A Question of Rhythm

Office Hours

Happy Fourth of July, everybody. I am biting my tongue here, trying my best to not write about politics after this very fraught, concerning week. So I’ll just say that the work we’re doing here is, in my view, an honorable pre-politics: we’re trying to hone our reading (and therefore thinking) skill, so as to be more present, human, powerful, and compassionate, in all things, at all times.

Ready? Let’s go. :)

Q.

Dear George,

My question is about rhythm in writing. And what brought this up is a quote by Ursula Le Guin about a paragraph in a letter by Virginia Woolf.

In an interview with author Ursula Le Guin, Le Guin paraphrases from a letter Virginia Woolf wrote to her lover, the author Vita Sackville-West.

Here is the relevant portion of the Woolf letter:

Le Guin says this is the most mystical thing she’s ever read about writing, and probably the profoundest. She says every book, even every short piece, has its own rhythm, and if you hang onto that rhythm while writing it, you can't go wrong.

Le Guin says we understand so little of the creative process of writing but that this passage says more about the process than anything she'd ever read.

There is, of course, the explicit sense of rhythm in poetry, Le Guin says. But the rhythm of prose is something that not very many people have studied. The rhythms are so subtle and have to be irregular. Woolf is talking about a rhythm that’s very long because it encompasses the whole of a book.

George, I would love to hear about how you think of rhythm in sentences, in paragraphs, in short stories, in novels, (and maybe even in the creative process and in life itself?) 

And what you can suggest to help us sensitize ourselves to the rhythm of our own work?

It's something I have a vague sense of—mainly when something feels awkward, I "play" with the passage until it feels better or somehow "clicks." 

But the larger beats in long-form writing—that's a mystery to me. I feel it going on in some of the works I read and am happy whenever I can identify it. When it comes to my own work, not so much.

I've been vaguely aware in my long-form non-fiction writing that there's a kind of subtext of motifs or ideas that are "pinging" at different points, making a rhythm of sorts. And that part of my job is to arrange these to help make the ending a more satisfying completion. That ideally, the ending ties these pings together in a way that "rhymes."

So, in my editing I try to notice and then massage these beats (if something feels like overkill, or something is missing or disconnected). But mostly I feel like I'm working in the dark.

Up until finding the Le Guin and Woolf quotes, I hadn't seen this dealt with anywhere in writings about writing.

I know early on in Story Club you had us pick a short series of words and arrange and rearrange these to hear what was most satisfying to our ears. And we discussed something like this with alternating POVs.

But how do we work on more complex rhythmic patterns over chapters and whole works? After all, Lincoln in the Bardo is a fugue, so I figured you are the person to ask!

Any advice is much appreciated!

THANK YOU, THANK YOU.

A.

And thank you, so much for this thoughtful question and for the Woolf letter, and Le Guin’s reflections on same.  What a bounty and so much to think about.

Here’s my take on it.

First, I really like what Woolf says about rhythm preceding everything else.  Sometimes it feels like a rhythm has to be there, as a sort of container for the words to flow into.  I’ll sometimes sit there, waiting for this thing (this “rhythm-conduit”) to show up.

But, if I’m being completely honest, apart from that feeling, I don’t think, overtly, about rhythm very much, trusting, as I do, that this will all come out in the wash – that this thing we call “rhythm” will show up naturally as a result of all of that iterative revising.  And it will show up unsummoned by me and unbeknownst to me – until I see it, and like it (and therefore leave it). 

In your question you mention that sometimes “when something feels awkward, (you) "play" with the passage until it feels better or somehow "clicks." 

That about sums it up for me too.

If something is causing a hitch in my reading, and I keep working with that (trying to eliminate the hitch)….well, that, that right there, is, de facto, an adjustment in “rhythm.”

Sometimes I might do a little mechanical monkeying with structure that would, in turn, have an effect on the piece’s rhythm – for example, I’d written that section in     Lincoln in the Bardo in which the Reverend recounts his trip to the diamond palace (pages 187-195) but didn’t know where it was going to go.  Then an idea came to me that made me happy, which was to try to put it as exactly in the middle of the book as I could. 

So, this was a structural decision that affected the rhythm of the book, I guess - but I made it (again) by feeling (refined over many iterations, i.e., read-throughs).

This approach, needless to say, requires a lot of reading through a thing, which…well, that’s very much an acquired skill – the ability to repeatedly read something and still be able to see (and hear) it.  Now, I’m sure there are some writers who start out with some idea about a rhythm they want to attain (a plan, or schematic vision), and mechanically try to put that in place, and so on – but that’s not true for me.

