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| Rhythm and Solitude |
To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the inner music the words make. ~Truman Capote, McCall’s, November 1967
Christmas Eve, one hundred miles from Anchorage , silent and still, a crisp, clear night pillowed with two feet of fresh snow, lit by a small string of lights hung on a small spruce tree. Blissful, radiant quiet broken only by hooting of horned owls, calling one to the other. We are the only ones here. The only people around for miles.
Out of the darkness my friend hears a human voice, sharp and close and clear. A little girl, calling “Mommy.” Later we’re told an unmarked grave lies on a neighboring lot. A little girl, five years old.
I don’t know about ghosts. But I know about solitude. A spirit, a child, alone on a wintery holiday eve, calling for her mother – this doesn’t seem so far-fetched, knowing we’re hard-wired for companionship, perhaps even from beyond the grave.
In her essay “Telling is Listening,” Ursula LeGuin points out that in preliterate societies, stories are communal, a way of connecting. Audience is central. Rhythm, in particular, is relied on not only to help the tellers recount long narratives, but also to bind the audience with the storyteller. She applies a concept of physics, entrainment, which she calls a “beautiful, economical laziness” to explain how things that are physically close tend to lock in and pulse at the same intervals, as the audience and the teller will do through a story.
Perhaps that explains our ghost, pulsing on a crisp, cold evening. It also explains how writers connect with their readers, through beats of language, through rhythm and repetition and silence.
I am not a café writer. I do my best work in solitude. I expect those who write best in cafes and other lively places enjoy a strong ability to resist entrainment, or perhaps even better, the ability to riff off it. I cannot, I confess, even write with classical music in the background, despite research that points to the Mozart effect , the idea that certain classical beats stimulate activity in the creative parts of the brain. The rhythms in the music butt up against the rhythms in my head, and I get nowhere.
Other research suggests that rhythmic activities like walking and ironing have a similar positive effect on creativity, which is why on a long walk, a fresh approach to a scene or a character will often reveal itself even when I’m not consciously puzzling over my work. The reason, scientists say, is that repetitive motion occupies a dominant left brain so the more creative right half can push insights forward. I like this, since walking and ironing can be done alone.
No matter how you work best, it’s useful to consider how rhythm connects us with readers. As scenes find their place on the page, I become a slave to sound, arranging and rearranging for maximum effect. I used to believe this was a problem, slowing me down and turning my focus from larger, more important considerations like character and plot. But I can’t help it. For me, rhythm is the pulse of the story. LeGuin would say it’s how I connect to an audience I can’t see.
Here’s how Virginia Woolf explains it in a letter to Vita Sackville-West (1926):
“As for the mot juste, you are quite wrong. Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sigh, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it.”
What could be more personal, more mysterious, more profound than this wave in the mind? No wonder some of us require solitude to recapture it.
Though if that all seems too weighty, you should know Woolf also added, “No doubt I shall think differently next year.”
Mysterious, indeed.
Try This: Settle into your favorite setting, communal or solitary. Starting with either a scene in rough form or a promising piece from your journal, play with the same material by writing first in staccato rhythm (sentence fragments work well) and then in a long, complex sentence that undulates with its own rhythm. Don’t be rigid; if the rhythm leads you in another direction, go with it. Let it be a door to discovery.
Check This Out: Ursula LeGuin, The Wave in the Mind, titled from Woolf’s lines quoted in the epigraph. A prolific and versatile writer, LeGuin is smart and savvy without pretension. In this eclectic collection of talks and essays on writing, reading, and the imagination, LeGuin also touches on issues of gender, beauty, and anthropology. A joy to read and contemplate.
Deb’s “Self-Made Writer” posts are also archived at www.selfmadewriter.blogspot.com.
I'd like to offer a subtle distinction. There is a beat and there is rhythm, but they are different things. The steady beat of walking or the sound of a heart beat create the tempo for writing. A writer can create a fast tempo, as though running, with quick changes in scene, dialogue, plot, or action. We call it a page turner, and it helps the reader sense that the the writer is encouraging an embodied experience comparable to running with a quickened heart. Alternatively, the writer can choose changes in scene, plot, and syntax that invite a slow strolling tempo with a relaxed heart beat. Once the tempo is set as slow or fast (or something in between), then it's possible to play with rhythm. Rhythm in music is the mix of quarter notes, eighth notes, half notes, and whole notes that create interesting variations within the steady beat tempo. Walking rhythms emerge while dancing. Quick and slow dance steps play within the steady beat. Singing also can have fast, slow, syncopated, and varied rhythms. Variations in syntax, sentence length, length of words, dialogue, and the quickness of the timeline all vary the rhythm within the underlying beat or tempo of the story. Both the choice of a tempo (a steady beat) and variations in rhythm can help entrain the reader with the writer's sense of the pacing and rhythm. Writing begins to feel like dancing with the writer as the lead and the reader as a follow who responds to the beat and rhythm of the words. Responding and entraining with another's rhythms while dancing releases oxytocin, an intimate bonding hormone that creates a blissful high. The same bonding effect occurs sometimes when I entrain with writing that matches my body's beat and rhythm.