. How do you thrive under such mastery? How do you feel like you’ve achieved something worthy? Beckett did, of course, but that was never a guarantee. He could have ended up a pale imitation, trying to write in the master’s style.

Becket found himself as a writer, as something other than the protege of a master, and he had to write in French to do it. Most of us aren’t literally in that position, but metaphorically, we all are. We are learning from the masters, but we become our own masters when our work becomes its own thing.

All great works were once rough and in need of their author to discover what the piece wants to say and how it wants to say it. Consider this selection from Thomas Jefferson’s rough draft of The Constitution of the United States.

We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable;
that all men are created equal & independent,
that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable,
among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness;

For those familiar with the text, the first obvious difference is sacred and undeniable, and it was Benjamin Franklin who suggested the change. It simplifies the focus at the falling intonation, that assurance of confidence no longer split between two ideas but devoted to one: self-evident.

The second change is similar, placing focus on equal. I find it appropriate that the intonation rises on this word, given how unequal society was, but we won’t linger on that particular thought.

The third change introduces anaphora, that form of parallelism that uses repetition at the beginning of each phrase, in this case, the single word there, initially repeated across two phrases now extended to three:

We hold these truths to be self-evident,
that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,
that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

They didn’t have the platonic ideal of the sentence, one right choice to work toward. They sought only to communicate their point with clarity. In our writing, we seek to do the same.

Choose a small section of writing. Ideally, use a first draft of your own. Read it aloud. Hear the pauses and the changes in intonation. Are patterns created or are there sections that feel like noise?

Rewrite with an ear for phrasal patterns. Consider using parallelism to give structure to the passage. When you’re finished, read it aloud. Test the patterns. Repeat as necessary.

We talk often about cutting unnecessary words, but this is an opportunity to focus on unnecessary phrases, ones you can cut without your reader losing any information. As an example, here’s part of my rough draft and the phrases I chose to cut:

…of her childhood bedroom and the popcorn ceiling that came alive at night in the interplay of shadows and the lights of cars passing outside her window with the hiss of freshly-fallen rain…

In the rough draft I wrote everything I saw as I told myself the story, but in reviewing what I had written, the fact that it was night or that the cars were outside her window was inferred information. The phrases that said it outright became repetitive. Unnecessary.

You’re playing with the rhythm of phrases, cutting them down to only what needs to be said and giving them structure through pattern. You’re awakening the passage’s language, understanding what you’ve written and what it’s trying to become. Let the work itself inspire you.

As your listen for your own song, a few things to pay attention to are cadence, stressed syllables, phonemes, and the flow between words and phrases. We’ll end with an introduction to cadence and stressed syllables and pick up the other two in the following chapters.

Timing in music is measured in the length of notes and rests. Poetry uses meter, but for prose there is cadence and the stressed syllable. Within this prosaic system, the sounds of the words and the way their utterance blends into one another (or doesn’t) adds the final subtlety, directing the reader’s ear as the story’s music plays.

Consider the short poem Sometimes with One I Love by Walt Whitman, but without line breaks or non-standard spellings, presented as if it were not poetry but prose.

Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse unreturned love, but now I think there is no unreturned love, the pay is certain one way or another. (I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not returned, yet out of that I have written these songs).

Whitman replaces a focus on meter and rhyme with techniques such as consonance, assonance, and cadence. Cadence is the rise and fall of intonation.

We are most aware of intonation in connection with punctuation. Questions and incomplete thoughts carry a rise in intonation. Uncertainty also carries that rise, which is why they teach you to end your statement with a falling intonation when speaking in public, to avoid conveying a lack of authority.

Statements, commands, and anything with a sense of completion has a falling intonation, as do the reporting questions (who, what, when, where, why, and how).

In longer sentences, the word before the comma is given a raised intonation, indicating that more is yet to come. Write those same lines in short sentences. Declarative. Ending in a period. You alter the intonation and with it, the implication. What is lost in musicality becomes authoritative and is often described as muscular and masculine.

Cadence can bring music to your writing, but it doesn’t dance alone. If you’ve written any poetry, you’ll recall worrying over every syllable, both stressed and unstressed. In prose, the only concern is the stressed syllable. The timing between those stressed syllables remains constant, no matter how many unstressed syllables fit between. The result is that short, monosyllabic words slow the reading down, which can be used to the writer’s strategic advantage, while polysyllabic words and their unstressed syllables can aid a sentence’s sense of flow.

Whatever wonders befall man tonight…

Which one breaks men tonight…

The stressed syllables in the first line and the second fall into the same rhythm, which is made possible by the slight pauses you insert between the words of the second line.

In that first line, the flow feels like it takes a beat just before befall. This isn’t an aspect of stressed syllables but of the impact of the plosive which doesn’t glide but has a singular beat that defines its sound. The /w/, by contrast, is called a semivowel or a glide. They’re consonants that act like vowels and glide words between the articulators that create consonant sounds (such as the tongue, lips, teeth, or the ridge just behind the upper front teeth).

The semivowel, like a liquid (or to some degree a fricative), aids in sonic flow by the variable length of its sound. Plosives create a staccato effect when grouped together, and together they’re known as phonemes. We’ll explore what they bring to our sentences in the next chapter.

In the meantime, we’ve felt the rhythm of cadence and stressed syllables, and through copious readings of well-written works, our internal sense of language overflows with rhythm until it spills into our writing. Our sentences do more than convey information. They conduct the reader, directing her pace and rhythm as if she were an orchestra performing the notes we’ve written upon the page.

— Thaddeus Thomas