For the most part, for me, rhythm is something that appears (and surprises me) by way of a lot of editing.  The piece’s rhythm gets gradually revealed by cutting away, by switching sections around (for sound, for the feeling at the margin between the sections, for causality, etc.) – in short, by that process of hitch-elimination mentioned above. 

All the things we talk about when we discuss fiction (rhythm, style, theme, character development – all of it) are, in my practice, results of editing, which is being done to taste – pretty much wordlessly and concept-free. 

There might be an analogy in terms of personal behavior.  We, of course, want people to say, about us, that we “have integrity,” “are trustworthy,” “are communicative” – well, here you can list whatever it is you want people to say about you.  But how to get there?  And the answer is: moment-to-moment, in response to our sense of that moment.  It’s 2:43 on a Friday and you’re presented with a dilemma.  Something of your essential nature is brought to the fore.  You act.  Many years of this leads to a reputation: she is trustworthy, calm, funny, good in a crisis – whatever.  But there was no overarching plan – except maybe a general intention.

So, I think my advice would just be to double-down on the approach you are now taking, dear questioner, in the faith that everything you want your work to have – rhythm and style and passion and originality and power – will be delivered by way of the editing process. 

Sometimes, I’ve felt, a great deal of power lies in this recommitting to one’s process; it’s a bit like a prisoner who realizes the only way out of the prison is…to dig. 

But let me try to be one degree more specific and so, I hope, helpful.

With Lincoln in the Bardo, I spent a long time trying to get the first 30-40 pages right. I knew the book was taking a risky approach and I wanted everything to be perfect before I showed it to anyone. 

So…a lot of polishing, per the model discussed above.

One result of this was that, by the time I was ready to show those first pages, certain elements had already been clearly established: there were ghosts; there were historical accounts, both real and invented; there was a certain pattern to how and when those historical accounts could occur (for example: they had to be prompted by the preceding text).

In a sense, by bearing down on the first 40 pages, I had created certain elements that would now be expected to 1) recur, and 2) in some way, escalate.

And that, really, is the seed of what you are calling “rhythm,” that implied question in the reader’s mind: “How is he going to be cycling those established elements in and out?”

Having those elements in place meant that there would, for sure, be some rhythm (some pattern of repetition); my job became to decide which one – and this was done, as discussed, by feeling, during iteration.

Mostly these decisions about rhythm, such as they were, occurred at the place where one section yielded to another.  That’s where, in a novel that is (as you so nicely put it, thank you, thank you) “fugue-like”¹, we feel the author’s rhythmic decisions being brought to bear. 

We’ve just read one section (a section between the three ghosts, for example): what needs to come next (what would make for the most interesting “rhythm?”)

These decision were, then, made immeasurably easier by the fact that, in those first 40 pages, I’d already figured out what my possible choices were (i.e., what different types of sections I had to work with) - I had established, let’s say, elements A through F; now “rhythm” was just the order in which those elements would reoccur. “Good” rhythm would mean that these recursions occurred in interesting, non-robotic patterns. Good patterning would, in turn, subtly compel the reader forward.

But again: it was all instinct plus iteration; over four years or so.

OK – I’ve gone on too long, so will turn this over to you, dear Story Club: thoughts on this elusive thing called “rhythm?”  How do you sense it, when you’re reading?  What does the absence of it feel like?  And so on.

(A few days later, I got this follow-up from our questioner):

PS: After I wrote to you, a book I'd ordered arrived of essays on writing by Ursula Le Guin  The Wave in the Mind and in it is an essay called "Stress-Rhythm in Poetry and Prose." 

In it, Le Guin scans and scrutinizes short writing passages from a surprising set of authors (Twain, Stein, Austen, Darwin, Tolkien, Woolf . . .) going into far more detail than I've ever imagined.

As for how rhythm works over an entire work, when it's not just the diction of a phrase and sentence, but it's in images, and ideas that recur or are hinted at, she goes into that in the essay that follows "Rhythmic Pattern in the Lord of the Rings."

**

(And here’s a link to a nice LA Times article on that Le Guin collection, with thanks to our intrepid and brilliant editor, Samantha Storey.)

1. Per Google, a fugue is “a musical composition that uses a contrapuntal technique to develop one or more themes through the imitation of voices that enter in succession.”