How a Writer Conducts her Reader like a Symphony Orchestra

On cadence, stressed syllables, and phonemes.

Here, I rework sections from The Secret of Literary Style, A Word Like a Butterfly Pinned, and Prose Percussion, Winds, and Strings. Works cited are by Walt Whitman, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Cormac McCarthy.

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How a Writer Conducts the Reader like a Symphony Orchestra

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.

Cadence

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 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 is 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.

Stressed Syllables

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 fist 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.

Examples

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 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. 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.

The pattern creates tension which is resolved through the change.

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.

We feel 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

P.S. — I’m personally of the conviction that we study these aspects of writing, allowing them to become part of the fabric our minds weave, but when it comes to the actual writing, we write. Through practice, the musician trains the motions of the muscle, but in the performance, muscle memory takes over. It’s the same here.

In the performance, we write.