Today was very nearly an article on physics, but I took pity on my new subscribers who would think themselves in the wrong newsletter. I assure you, though, another article is coming. I call it: Bridging Quantum Weirdness and the World We Know. For now, though, we turn our attention to the workings of the sounds our words make and how those sounds play together in our sentences.
The Nitty Gritty of Pretty Prose
As much as I want to talk about what I’ve gained from this study so far, I won’t delay a return to our lesson at hand. The rest will wait until the end of the chapter. We left off with cadence and stressed syllables. Cadence structures the rhythm of a sentence one phrase at a time, but as we consider the words that make up each phrase, phonemes become important in supporting and frustrating that rhythm.
Phonemes
The smallest unit of sound that distinguishes one word from another is a phoneme. When phonemes match, that’s consonance. We see phonemes at work when we hear the smooth flow of “laughter fails” and compare that with the distinct separation between words in “laugh falters,” where the reader must break the adjacent /f/-/f/ phonemes.
That /f/ sound is known as a fricative.
Fricatives, liquids, and plosives are forms of consonant sounds that create distinctly different results. Fricatives and liquids are drawn out, with fricatives having more restriction of the air flow. Liquids supply a flowing sound, while a fricative brings clarity to a word as well as an audible tension.
Examples of fricatives are the sounds /f/, /v/, /s/, and /z/, and liquids are sounds like /l/ and /r/. It helps to remember what each type of phoneme sounds like when you know their names begin examples of what they are. /f/ricative. /l/iquid.
The plosive is a sound made in an instant by cutting off and releasing airflow; the sound can’t be drawn out. Petty is made up of the voiceless plosives /p/ and /t/, while bad employs voiced plosives /b/ and /d/.
Plosives are explosive. While too many strung together can be jarring, their sharp sounds create emphasis.
A liquid’s role is to lend euphony to a sentence, but rhythm in fiction isn’t about limiting ourselves to the smoothest phonemes. Instead, we create patterns with verbal symphony complete with percussion, winds, and strings.
In the following example from Joyce, the repeated /h/ is one example of consonance (generally alliteration, but not always, as in the case of unheeded and wildhearted). It’s known as a glottal fricative, meaning it passes air through the vocal cords without making a sound.
He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man — James Joyce
The /ai/ in wild and life (the long “i” sound) is assonance, and the combination of the liquids and semivowels with a strong, easily pronounced vowel sound creates that sense of euphony.
On and on she went, across Piccadilly, and up Regent Street, ahead of him, her cloak, her gloves, her shoulders combining with the fringes and the laces and the feather boas in the windows to make the spirit of finery and whimsy which dwindled out of the shops on to the pavement, as the light of a lamp goes wavering at night over hedges in the darkness.
Mrs. Dalloway — Virginia Woolf
Here we see the use of assonance: spirit… whimsy… dwindled; and alliteration: light of a lamp. We see changes of pace through groupings of monosyllabic words followed by polysyllabic ones: her cloak, her gloves, her shoulders combining with the fringes and the laces and the feather boas in the windows…
Woolf transitions through these grouping by moving from a plosive that emphasizes the crisp pattern of the stressed syllables (cloak /c/) to the fricatives (gloves /g/ and shoulders /sh/). This then becomes the semivowels (windows, whimsy which, wavering) and liquids (light, lamp). It’s a transition into increasingly flowing sounds and then back out again with night (/n/: nasal consonant), hedges (/h/: glottal fricative) and darkness (/d/: plosive).
Flow Between Words and Phrases
Consider the phrase: a ball bearing rolls. Each word is distinct, but in the example a bad dear runs, in order to save the reading, we may sacrifice the words, voicing the line as a ba-dea-runs in our head. We hide this fact from ourselves by prolonging the sound of the /r/, like a car rolling through a stop sign. The plosives do not give us that option.
Compare the flow of ball bearing to the slower and distinct bad bearing. The /d/ and the /b/ are adjacent plosives which require a vocal pause and reset between the words. Ball ends with that liquid /l/ allows the reader to flow into the beginning plosive.
