Testing to see if I can put a link here in a comment - this link was provided by the questioner but I somehow missed it - it's Le Guin talking through this whole idea of Woolf and rhythm - fascinating.
Thanks George and thank you so much for the links a month or so back, to the plays of your work. I created family evenings to watch these and was blown away by the talented actors and the beauty of the words in your work which works through us.
For what it may be worth, I've written an essay on the subject of rhythm in prose. It's called "What We Talk About When We Talk About Flow," and it's in my 2022 book Alone With All that Could Happen: On Writing Fiction (Revised & Expanded Edition). I think there may be a few things in the essay that might supplement and complement Woolf's wise words.
Oh my goodness! David Jauss! Wonderful to see you here. I very much enjoyed your book, and I just now took a look (again) at the chapter you mention, which contains this near the beginning: "...when we talk about flow we're talking about an element of writing that is more music than meaning and thus beyond rational explanation... Hence it's difficult to discuss.. but not impossible." And then you discuss it wonderfully! (People of Story Club--check it out!)
So glad to see you here, David! I will take this opportunity to offer a heartfelt recommendation of David's essay about revision, which I've reread a bunch of times since I first encountered it several years ago as one of David's students in the low-residency MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. It is one of those pieces of writing about writing that tends to clear the crud out of one's brain and make the good stuff flow from the pen a little more easily. Its argument is very in keeping with George Saunders's own views regarding the magic of revision. https://gristjournal.com/2020/02/the-flowers-of-afterthought-premises-and-strategies-for-revision-by-david-jauss/
Many thanks, Bill. I'm really pleased that you found my essay on revision valuable. A somewhat revised version of the essay will appear in my new book, Words Made Flesh: The Craft of Fiction, which is due out in Oct. from Press 53.
No ebook for Alone with All that Could Happen, alas (my vision requires ebooks), but your story collections look intriguing. I look forward to checking them out.
Great question and response. I know that feeling. Sometimes I'll not know what word will be right for a sentence, but I'll know it has a certain number of beats. It will have been dictated by the words that came before. I mostly know when a rhythm is working or not when I read something aloud. Right now I'm reading WOLF HOLLOW to my son at bedtime. The rhythms are so good. There's almost never a hitch when I reading, none that I can think of, so that I'm convinced the author must have read the novel aloud to get the rhythm and the pacing right. Same with my own writing; if I think I'm finished but I haven't read it out loud then I end up changing the rhythms drastically at least in some parts once I read it out loud. I always say the eye is sharp, but the ear is ancient and wise. Since humans have listened to stories far longer than we've read them, the ear is just a much better judge than the eye. It'll tell us when the rhythms are working or not.
This is so true! Once I'm done writing and editing a piece, I always read it aloud regardless if it's poetry, fiction, or a newsletter/blog post. Not only do I find errors, but I can also hear if there are any "hitches" that you mention.
I think the way Woolf uses Rhythm here is different from what I'm used to. At first when I hear the word rhythm in prose I think of writing for the "ear", and it is that but also different. From Woolf's sentence.. "..A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it;" I get she is saying all writing derives from emotion. Feeling. There might be analogy in music, where rhythm is perhaps more obvious than in prose. Consider the feeling that inspired Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring," or Beethoven's "Fifth Symphony,"to , say, a Julie Andrews song in Mary Poppins. The same notes were available to all three composers, but their feelings or emotions resulted in quite different compositions. In this sense a piece's internal rhythms might not be easy on our ear. I know myself I sometimes try for discordant rhythms or a dissonance in my writing if I'm trying to synch with a mood that I might not even be able to name or describe. Early on I used to think EB White was a master of rhythm, and he was, but I thought his style of rhythms were the archetypes one must aspire to to be a good writer. Now I recognize, I think, that there are as many rhythms out there as there are writers, and exploring rhythm through words is one of the joys of writing.
I like the musical analogy here, and might take it a step further and equate it to the musical concept of phrasing. It's not just the notes, it's the the rhythm of the notes. And two artists who sing the same notes may do so with different phrasing, creating a vastly different effect.
Love this discussion. I was thinking Ursula Le Guin's appraisal of Virginia Woolf's letter seemed overblown, but then I had to admit that in screenwriting, at least, rhythm may be more important than anything else. Reading a script, you can feel when things drag or skip a beat or falter rhythmically in some way. Movies are ruined by scenes that start too early, end too late, stall out in the middle, or seem redundant or pointless. In the streaming era, we're all more aware of the overall rhythm of a TV series, the shape of individual episodes—how many shows feel like movie ideas stretched out needlessly over eight or ten hours?—so many ways rhythmic failures can undermine a story.
Three things I've learned about rhythm in screenwriting:
1: Where you first feel rhythmic wrongness is almost never the first place to fix it. It started earlier. Something is off on the previous page, or five scenes back, or even in the initial set-up, to cause this scene to feel off. Screenwriters always talk about how Act 2 problems are really Act 1 problems. or Act 3 problems go back to either or both. When I'm reading my work and feel something off, I look back at the previous scene, back to the start of a sequence, back to the very beginning. I misled myself somewhere. If I find it, I can reset the rhythm.
2: As discussed here previously, a big part of storytelling is how much to reveal and when to reveal it, which is to say, there's what the reader or audience knows and what they don't know. Balance between these creates rhythm. I think maybe all story rhythm is essentially balance—on the beat and off, foreground and background, progress and reversal, what characters say vs. what they do, interior motivation vs. exterior event or action, emotion and logic, humor and gravity, a dozen other balancing acts, including—especially in story endings—inevitability and surprise. I'm not sure there's anything more important in writing than balancing these opposites in a satisfying way.
3. Think like a film editor. I know writing literary fiction and editing a movie are very different, but they have this in common: you have to decide what image follows the one you're on. I'm not the first to observe that reading creates movies in our minds (this is why the book is almost always better—you already made your movie out of it). As we write, we're seeing the movie, but when you're busy solving plot problems or giving characters more depth or dialogue more verve or a scene more tension, it's easy to forget what you're making readers or viewers imagine.
The great film editor Jay Rabinowitz cut the first movie I ever had produced, and I was blown away by his ability to create alternate sequences from daily footage to show different ways to tell the story: one way might emphasize the protagonist's impatience; another, his fear; still others would be fantasies or memories—all made from essentially the same material. I'd always believed in the primacy of the image in film storytelling, but now I could see the power of the cut. That taught me to be clearer about what I wanted to see, shot to shot.
There are probably more things I could write on the subject of rhythm. But remember the mnemonic about spelling the word? Ride Hard Your Three-Headed Monster. Maybe three is enough.
'Where you first feel rhythmic wrongness is almost never the first place to fix it. It started earlier. Something is off on the previous page, or five scenes back, or even in the initial set-up, to cause this scene to feel off. ' Brilliantly helpful, thank you Jim.
As a musician first, writer second I feel entitled to weigh in. I am intrigued by LeGuin's statement and on some level know it to be true. All good writing has a groove. Tom Wolfe, Hemingway—both have it in opposites. It's a feel and flow, and this is what we talk about first with great jazz musicians, not their notes (for writers, words). Miles Davis once said the secret to his sound was his time. He had incredible rhythmic phrasing. And said something of great value to all artists, including writers. "LEAVE EVERY OTHER PHRASE OUT." How do you develop this feel? Hmmm, I can tell you as a musician. Copy the masters, inculcate their groove into your own body, and then read out loud when editing. You KNOW when it's grooving, because your body tells you. Get out of your mind, and into your body. Harder for writers than improvisers maybe? Develop the long phrase, the short phrase, the long arc and short arc, mix and match, and know that when it gets tedious it's because there's too much of one and not enough of the other and you ain't swingin.'
I totally agree. Out of the head! Leave that to the editing. No groove while editing, except when reading aloud. Vonnegut read his early work aloud to himself. Grace Paley too, to hear the rhythms and keep'em.
I have a theory on rhythm from the point of view of the reader. I don't know how many people this happens to. This is going to sound very OOO EEE OOO but keep in mind that I'm trying to express something by metaphor.
I have noticed that there are certain writers I like way more than others even if the substance of what they are saying is similar to another author. I've come to think of this as a matter of "wave-length" and that is in large part a result of the habitual rhythm of an author when s/he has found their "voice." I am not talking about the difference between skilled and "clunky" writing. It is more a matter of being more tuned in at an almost unconscious level to the internal sound of one skilled writer more than another. Peter Brown writing on Late Antiquity is one of the authors who does this for me in non-fiction. The fiction writers are too many to count.
I have written a fair amount of poetry, almost none of it in a poetic "form." But the rhythm of what I am writing is all important and I agree with Woolf that hearing that (it IS an internal hearing) leads you to the right word. Of almost as much importance to the sound is the sensitivity to internal rhyme and off-rhyme. As a result, several of those who have published me in the "little magazines" have said in their acceptance letters that they like the way my stuff "sings" with no actual attention to strict meter. And I do find that my poems often go somewhere I did not expect as I work with this. When the word shows up, its meaning, its connotations, can take me somewhere very different from where I thought I was going when I started.
by voice I mean the thing that makes up the writer's (or at least poet's) particular and recognizable style. No one would ever confuse Wallace Stevens with William Carlos Williams--I happen to be in the Stevens camp.
So when I talk about voice connecting, I mean the characteristic rhythms of the style seem to strike a chord for no real reason I can see but some sort of shared "vibe."--again, being metaphorical. In the more literal sense of voice, that can happen in poetry, though. Some poems just read aloud better than others, even in free verse.
Equally attentive readers find different authors on their own personal wavelength. In genre fiction, Donna Leon and John Scalzi do it for me. I'll preorder their books without even checking to see what they are about. I know I'm going to bask in them.
A thoughtful and intelligent question. However, I am not convinced that George Saunders, in trying to respond to it, is able to relate what the essence of rhythm in writing actually is. He says: "Sometimes it feels like a rhythm has to be there, as a sort of container for the words to flow into." I associate the word 'rhythm' with a wave pattern, with movement that comes into its own out of a unique dynamism, a force that propels the story forward. A container does what it purports to do: it contains. Rhythm as container does not, cannot work. Rhythm is wave, is movement... in a vast sea of rolling stories.
I had the same problem with the word "container." I think I know what George is getting at, and if the container is not hard edged and a thing of confinement in the usual sense of container but something else - if we can consider emotions and feelings sometimes coalescing into a container maybe that works.
Waves flow in and out of the physical body including the geography, the land, which is full of vessels. So much of our world and wider universe is fluid. Songs of nature flow in and out of solid forms which only seem to be solid when we attach ourselves to the material. In imagination all is fluid. We can find the vessel, even create the vessel, but we always need to be aware of the waves that flow in and out.
A wave is a wave, and movement is movement. I see rhythm as more of a shape (in time) (comprised as a combination of waves and movements). Thus, for me, the characterization of rhythm as a container works quite well - and evocatively - for our purposes.
I read container a little differently in this context. I read it more as a pattern of beats that precedes words as in: da da DA, da da. As if Melville first felt that rhythm and knew he wanted to use it and only later did "Call me Ishmael" come to him. In that sense, da da DA, da da, that rhythm, is the container and "Call me Ishmael" is what filled it.
Although George has discussed his method of rewriting/revising before finishing a piece, I was never sure why that was a good idea. (Wouldn’t it be better to get the whole story out before it walks away to find some other vessel? And then start revision after a complete draft is done?) But this idea of capturing the rhythm first and then repeating it (yes, as in a fugue) suddenly makes the ‘revise early’ method make sense to me. Thanks!
Elizabeth Gilbert believes in a literal muse. If the writer doesn’t work on the idea fast enough, the muse takes it elsewhere. Sometimes I feel like this is true. (Wacky, perhaps. 🤪) I work on novels and then someone else writes them.
I’ve been thinking all day about what you said about muses and losing a story if you don’t write it quickly enough. If that happened, I’ve forgotten the ideas, anyway but there have been story ideas, and like Woolf, I was “crammed with ideas and visions…[but] unable to dislodge them,” but I’ve kept them alive by thinking about them and making notes. A number of years ago I had a series of visions, ideas, and dreams. I tried to write stories using those ideas, but nothing worked. Then one night (I think it was during Covid) when I couldn’t sleep, an idea came to me, and it fell into place. I laid abed telling myself the story and sort of worked out how the series of visions and ideas could be worked into a coherent, but strange plot. In the morning, I made a few notes and shortly afterward, spent at least a month just writing the first draft of what became a chapter-length ‘book within a book’ I was writing. And I also have a muse who I trust and find myself speaking to at times.
This is such an interesting experience. I had a few of those during COVID—it was an intense time of caretaking and deaths in my family—and they were powerful. Although I wrote some scenes, I can’t bring them together in any coherent way. I’m querying a novel, but hope to get bad to that more mythological work and see if I am up to it.
I am sorry to hear you had such a sad and terrible time of sickness and death during Covid. My experience was stressful, but nothing like what you went through. I was never sick but do blame a chronic condition I developed on the stress. As for my experience of the visions, they were so intense, I never forgot them. But it took many years before I realized how I could assemble them cohesively. Ask your muse for guidance.
Another way I've been working on a story is by writing small fragments. The first fragment also came to me on a sleepless night. But I've been busy with revising other works and kept putting off developing the story/fragment further. Occasionally I'd make a few notes, follow random ideas down alleys, then, because I've subscribed to mary g's prompts, I thought, why not write another fragment every Monday? I've come up with a general outline, and according to her prompt (sometimes I don't follow the prompt very closely), I'll pick up on one of the ideas I've outlined and write another fragment. This way, at least I am growing it, and when the time comes to stick the fragments together (they are really just roughed out short-shorts at this point), I'll have something to work with.
I encourage you to work with mythological material. I can't seem to work with anything else. It's like swimming in an endless sea of story.
Ah, that is such a great way to use Mary g’s prompts and I’m sure she would love to know! And boy, stress can surely contribute to chronic conditions. So sorry!
I, too, am focused on another (complete) work, but I will need to move on soon. The novel is about a high school teacher, book banning and mixing church and state business. (And, of course, relationships—the heart of all novels.) I’ve workshopped it, had beta readers, had a complete read with a professional editor. Thought it was good timing, but I must be doing something wrong. I’ll go to small publishers and see what they think. But I need to start some new writing soon. And Irish mythology is calling my new protagonist.
Yes, the Ancients often called upon their muses to fill them with the story they were about to tell. Knowing Gilbert has a muse makes me feel a little less crazy.
This has definitely happened to me. In some ways it made me feel better (like, this idea I had wasn't so bad, even if I wasn't able to bring it to fruition).
It’s been a while, but I know Gilbert discusses this in ‘Big Magic” and elsewhere. She knows a poet (named in the book, I can’t remember who), who gets ideas outdoors and had to make a run for the house, to find a writing implement before the idea, which is also on the move, passes her by and hooks up with someone else.