A bad deer runs is a series of adjacent phonemes. In a bad dog goes, that series is restricted to plosives, requiring multiple pauses and what may be misplaced mental effort. We generally want that reader’s mind engaged in the right places for the right purposes. However, that doesn’t mean we never use difficult phoneme constructions and turn them to our advantage.
Consider these phrases from the final paragraph of The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
Once / there were brook trout / in the streams / in the mountains.
Notice how you’re forced to separate the ending and beginning plosives in brook trout. In-the-streams and in-the-mountains flow as if they were each one word, and that separates the phrases audibly from the distinct words: brook trout.
Variety is central to good writing. Too often, our phrases sound alike: she sat in her chair in the garden in the sun.
We can resolve this by removing phrases: she sat in the sunlit garden.
But that doesn’t mean we always want to resolve repetition by removing it. A repetitive cadence creates more tension the longer it’s held, and that tension is resolved in the change that follows it.
You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand.
McCarthy’s first sentence in this pair is made gentle through variation in its phrases and a scattering of two-syllable words. The next line feels like a completion, short and monosyllabic.
In its brevity, the fragment that follows hits those same beats, albeit through its stranded list of polysyllabic words.
Polished and muscular and torsional.
McCarthy’s choice of words and punctuation creates patterns, building tension which is resolved through a change in construction.
On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming.
Let’s return to our monotonous example and follow it with a change that relieves the tension: She sat in her chair in the garden in the sun / and bleached away the evil that seeped from her pores like the stench of her mother’s cigarettes.
No matter what your style, this concept of tension and release works. If your sentences feel dull and lifeless, if you’re struggling to develop style and nothing seems to help, this one technique can change everything.
Students look at great writers and ask why they get to break all the rules. Polished and muscular and torsional. How is that even a complete sentence? It’s not. By breaking the rules we can disrupt balance and create tension. Through cadence and word choice, we establish patterns that are then frustrated before finding their final fulfillment.
Inspiration Strikes
With the lesson finished, now I may speak of Hemingway and what he said to us in chapter two: Don’t imitate the greats. Look to the popular fiction of the day, to the fiction you love, take from that and write a new classic. If you fail, what will you have? A superbly written tale that people will want to read.
What did we learn from Faulkner in chapter one? Instead of trying to be someone else, we will authentically express ourselves, telling our story in the way it must be told, with a focus on clarity.
Might there be exceptions to this advice as we travel the road to learning story and style? Yes, I’ve lived those exceptions, but for now, to hell with the exceptions. I will focus my attention here and now, and I will learn the lessons I’ve failed to learn in the two years I’ve been writing this series.
All this time, I understood pieces of the truth, but I failed to put those pieces together. I failed to draw the proper conclusions, until now.
I think it was Hemingway and Faulkner’s love for crime stories that awoke me from my slumber. Twenty years ago, I thought crime would be my genre.
Today, I pursue something else.
I have begun planning a new novel, following Hemingway’s advice, and though, when I wrote about the Pratchett draft, I said I couldn’t write a book that way, I am plotting. I am working my way up to a Pratchett draft. What I thought to be personally impossible is impossible no longer.
If you join me on this journey, I hope it inspires you as fully.
— Thaddeus Thomas
P.S. — If you’re looking for help with your writing and the inspiration of other writers, allow me to recommend Write Club. I’ve recently joined, myself, and it promises to be the community I’d hoped to build a year ago! Visit writeclub.chat and click on the Discord Community button to join the conversation.
Tonight’s work to be reviewed is by Josi Sofer | PNR Fiction.
P.P.S. This reads like paid promotion, but I promise, it’s not. I’m sincere in my excitement!
Write club is run by David T Etheredge.
The tension-and-release argument holds, but every example here is a writer whose prose is meant to be heard — Joyce, Woolf, McCarthy. There's a kind of sentence it doesn't reach. "I took off the new shoes: my feet were used to being bare, and it was quieter." That's Marian L Thorpe, whom this Salon championed. Nothing in that line is doing euphony: monosyllables, no pattern held long enough to frustrate. It works because the woman saying it cannot say she has been a captive for fifteen years, so she says it about her feet. The tension isn't in the cadence, it's in what she isn't allowed to spend words on. Which makes me wonder whether the sound-level technique is available to every narrator, or only to the ones who can afford to be heard.