Way back, I wrote a little review of “Big Magic” with high school students as my intended audience. Here’s a bit on the muse: “ In discussing creative ideas as ‘big magic,’ Gilbert insists that ideas are, if not living beings, at least animate. They roam the universe looking for a body to inhabit, someone who will bring them to life. Sometimes, if the chosen person doesn’t get this done quickly enough, the idea will flee, looking for a better person to get the job done. She has a wild story about this happening in her own life. She had a great idea for a novel, but because of unforeseen circumstances, she couldn’t get it done. As I read this, I thought, ‘Oh, I know where that idea went!’ because I had read a very similar novel. And then, a few paragraphs later, Gilbert mentions that very novel and explains how the idea left her and inhabited the other novelist–in a kiss between them. This sounds crazy, but when you see how closely related the two novels are, you have to ask yourself: what’s a better explanation? And you have none. So–big magic.” https://schoollibrarylady.com/2015/12/04/nonfiction-big-magic/
Yes! I remember this--about "State of Wonder." Such an amazing story!
Also, here is the quote from Gilbert's book "Big Magic" about the poet you mentioned who ran in order to write down her poems:
"One of the best descriptions I’ve ever heard of this phenomenon — that is, of ideas entering and exiting the human consciousness at whim — came from the wonderful American poet Ruth Stone. I met Stone when she was nearly ninety years old, and she regaled me with stories about her extraordinary creative process. She told me that when she was a child growing up on a farm in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields when she would sometimes hear a poem coming toward her — hear it rushing across the landscape at her, like a galloping horse. Whenever this hap ned, she knew exactly what she had to do next: She would “run like hell” toward the house, trying to stay ahead of the poem, hoping to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough to catch it. That way, when the poem reached her and passed through her, she would be able to grab it and take dictation, letting the words pour forth onto the page. Sometimes, however, she was too slow, and she couldn’t get to the paper and pencil in time. At those instances, she could feel the poem rushing right through her body and out the other side. It would be in her for a moment, see king a response, and then it would be gone before she could grasp it — galloping away across the earth, as she said, “searching for another poet.” But sometimes (and this is the wildest part) she would nearly miss the poem, but not quite. She would just barely catch it, she explained, “by the tail.” Like grabbing a tiger. Then she would almost physically pull the poem back into her with one hand, even as she was taking dictation with the other. In these instances, the poem would appear on the page from the last word to the first — backward, but otherwise intact. That, my friends, is some freaky, old-timey, voodoo-style Big Magic, right there. I believe in it, though."
We seem connected when we tune into that creative space. This was confirmed to me when I recently conducted a historical writing workshop. Several writers came up with the same setting and similar ideas. I am sure the end works would be different but there is at lease an initial connection, a fluidity, a flow in the wordless sharing space where ideas accumulate.
Definitely, Victoria, this is to do with . . . the more esoteric side of writing or anything at all one does. These things, these essences, are real, just as real as anything physical. Inspiration, what breathes life into something? A whole crowd at a stadium, say, is possessed of an essence, which imparts specific rhythms; readers or writers at a café, in solitude but together, are possessed of another. We are vessels, or carriers, and have a choice of what we fill ourselves up with--the good, the bad, the nasty or Divine.
Money, Wall Street, is a rhythm. Blog writing is another. 'Birds of a feather flock together.' Academia, or pedantry, is another. Freedom and inspiration, another. Such simple wisdom, this is where I wish to be with anything, including writing and the "flow."
Clairvoyance is real, and ideas and thoughts do leap, to wherever they'll find a home and the right Nutrigrow . . . Capture the rhythm first, then let it run through you . . . be with it, get out of the way, that is the biggest challenge.
One day, a few weeks back, I was writing, and nothing could perturb me. The process was invincible, that particular essence or rhythm having found the right home. Other days, I touch on it, but as it still has not grown (with me), it can easily disperse.
I appreciate this discussion, because I think the importance of rhythm in prose can’t be overemphasized. Unfortunately, it’s something writers understand better than editors. While in graduate school back in the early ‘90s, in the pre-Internet days, I published my first story. However, when it came in the mail and I read it, I was devastated: an overzealous editor had added numerous commas to my sentences, destroying the rhythm. Virtually all the joy of that first publication was taken from me. I applied White-Out to those extra commas before I showed the story to anyone, but of course, then the text was littered with white blobs. Now, in the days of online literary magazines, I’ve learned to be politely firm with editors, and insist I see and approve any changes to my story before they publish it.
One of the things I love about this 'conversation' between Le Guin and Woolf is that it is about feeling and following (or being borne forward on!) rhythm as part of the writing *process*, as much as it is about the resulting fluidity or rhythm of the prose we create, and that the questioner is therefore spot on in asking about how to hone that 'sensitivity'.
While what Woolf describes is probably not quite the same as the experience of Flow that Csikszentmihalyi (and other theorists) talk about, there's something ... connected to that idea, I think. Woolf suggests that until she can *feel* that wave bear her up and carry her forward in the work, the work feels stilted and difficult. Perhaps even impossible.
I love that George is consistent in advising us to focus on revision as the ongoing and magical/delightful process where writing is refined, but I have to admit that while I agree, on the whole, there is something else in Woolf's quotation that feels to me to be talking about finding the pulse of a work before you can even begin, and then being able to stay with that pulse as you write the first (zero) draft.
It may not be for everyone, but I recommend taking your writing 'for a walk' as (part of) a process for getting the rhythm of a piece of work to inhabit the body as well as the mind. It can be useful to choose a walk that suits the piece you're working on: a walk along the ocean shore, or a wide-open field, if you want big, open, expansive prose. A switchback bush track with lots of turns and clambering for something more close, dense, slow. I like to walk and walk until I 'find' a few lines that work, or until I feel the rhythm of the prose in my body: its pace and pauses. I find that when I then return to the desk to write, my body recalls the rhythm of the work that I found while walking. Sometimes I even have some fragments to start with--sentences or phrases. Sometimes I feel something larger about form and shape: once, taking a walk that started in protected rainforest, moved through state forest (pines grown to be harvested in neat lines), and ended high on a mountain after a difficult, sharp incline, I discovered a rhythm for a short story that reflected how it felt to walk that path.
It's amazing to me how walking, running, trotting, physical movement and the spaces we would choose to undertake that activity in, just how relevant that is to this conversation. How the way we would breath during that movement, how that would affect our ability to converse and how that would be represented on the page, it is all so fascinating to me that there is a correlation there.
I wonder if it’s related to how rhythm in writing (poetry and prose) is connected to musicality, and how so often we respond to and interpret music through movement: dancing, bobbing, tapping, nodding. The rhythms of prose might feel less urgent, repetitive, and propulsive, but I think we (maybe just some of us!) feel them in our bodies. And maybe even if you don’t have that ‘feel’ for rhythm in the body/mind to begin with, you can learn to feel it?
Agree with this, even those who wouldn't claim any rhythmic talent would tap their toes to beat they feel. Or enjoy reading aloud the pitter-patter meter of a nursery rhyme. It's something deeper than just the logic of the action.
The walking advice is so useful thank you. Walking certainly helped me find the nature scenes in my debut novel, and the rhythm to which I could return. I found it particularly helpful that you describe different settings, different aspects of nature in which to walk. But there are places I write about which are impossible for me to physically visit so I find it helpful to look at paintings or photographs of landscapes, to find the record where nature is relatively unchanged. I immerse myself in the landscape by walking myself through it in imagination. I hone this imagination by watching birds in flight, seeing what they see as they soar. It's a both thing - walking and dreaming.
Hi Saige! I'm so pleased that this idea feels helpful to you.
That's interesting about wanting to walk in the places where your story is set when you can. For me, this isn't so important in terms of catching the rhythm of the writing, but can be so important for writing really rich and authentic place.
I have aphantasia (I don't have a visual imagination), so I don't share your experience of being able to walk through a landscape in the imagination: I'm pretty envious of folk, like you, who can do so!
WOW: thank you, Nike, for connecting this to embodied rhythm—this goes directly to the post by @Malachi above on dancing. I do a lot of walking and I am often playing (worrying) over writing in my head but I hadn't thought about having it worked out in my body. This is great—since in the end, you only know you've "gotten it right" when you feel it in your body.
Hello dear writing people. This is my first comment here and English is not my native language, I am from Spain. Sorry for that. I would like to add something to those wonderful reflections you wrote about rhythm: the musical sense in prose writing. I have studied composition and musical harmony before commit myself to writing and it was really helpful when I began to write prose. The sense of melody translated to the phrase construction. And the sense of Harmony translated to the events and thoughts happening in the text. I think there are a brain links between both fields, fiction and music.
My two cents.
Pardon my English.
I cannot thank enough George to be so kind, wise and enlightened, and to share it here and in all his books. All of them masterpieces. Bless you.
This matter of riding the wave has always been important to me. I have two adjacent points that come at this obliquely: one is Robert Olen Butler’s beautiful book “From Where You Dream” where he talks about his process being dreamlike, waiting on the wave. The other is a memory I have of taking a class in 1979 or 80 in writing speculative fiction from the dynamic trio of Ray Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon and Harlan Ellison (Antioch University West down on Fairfax and Santa Monica in LA). They trained us with great rigor in writing metered prose, which is a practice all three had. They gave us the most complicated exercises, writing stories using three different assigned meters in different paragraphs,for example. This was the hardest and best writing training I got on my way to an MFA in Poetry and a thirty year career in teaching poetry and prose, literature and writing at a community college.
WOW—what a line-up of teachers to have had, Sandy, that sounds like it was an amazingly challenging and inspiring class—and a great model for your own teaching!
I can’t wait to read David Jauss on the subject of rhythm.
It may sound heretical but much of the confidence I feel in the narrative prose I read and in all that I write depends on rhythm. This more than story or plot or character or theme. It’s like a percussive, a heart beating under any story I read that lets it live in me.
In writing, sometimes the rhythm drives the telling— it comes first— I love it when this happens. It feels like grace. Stanley Kunitz, the poet, referred to it as “body knowledge.” Other times I have to find my way to it in editing. George seems to make better use of editing than any one I know! This is a gift, Me, I can kill the thing before it has a chance to find its heart beat. I often need to walk away from work for quite a stretch of time to feel the rhythm fresh.
George, i think you might underestimate (in your response to questioner) your advantage in having a really “good ear” for the way a story sounds.
I agree wholeheartedly! It is really interesting, this need to disengage so as to reengage in proper rhythmic attunement, like any organic oscillation maneuvering inorganic conditions. We are, quite arguably, adjustable metronomes. It reminded me of Martin Amis's insistence on the voice as fundamental, primary to the telling of stories. Amis also contends that "style is not neutral," as "it gives moral directions," i.e., rhythm is a technology, and perhaps a conceptual tool for edification. I wonder what this might say about our heartbeats.
Thanks, HTBM, your point here got me thinking how when I'm checking out a book to buy or borrow, I read just the opening paragraph usually, and then the first full paragraph on pg. 50 (my friend Howard taught me this trick.) I always thought I was reading to see if I could connect with the author's voice. But now I think that "voice" is actually the rhythm that I am responding to (or not). And that in some instances, it's just not the right time for me and this book. That it might be in the future—when my biorhythm and its will be conducive.
I’ve been thinking a lot about rhythm because of attempting poetry now and then, and, with serendipity, I happened upon not one, but two articles today that touched on the topic of rhythm:
One was tilted “Does Music Make you Move - Here’s Why Our Brain Loves to Groove” in the July 4th edition of the Washington Post by Richard Sima, and the other was an article by Kathryn Schulz in the New Yorker (July 1, 2024) titled “Norman MacLean Didn’t Publish Much. But What He Did Contains Everything.”
The first article about moving and grooving to music attracted me as I had just returned from my son’s wedding where we all danced wildly as if there were no tomorrow (I know, not actually funny…on top of which several of us now have Covid), and I wanted to try to better understand the absolute joy that everyone felt dancing because, for one, it transcended politics, shall we say. It was unifying in its own heartfelt way. Sima’s article states that
“Psychological and neuroscience research suggests that the phenomenon of groove reveals something fundamental
about how our brains work: We enjoy trying to predict how the music will go, and we move to help us make that
prediction.”
And it goes on to say:
“When the musical rhythm is not completely predictable, it invites us to move and “fill in the beat,” said Maria Witek,
an associate professor of music at Britain’s University of Birmingham who researches music cognition. “The music
requires us to move to be complete, in a sense.”
Most significantly, he writes that
“People tend to find music that is moderately complex in rhythm elicits more feelings of groove than music with a
low- or high-complexity rhythm.”
!!!!!
The idea piques my interest in regard to “writing rhythms”, as well as a line or two from the article on Norman Maclean, wherein Schulz writes that:
“Maclean learned meter from his mother, who tapped his hand on the kitchen table while reading poetry aloud until he could tell anapests from iambs. That mastery is the invisible force tightening all the bolts on Maclean’s prose. “My ordinary style,” he once said, “is better than ordinary speech, but not so much you would notice it.”
And goes on later to say:
“The boys, being boys, just want to go out and start trying to catch fish, “omitting entirely anything difficult or technical in the way of preparation.” But the Reverend believes that people who don’t know how to fish should not be allowed to catch anything, “so my brother and I learned to cast Presbyterian-style, on a metronome.” “That lesson, on casting on a four-count beat, is the first one in the book, and it doubles as an introduction to the dynamics of the Maclean family. The instruction carries on from there: how to read the water, how to choose a fly, how to set a hook.”
So, I think both these articles can point to something critical about rhythm in writing, but I leave it to you to interpret / extrapolate it. :-)
Re: the dancing at your son's wedding (congrats btw and sorry about the Covid), you might enjoy William O'Neill's Keeping Together in Time (https://www.amazon.com/Keeping-Together-Time-Dance-History/dp/1597406740), a whole (short) book about how moving together unifies people and how that has affected human history. And yes, Norman Maclean did write the most perfect sentences.
The rhythms of Maclean's "A River Runs Through It" are hypnotic to me, and have that frisson of understatement and restraint while carrying deep emotions. Same thing happens when I read something like Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried": some of the stories are almost like songs, though songs that blow you apart. Marilynne Robinson's work feels that way to me too, as well as Kent Haruf's. Directness with layers. Wish I could write a tenth that well.
I don't hear rhythm mentioned much, if at all, in prose — such considerations seem to be lumped under the amorphous heading of "voice." It's hard to articulate why that V.Woolf passage has such impact — I agree with the divine Ms. LeGuin's observation that it enters the realm of mystical truth. There is a certain vibe (for lack of a better word) I've at least partially stumbled while writing a story or an essay when the work seems to flow — according to an innate rhythm. Wish I could figure it out!
Testing to see if I can put a link here in a comment - this link was provided by the questioner but I somehow missed it - it's Le Guin talking through this whole idea of Woolf and rhythm - fascinating.
https://youtu.be/bVSL7ERb7TY
Thanks George and thank you so much for the links a month or so back, to the plays of your work. I created family evenings to watch these and was blown away by the talented actors and the beauty of the words in your work which works through us.
For what it may be worth, I've written an essay on the subject of rhythm in prose. It's called "What We Talk About When We Talk About Flow," and it's in my 2022 book Alone With All that Could Happen: On Writing Fiction (Revised & Expanded Edition). I think there may be a few things in the essay that might supplement and complement Woolf's wise words.
Oh my goodness! David Jauss! Wonderful to see you here. I very much enjoyed your book, and I just now took a look (again) at the chapter you mention, which contains this near the beginning: "...when we talk about flow we're talking about an element of writing that is more music than meaning and thus beyond rational explanation... Hence it's difficult to discuss.. but not impossible." And then you discuss it wonderfully! (People of Story Club--check it out!)
Thanks for the thumbs-up, Mary!
So glad to see you here, David! I will take this opportunity to offer a heartfelt recommendation of David's essay about revision, which I've reread a bunch of times since I first encountered it several years ago as one of David's students in the low-residency MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. It is one of those pieces of writing about writing that tends to clear the crud out of one's brain and make the good stuff flow from the pen a little more easily. Its argument is very in keeping with George Saunders's own views regarding the magic of revision. https://gristjournal.com/2020/02/the-flowers-of-afterthought-premises-and-strategies-for-revision-by-david-jauss/
Many thanks, Bill. I'm really pleased that you found my essay on revision valuable. A somewhat revised version of the essay will appear in my new book, Words Made Flesh: The Craft of Fiction, which is due out in Oct. from Press 53.
How wonderful to find you here, David! I love your book on writing craft—one of my all time favourites!
Thanks! I'm very pleased you liked my book. I have a new one coming out in October that I hope you'll also find worthwhile.
I'll keep an eye out for it--I'm sure it will be marvelous.
I cannot wait to read this, David!
I hope you find it helpful!
No ebook for Alone with All that Could Happen, alas (my vision requires ebooks), but your story collections look intriguing. I look forward to checking them out.
Added to my to-buy, keep, and cherish list, thanks David.
And followed through with purchase. Winging its way to New Zealand!
Thanks, Saige! I hope the book earns a place on your bookshelf.
Your valuable book will hold a special place on my bookshelf.
Great question and response. I know that feeling. Sometimes I'll not know what word will be right for a sentence, but I'll know it has a certain number of beats. It will have been dictated by the words that came before. I mostly know when a rhythm is working or not when I read something aloud. Right now I'm reading WOLF HOLLOW to my son at bedtime. The rhythms are so good. There's almost never a hitch when I reading, none that I can think of, so that I'm convinced the author must have read the novel aloud to get the rhythm and the pacing right. Same with my own writing; if I think I'm finished but I haven't read it out loud then I end up changing the rhythms drastically at least in some parts once I read it out loud. I always say the eye is sharp, but the ear is ancient and wise. Since humans have listened to stories far longer than we've read them, the ear is just a much better judge than the eye. It'll tell us when the rhythms are working or not.
This is so true! Once I'm done writing and editing a piece, I always read it aloud regardless if it's poetry, fiction, or a newsletter/blog post. Not only do I find errors, but I can also hear if there are any "hitches" that you mention.
I think the way Woolf uses Rhythm here is different from what I'm used to. At first when I hear the word rhythm in prose I think of writing for the "ear", and it is that but also different. From Woolf's sentence.. "..A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it;" I get she is saying all writing derives from emotion. Feeling. There might be analogy in music, where rhythm is perhaps more obvious than in prose. Consider the feeling that inspired Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring," or Beethoven's "Fifth Symphony,"to , say, a Julie Andrews song in Mary Poppins. The same notes were available to all three composers, but their feelings or emotions resulted in quite different compositions. In this sense a piece's internal rhythms might not be easy on our ear. I know myself I sometimes try for discordant rhythms or a dissonance in my writing if I'm trying to synch with a mood that I might not even be able to name or describe. Early on I used to think EB White was a master of rhythm, and he was, but I thought his style of rhythms were the archetypes one must aspire to to be a good writer. Now I recognize, I think, that there are as many rhythms out there as there are writers, and exploring rhythm through words is one of the joys of writing.
I agree. Getting the rhythm right feels joyous.
I like the musical analogy here, and might take it a step further and equate it to the musical concept of phrasing. It's not just the notes, it's the the rhythm of the notes. And two artists who sing the same notes may do so with different phrasing, creating a vastly different effect.
Agree. That's why sometimes cover songs can be almost unrecognizable from the version we've got stored in our brains. And sometimes sound awful.
Love this discussion. I was thinking Ursula Le Guin's appraisal of Virginia Woolf's letter seemed overblown, but then I had to admit that in screenwriting, at least, rhythm may be more important than anything else. Reading a script, you can feel when things drag or skip a beat or falter rhythmically in some way. Movies are ruined by scenes that start too early, end too late, stall out in the middle, or seem redundant or pointless. In the streaming era, we're all more aware of the overall rhythm of a TV series, the shape of individual episodes—how many shows feel like movie ideas stretched out needlessly over eight or ten hours?—so many ways rhythmic failures can undermine a story.
Three things I've learned about rhythm in screenwriting:
1: Where you first feel rhythmic wrongness is almost never the first place to fix it. It started earlier. Something is off on the previous page, or five scenes back, or even in the initial set-up, to cause this scene to feel off. Screenwriters always talk about how Act 2 problems are really Act 1 problems. or Act 3 problems go back to either or both. When I'm reading my work and feel something off, I look back at the previous scene, back to the start of a sequence, back to the very beginning. I misled myself somewhere. If I find it, I can reset the rhythm.
2: As discussed here previously, a big part of storytelling is how much to reveal and when to reveal it, which is to say, there's what the reader or audience knows and what they don't know. Balance between these creates rhythm. I think maybe all story rhythm is essentially balance—on the beat and off, foreground and background, progress and reversal, what characters say vs. what they do, interior motivation vs. exterior event or action, emotion and logic, humor and gravity, a dozen other balancing acts, including—especially in story endings—inevitability and surprise. I'm not sure there's anything more important in writing than balancing these opposites in a satisfying way.
3. Think like a film editor. I know writing literary fiction and editing a movie are very different, but they have this in common: you have to decide what image follows the one you're on. I'm not the first to observe that reading creates movies in our minds (this is why the book is almost always better—you already made your movie out of it). As we write, we're seeing the movie, but when you're busy solving plot problems or giving characters more depth or dialogue more verve or a scene more tension, it's easy to forget what you're making readers or viewers imagine.
The great film editor Jay Rabinowitz cut the first movie I ever had produced, and I was blown away by his ability to create alternate sequences from daily footage to show different ways to tell the story: one way might emphasize the protagonist's impatience; another, his fear; still others would be fantasies or memories—all made from essentially the same material. I'd always believed in the primacy of the image in film storytelling, but now I could see the power of the cut. That taught me to be clearer about what I wanted to see, shot to shot.
There are probably more things I could write on the subject of rhythm. But remember the mnemonic about spelling the word? Ride Hard Your Three-Headed Monster. Maybe three is enough.
'Where you first feel rhythmic wrongness is almost never the first place to fix it. It started earlier. Something is off on the previous page, or five scenes back, or even in the initial set-up, to cause this scene to feel off. ' Brilliantly helpful, thank you Jim.
Thank you, Jim, this is terrific! You've given me (us) several other layers to consider—very helpful!
As a musician first, writer second I feel entitled to weigh in. I am intrigued by LeGuin's statement and on some level know it to be true. All good writing has a groove. Tom Wolfe, Hemingway—both have it in opposites. It's a feel and flow, and this is what we talk about first with great jazz musicians, not their notes (for writers, words). Miles Davis once said the secret to his sound was his time. He had incredible rhythmic phrasing. And said something of great value to all artists, including writers. "LEAVE EVERY OTHER PHRASE OUT." How do you develop this feel? Hmmm, I can tell you as a musician. Copy the masters, inculcate their groove into your own body, and then read out loud when editing. You KNOW when it's grooving, because your body tells you. Get out of your mind, and into your body. Harder for writers than improvisers maybe? Develop the long phrase, the short phrase, the long arc and short arc, mix and match, and know that when it gets tedious it's because there's too much of one and not enough of the other and you ain't swingin.'
I totally agree. Out of the head! Leave that to the editing. No groove while editing, except when reading aloud. Vonnegut read his early work aloud to himself. Grace Paley too, to hear the rhythms and keep'em.
I have a theory on rhythm from the point of view of the reader. I don't know how many people this happens to. This is going to sound very OOO EEE OOO but keep in mind that I'm trying to express something by metaphor.
I have noticed that there are certain writers I like way more than others even if the substance of what they are saying is similar to another author. I've come to think of this as a matter of "wave-length" and that is in large part a result of the habitual rhythm of an author when s/he has found their "voice." I am not talking about the difference between skilled and "clunky" writing. It is more a matter of being more tuned in at an almost unconscious level to the internal sound of one skilled writer more than another. Peter Brown writing on Late Antiquity is one of the authors who does this for me in non-fiction. The fiction writers are too many to count.
I have written a fair amount of poetry, almost none of it in a poetic "form." But the rhythm of what I am writing is all important and I agree with Woolf that hearing that (it IS an internal hearing) leads you to the right word. Of almost as much importance to the sound is the sensitivity to internal rhyme and off-rhyme. As a result, several of those who have published me in the "little magazines" have said in their acceptance letters that they like the way my stuff "sings" with no actual attention to strict meter. And I do find that my poems often go somewhere I did not expect as I work with this. When the word shows up, its meaning, its connotations, can take me somewhere very different from where I thought I was going when I started.
Was about to pose the question: does voice determine rhythm?
by voice I mean the thing that makes up the writer's (or at least poet's) particular and recognizable style. No one would ever confuse Wallace Stevens with William Carlos Williams--I happen to be in the Stevens camp.
So when I talk about voice connecting, I mean the characteristic rhythms of the style seem to strike a chord for no real reason I can see but some sort of shared "vibe."--again, being metaphorical. In the more literal sense of voice, that can happen in poetry, though. Some poems just read aloud better than others, even in free verse.
Equally attentive readers find different authors on their own personal wavelength. In genre fiction, Donna Leon and John Scalzi do it for me. I'll preorder their books without even checking to see what they are about. I know I'm going to bask in them.
A thoughtful and intelligent question. However, I am not convinced that George Saunders, in trying to respond to it, is able to relate what the essence of rhythm in writing actually is. He says: "Sometimes it feels like a rhythm has to be there, as a sort of container for the words to flow into." I associate the word 'rhythm' with a wave pattern, with movement that comes into its own out of a unique dynamism, a force that propels the story forward. A container does what it purports to do: it contains. Rhythm as container does not, cannot work. Rhythm is wave, is movement... in a vast sea of rolling stories.
I had the same problem with the word "container." I think I know what George is getting at, and if the container is not hard edged and a thing of confinement in the usual sense of container but something else - if we can consider emotions and feelings sometimes coalescing into a container maybe that works.
Waves flow in and out of the physical body including the geography, the land, which is full of vessels. So much of our world and wider universe is fluid. Songs of nature flow in and out of solid forms which only seem to be solid when we attach ourselves to the material. In imagination all is fluid. We can find the vessel, even create the vessel, but we always need to be aware of the waves that flow in and out.
A wave is a wave, and movement is movement. I see rhythm as more of a shape (in time) (comprised as a combination of waves and movements). Thus, for me, the characterization of rhythm as a container works quite well - and evocatively - for our purposes.
I read container a little differently in this context. I read it more as a pattern of beats that precedes words as in: da da DA, da da. As if Melville first felt that rhythm and knew he wanted to use it and only later did "Call me Ishmael" come to him. In that sense, da da DA, da da, that rhythm, is the container and "Call me Ishmael" is what filled it.
Although George has discussed his method of rewriting/revising before finishing a piece, I was never sure why that was a good idea. (Wouldn’t it be better to get the whole story out before it walks away to find some other vessel? And then start revision after a complete draft is done?) But this idea of capturing the rhythm first and then repeating it (yes, as in a fugue) suddenly makes the ‘revise early’ method make sense to me. Thanks!
The idea that a story will walk away to find another vessel is interesting! Could be a story…
Elizabeth Gilbert believes in a literal muse. If the writer doesn’t work on the idea fast enough, the muse takes it elsewhere. Sometimes I feel like this is true. (Wacky, perhaps. 🤪) I work on novels and then someone else writes them.
I’ve been thinking all day about what you said about muses and losing a story if you don’t write it quickly enough. If that happened, I’ve forgotten the ideas, anyway but there have been story ideas, and like Woolf, I was “crammed with ideas and visions…[but] unable to dislodge them,” but I’ve kept them alive by thinking about them and making notes. A number of years ago I had a series of visions, ideas, and dreams. I tried to write stories using those ideas, but nothing worked. Then one night (I think it was during Covid) when I couldn’t sleep, an idea came to me, and it fell into place. I laid abed telling myself the story and sort of worked out how the series of visions and ideas could be worked into a coherent, but strange plot. In the morning, I made a few notes and shortly afterward, spent at least a month just writing the first draft of what became a chapter-length ‘book within a book’ I was writing. And I also have a muse who I trust and find myself speaking to at times.
This is such an interesting experience. I had a few of those during COVID—it was an intense time of caretaking and deaths in my family—and they were powerful. Although I wrote some scenes, I can’t bring them together in any coherent way. I’m querying a novel, but hope to get bad to that more mythological work and see if I am up to it.
I am sorry to hear you had such a sad and terrible time of sickness and death during Covid. My experience was stressful, but nothing like what you went through. I was never sick but do blame a chronic condition I developed on the stress. As for my experience of the visions, they were so intense, I never forgot them. But it took many years before I realized how I could assemble them cohesively. Ask your muse for guidance.
Another way I've been working on a story is by writing small fragments. The first fragment also came to me on a sleepless night. But I've been busy with revising other works and kept putting off developing the story/fragment further. Occasionally I'd make a few notes, follow random ideas down alleys, then, because I've subscribed to mary g's prompts, I thought, why not write another fragment every Monday? I've come up with a general outline, and according to her prompt (sometimes I don't follow the prompt very closely), I'll pick up on one of the ideas I've outlined and write another fragment. This way, at least I am growing it, and when the time comes to stick the fragments together (they are really just roughed out short-shorts at this point), I'll have something to work with.
I encourage you to work with mythological material. I can't seem to work with anything else. It's like swimming in an endless sea of story.
Ah, that is such a great way to use Mary g’s prompts and I’m sure she would love to know! And boy, stress can surely contribute to chronic conditions. So sorry!
I, too, am focused on another (complete) work, but I will need to move on soon. The novel is about a high school teacher, book banning and mixing church and state business. (And, of course, relationships—the heart of all novels.) I’ve workshopped it, had beta readers, had a complete read with a professional editor. Thought it was good timing, but I must be doing something wrong. I’ll go to small publishers and see what they think. But I need to start some new writing soon. And Irish mythology is calling my new protagonist.
Yes, the Ancients often called upon their muses to fill them with the story they were about to tell. Knowing Gilbert has a muse makes me feel a little less crazy.
This has definitely happened to me. In some ways it made me feel better (like, this idea I had wasn't so bad, even if I wasn't able to bring it to fruition).
That’s a great attitude. I get down on myself for not being able to bring it to fruition. But, hope springs eternal, and I start the next project.
Rick Rubin says the same thing
If you find yourself with extra time, this podcast is a re-run and double feature with Rick Rubin and Mary Karr (not together, one after the other). In Karr’s interview, she has fun stories about George Saunders. Here’s the link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-tim-ferriss-show/id863897795?i=1000658623902
Thank you, Sea!!
Thanks!
It’s been a while, but I know Gilbert discusses this in ‘Big Magic” and elsewhere. She knows a poet (named in the book, I can’t remember who), who gets ideas outdoors and had to make a run for the house, to find a writing implement before the idea, which is also on the move, passes her by and hooks up with someone else.
Way back, I wrote a little review of “Big Magic” with high school students as my intended audience. Here’s a bit on the muse: “ In discussing creative ideas as ‘big magic,’ Gilbert insists that ideas are, if not living beings, at least animate. They roam the universe looking for a body to inhabit, someone who will bring them to life. Sometimes, if the chosen person doesn’t get this done quickly enough, the idea will flee, looking for a better person to get the job done. She has a wild story about this happening in her own life. She had a great idea for a novel, but because of unforeseen circumstances, she couldn’t get it done. As I read this, I thought, ‘Oh, I know where that idea went!’ because I had read a very similar novel. And then, a few paragraphs later, Gilbert mentions that very novel and explains how the idea left her and inhabited the other novelist–in a kiss between them. This sounds crazy, but when you see how closely related the two novels are, you have to ask yourself: what’s a better explanation? And you have none. So–big magic.” https://schoollibrarylady.com/2015/12/04/nonfiction-big-magic/
The novel is Ann Patchett’s “State of Wonder.”
Yes! I remember this--about "State of Wonder." Such an amazing story!
Also, here is the quote from Gilbert's book "Big Magic" about the poet you mentioned who ran in order to write down her poems:
"One of the best descriptions I’ve ever heard of this phenomenon — that is, of ideas entering and exiting the human consciousness at whim — came from the wonderful American poet Ruth Stone. I met Stone when she was nearly ninety years old, and she regaled me with stories about her extraordinary creative process. She told me that when she was a child growing up on a farm in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields when she would sometimes hear a poem coming toward her — hear it rushing across the landscape at her, like a galloping horse. Whenever this hap ned, she knew exactly what she had to do next: She would “run like hell” toward the house, trying to stay ahead of the poem, hoping to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough to catch it. That way, when the poem reached her and passed through her, she would be able to grab it and take dictation, letting the words pour forth onto the page. Sometimes, however, she was too slow, and she couldn’t get to the paper and pencil in time. At those instances, she could feel the poem rushing right through her body and out the other side. It would be in her for a moment, see king a response, and then it would be gone before she could grasp it — galloping away across the earth, as she said, “searching for another poet.” But sometimes (and this is the wildest part) she would nearly miss the poem, but not quite. She would just barely catch it, she explained, “by the tail.” Like grabbing a tiger. Then she would almost physically pull the poem back into her with one hand, even as she was taking dictation with the other. In these instances, the poem would appear on the page from the last word to the first — backward, but otherwise intact. That, my friends, is some freaky, old-timey, voodoo-style Big Magic, right there. I believe in it, though."
Oh, thank you for that excerpt!
I love this imagery, the girl and the galloping poem - the catching of it even by the tail. The way it finds another poet if you don't catch it.
We seem connected when we tune into that creative space. This was confirmed to me when I recently conducted a historical writing workshop. Several writers came up with the same setting and similar ideas. I am sure the end works would be different but there is at lease an initial connection, a fluidity, a flow in the wordless sharing space where ideas accumulate.
No doubt the end products will turn out to be different, but the initial connection is very interesting.
Definitely, Victoria, this is to do with . . . the more esoteric side of writing or anything at all one does. These things, these essences, are real, just as real as anything physical. Inspiration, what breathes life into something? A whole crowd at a stadium, say, is possessed of an essence, which imparts specific rhythms; readers or writers at a café, in solitude but together, are possessed of another. We are vessels, or carriers, and have a choice of what we fill ourselves up with--the good, the bad, the nasty or Divine.
Money, Wall Street, is a rhythm. Blog writing is another. 'Birds of a feather flock together.' Academia, or pedantry, is another. Freedom and inspiration, another. Such simple wisdom, this is where I wish to be with anything, including writing and the "flow."
Clairvoyance is real, and ideas and thoughts do leap, to wherever they'll find a home and the right Nutrigrow . . . Capture the rhythm first, then let it run through you . . . be with it, get out of the way, that is the biggest challenge.
One day, a few weeks back, I was writing, and nothing could perturb me. The process was invincible, that particular essence or rhythm having found the right home. Other days, I touch on it, but as it still has not grown (with me), it can easily disperse.
Sort of like tuning up your car before going for the drive instead of after.
Sorry for this delay. Substack is not forwarding the majority of responses to my e-mail.
I appreciate this discussion, because I think the importance of rhythm in prose can’t be overemphasized. Unfortunately, it’s something writers understand better than editors. While in graduate school back in the early ‘90s, in the pre-Internet days, I published my first story. However, when it came in the mail and I read it, I was devastated: an overzealous editor had added numerous commas to my sentences, destroying the rhythm. Virtually all the joy of that first publication was taken from me. I applied White-Out to those extra commas before I showed the story to anyone, but of course, then the text was littered with white blobs. Now, in the days of online literary magazines, I’ve learned to be politely firm with editors, and insist I see and approve any changes to my story before they publish it.
One of the things I love about this 'conversation' between Le Guin and Woolf is that it is about feeling and following (or being borne forward on!) rhythm as part of the writing *process*, as much as it is about the resulting fluidity or rhythm of the prose we create, and that the questioner is therefore spot on in asking about how to hone that 'sensitivity'.
While what Woolf describes is probably not quite the same as the experience of Flow that Csikszentmihalyi (and other theorists) talk about, there's something ... connected to that idea, I think. Woolf suggests that until she can *feel* that wave bear her up and carry her forward in the work, the work feels stilted and difficult. Perhaps even impossible.
I love that George is consistent in advising us to focus on revision as the ongoing and magical/delightful process where writing is refined, but I have to admit that while I agree, on the whole, there is something else in Woolf's quotation that feels to me to be talking about finding the pulse of a work before you can even begin, and then being able to stay with that pulse as you write the first (zero) draft.
It may not be for everyone, but I recommend taking your writing 'for a walk' as (part of) a process for getting the rhythm of a piece of work to inhabit the body as well as the mind. It can be useful to choose a walk that suits the piece you're working on: a walk along the ocean shore, or a wide-open field, if you want big, open, expansive prose. A switchback bush track with lots of turns and clambering for something more close, dense, slow. I like to walk and walk until I 'find' a few lines that work, or until I feel the rhythm of the prose in my body: its pace and pauses. I find that when I then return to the desk to write, my body recalls the rhythm of the work that I found while walking. Sometimes I even have some fragments to start with--sentences or phrases. Sometimes I feel something larger about form and shape: once, taking a walk that started in protected rainforest, moved through state forest (pines grown to be harvested in neat lines), and ended high on a mountain after a difficult, sharp incline, I discovered a rhythm for a short story that reflected how it felt to walk that path.
It's amazing to me how walking, running, trotting, physical movement and the spaces we would choose to undertake that activity in, just how relevant that is to this conversation. How the way we would breath during that movement, how that would affect our ability to converse and how that would be represented on the page, it is all so fascinating to me that there is a correlation there.
I wonder if it’s related to how rhythm in writing (poetry and prose) is connected to musicality, and how so often we respond to and interpret music through movement: dancing, bobbing, tapping, nodding. The rhythms of prose might feel less urgent, repetitive, and propulsive, but I think we (maybe just some of us!) feel them in our bodies. And maybe even if you don’t have that ‘feel’ for rhythm in the body/mind to begin with, you can learn to feel it?
Agree with this, even those who wouldn't claim any rhythmic talent would tap their toes to beat they feel. Or enjoy reading aloud the pitter-patter meter of a nursery rhyme. It's something deeper than just the logic of the action.
The walking advice is so useful thank you. Walking certainly helped me find the nature scenes in my debut novel, and the rhythm to which I could return. I found it particularly helpful that you describe different settings, different aspects of nature in which to walk. But there are places I write about which are impossible for me to physically visit so I find it helpful to look at paintings or photographs of landscapes, to find the record where nature is relatively unchanged. I immerse myself in the landscape by walking myself through it in imagination. I hone this imagination by watching birds in flight, seeing what they see as they soar. It's a both thing - walking and dreaming.
Hi Saige! I'm so pleased that this idea feels helpful to you.
That's interesting about wanting to walk in the places where your story is set when you can. For me, this isn't so important in terms of catching the rhythm of the writing, but can be so important for writing really rich and authentic place.
I have aphantasia (I don't have a visual imagination), so I don't share your experience of being able to walk through a landscape in the imagination: I'm pretty envious of folk, like you, who can do so!
WOW: thank you, Nike, for connecting this to embodied rhythm—this goes directly to the post by @Malachi above on dancing. I do a lot of walking and I am often playing (worrying) over writing in my head but I hadn't thought about having it worked out in my body. This is great—since in the end, you only know you've "gotten it right" when you feel it in your body.
Thanks for your kind response, Angela! I'm pleased to hear that this small idea about embodied rhythm has resonated with you :)
Hello dear writing people. This is my first comment here and English is not my native language, I am from Spain. Sorry for that. I would like to add something to those wonderful reflections you wrote about rhythm: the musical sense in prose writing. I have studied composition and musical harmony before commit myself to writing and it was really helpful when I began to write prose. The sense of melody translated to the phrase construction. And the sense of Harmony translated to the events and thoughts happening in the text. I think there are a brain links between both fields, fiction and music.
My two cents.
Pardon my English.
I cannot thank enough George to be so kind, wise and enlightened, and to share it here and in all his books. All of them masterpieces. Bless you.
By the way, there is no need to apologize. I would never have guessed English is your second language.
Yes, yes. Melody to the bridge and escalation. The parallels to music and the voice.
This matter of riding the wave has always been important to me. I have two adjacent points that come at this obliquely: one is Robert Olen Butler’s beautiful book “From Where You Dream” where he talks about his process being dreamlike, waiting on the wave. The other is a memory I have of taking a class in 1979 or 80 in writing speculative fiction from the dynamic trio of Ray Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon and Harlan Ellison (Antioch University West down on Fairfax and Santa Monica in LA). They trained us with great rigor in writing metered prose, which is a practice all three had. They gave us the most complicated exercises, writing stories using three different assigned meters in different paragraphs,for example. This was the hardest and best writing training I got on my way to an MFA in Poetry and a thirty year career in teaching poetry and prose, literature and writing at a community college.
WOW—what a line-up of teachers to have had, Sandy, that sounds like it was an amazingly challenging and inspiring class—and a great model for your own teaching!
I can’t wait to read David Jauss on the subject of rhythm.
It may sound heretical but much of the confidence I feel in the narrative prose I read and in all that I write depends on rhythm. This more than story or plot or character or theme. It’s like a percussive, a heart beating under any story I read that lets it live in me.
In writing, sometimes the rhythm drives the telling— it comes first— I love it when this happens. It feels like grace. Stanley Kunitz, the poet, referred to it as “body knowledge.” Other times I have to find my way to it in editing. George seems to make better use of editing than any one I know! This is a gift, Me, I can kill the thing before it has a chance to find its heart beat. I often need to walk away from work for quite a stretch of time to feel the rhythm fresh.
George, i think you might underestimate (in your response to questioner) your advantage in having a really “good ear” for the way a story sounds.
I agree wholeheartedly! It is really interesting, this need to disengage so as to reengage in proper rhythmic attunement, like any organic oscillation maneuvering inorganic conditions. We are, quite arguably, adjustable metronomes. It reminded me of Martin Amis's insistence on the voice as fundamental, primary to the telling of stories. Amis also contends that "style is not neutral," as "it gives moral directions," i.e., rhythm is a technology, and perhaps a conceptual tool for edification. I wonder what this might say about our heartbeats.
Thanks, HTBM, your point here got me thinking how when I'm checking out a book to buy or borrow, I read just the opening paragraph usually, and then the first full paragraph on pg. 50 (my friend Howard taught me this trick.) I always thought I was reading to see if I could connect with the author's voice. But now I think that "voice" is actually the rhythm that I am responding to (or not). And that in some instances, it's just not the right time for me and this book. That it might be in the future—when my biorhythm and its will be conducive.
I’ve been thinking a lot about rhythm because of attempting poetry now and then, and, with serendipity, I happened upon not one, but two articles today that touched on the topic of rhythm:
One was tilted “Does Music Make you Move - Here’s Why Our Brain Loves to Groove” in the July 4th edition of the Washington Post by Richard Sima, and the other was an article by Kathryn Schulz in the New Yorker (July 1, 2024) titled “Norman MacLean Didn’t Publish Much. But What He Did Contains Everything.”
The first article about moving and grooving to music attracted me as I had just returned from my son’s wedding where we all danced wildly as if there were no tomorrow (I know, not actually funny…on top of which several of us now have Covid), and I wanted to try to better understand the absolute joy that everyone felt dancing because, for one, it transcended politics, shall we say. It was unifying in its own heartfelt way. Sima’s article states that
“Psychological and neuroscience research suggests that the phenomenon of groove reveals something fundamental
about how our brains work: We enjoy trying to predict how the music will go, and we move to help us make that
prediction.”
And it goes on to say:
“When the musical rhythm is not completely predictable, it invites us to move and “fill in the beat,” said Maria Witek,
an associate professor of music at Britain’s University of Birmingham who researches music cognition. “The music
requires us to move to be complete, in a sense.”
Most significantly, he writes that
“People tend to find music that is moderately complex in rhythm elicits more feelings of groove than music with a
low- or high-complexity rhythm.”
!!!!!
The idea piques my interest in regard to “writing rhythms”, as well as a line or two from the article on Norman Maclean, wherein Schulz writes that:
“Maclean learned meter from his mother, who tapped his hand on the kitchen table while reading poetry aloud until he could tell anapests from iambs. That mastery is the invisible force tightening all the bolts on Maclean’s prose. “My ordinary style,” he once said, “is better than ordinary speech, but not so much you would notice it.”
And goes on later to say:
“The boys, being boys, just want to go out and start trying to catch fish, “omitting entirely anything difficult or technical in the way of preparation.” But the Reverend believes that people who don’t know how to fish should not be allowed to catch anything, “so my brother and I learned to cast Presbyterian-style, on a metronome.” “That lesson, on casting on a four-count beat, is the first one in the book, and it doubles as an introduction to the dynamics of the Maclean family. The instruction carries on from there: how to read the water, how to choose a fly, how to set a hook.”
So, I think both these articles can point to something critical about rhythm in writing, but I leave it to you to interpret / extrapolate it. :-)
Re: the dancing at your son's wedding (congrats btw and sorry about the Covid), you might enjoy William O'Neill's Keeping Together in Time (https://www.amazon.com/Keeping-Together-Time-Dance-History/dp/1597406740), a whole (short) book about how moving together unifies people and how that has affected human history. And yes, Norman Maclean did write the most perfect sentences.
The rhythms of Maclean's "A River Runs Through It" are hypnotic to me, and have that frisson of understatement and restraint while carrying deep emotions. Same thing happens when I read something like Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried": some of the stories are almost like songs, though songs that blow you apart. Marilynne Robinson's work feels that way to me too, as well as Kent Haruf's. Directness with layers. Wish I could write a tenth that well.
I don't hear rhythm mentioned much, if at all, in prose — such considerations seem to be lumped under the amorphous heading of "voice." It's hard to articulate why that V.Woolf passage has such impact — I agree with the divine Ms. LeGuin's observation that it enters the realm of mystical truth. There is a certain vibe (for lack of a better word) I've at least partially stumbled while writing a story or an essay when the work seems to flow — according to an innate rhythm. Wish I could figure it out!