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August 31, 2020

Rhythm in Prose: The Rolling Waves of Storytelling

Criticism, Writing

guest post, Igor Livramento, narrative, pace, sounds

21 comments

Today’s post on the concept of rhythm in prose is authored by Igor da Silva Livramento. He’s a fellow academic from UFSC, fellow author, fellow creative-writing advisor, and overall a great fellow. He’s also a composer, music theorist, and producer. Check out his papers on Academia.edu, his music on Bandcamp, and his personal musings on his blog – in Portuguese, Spanish/Castilian, and English.

So you’ve heard of rhythm. It exists most explicitly in music, especially music with drums and beats and looping patterns. It also exists in poetry, with its rhyming and metrical patterns.

Indeed, rhythm is a remarkable feature of our very life and its processes. Think of sleeping, walking, breathing, or having a heartbeat.

No wonder, then, that rhythm in prose is so important. In this post we’ll see how it manifests and why it matters.

rhythm in prose
Rhythm in prose operates both on the syntactic and the narrative level

Artistic Rhythm

There is rhythm in the arts, as there is rhythm in life. Just as we breath and walk somewhat regularly along time periods, so we speak and dance and sing and stomp our feet.

The arts most infamous for their studies of rhythm are music and poetry, bequeathing us the oldest treatises about such topics.

These two arts are affine to each other, so much that it’s said they were born together. In other words, the ancient Greek àiodós (ἀοιδός), the poet-singer, is the common origin for both practices.

For us, interested in the arts of words and letters, poetic rhythm stems from the patterns of (un)stressed syllables in the verses and across the whole poem. At least that’s how it works in English and some other modern languages, like Portuguese and Spanish.

And don’t go thinking there is no rhythm in architecture (have you walked through the place/site?) or in painting or sculpture (how many movements have your eyes made to grasp the whole thing?). Every curve is a variation of intensity and it affects the rhythm of apprehension.

Rhythm in Prose: from the Syntactic to the Narrative Level

Aside from the obvious syntactic-level rhythm in prose, borrowed from poetryThat is, choosing words in order to (regularly) distance (un)stressed syllables from one another, a strategy used by classical Roman rhetors., there is also at least one more level for rhythm in prose.

With recent studies regarding story beats – a word well-suited to our discussion – in narrative arts (originally stemming from film studies, only later arriving at creative writing), we get to envision this rhythmic layer.

For the sake of naming, let us call it information delivery: the pace at which a reader receives new information regarding the story.

But how do we put it to use?

In Practice

With our definition in hand, we get to know a few aspects of narrative rhythm regarding the sentence level, besides poetic (syllabic) considerations.

Beyond this, we get to the aforementioned level of information delivery. Each new bit of information speeds up the pace and takes up more cognitive space in the reader’s current working memory.

Doing so, it demands more of their attention. And yet, it produces more interest as it populates the fictional universe, unfolding sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph. Ultimately, it surrounds their imagination from all sides, progressively engulfing them.

As you’ve probably noticed, both levels intertwine intimately. I can present new happenings via descriptions, dropping this new coin at the reader’s pocket with a gentle sleight of hand; or I can roll people on the floor, fist-fighting and pulling hairs, to throw the reader face-first on the ongoing action.

Cognitive considerations should be taken, as stress is a main factor in memory retention and in the self-perception of pleasure.

A Note about Diegesis

I’ve used a fancy theoretical word up there: diegesis. It used to be Greek, but not anymore, for French literary theorist Gerard Genette provided us with a redefined use of it in his narratological studies.

Because classical Greek thought was based on pairs of conceptual opposites (somewhat simple dialectical thinking), the opposite of diegesis was mimesis.

Let us take a sneak peek at its meaning. Mimesis was translated to Latin as imitatio (phonetic resemblance to imitation is the clue we’re looking for).

Thus, if mimesis imitated the story we want to tell (think of reenacting it as a play, performance, or film), diegesis tells it from without (think narration, or even hearsay).

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Diegesis and Plot

But as I’ve said, big ol’ G. G. redefined the term for modern narratological studies. Diegesis concerns the whole of the fictional world presented to the reader: characters, actions, locations, objects, etc.

This creates a divide between the internal diegetic level of the fiction’s happenings (intradiegetic) and the external level of how we deliver information to the reader (extradiegetic).

From this we can tell literary rhythm concerns both levels. Short sentences (extradiegetic level) speed up reading, but that does not necessarily correspond to stuff happening quicker inside the story (intradiegetic level). Coinciding or diverging both levels makes up for a powerful rhythmic tool.

Another example: Think of a film scene depicting a slow motion punch to the face. An extradiegetic decision (slowing down the information delivery) affects directly the intradiegetic affective meaning of what happened (someone punched someone else), thus rendering it far more symbolic than a real-time paced punch (something rather fast and almost meaningless; just watch a boxing match and you’ll see what I mean).

Thus, the secret for literary rhythm is to decide at which pace and speed to deliver each information, aware that reading has its own inherent rhythm, pace, speed, and time.

Rhythm in Prose: Plot Isn’t Everything

The above might make you think plot is everything when it comes to rhythm. But in actual fact, plot is akin to glue, sticking the whole thing together, rather than something more substantial, like bricks.

A memorable novel with great rhythm but little plot is L’amant, by Marguerite Duras. The very language used has an internal rhythm respective to memory, forming layers upon layers of comes-and-goes, rolling waves of story.

But plot may be used to plan beforehand and guarantee an internal rhythm. Excessive elaboration may go unnoticed by the reader. Think of the sestina. It has a fixed form so complicated, that its internal complexity becomes inapprehensible when the poem is read out loud.

As a note from experience: Beware of too much planning. It feels fun and promising, all sun rays and glory, but it is not work done.

Just as we feel time in our lives filtered through so many intermeshed rhythms (breath, talk, walk, sleep, blink and sight, heartbeat, chewing, and so on), so we do in the arts.

Rhythm in Prose: A Fun Exercise

I have stumbled upon poetic rhythms because I was recently invited to co-translate a forgotten Latin author.

Classical antique poetry did not have rhymes. Sometimes, it did not even have a fixed stanza, only variation in syllable durationOr stress; apparently Latin was much closer to neo-Latin languages than it first seemed. served to ground the form.

Because of that, I had to research some stuff and I’ve found out Latin prose writers also used rhythms, but not through the whole sentence. Rather, they counted from the final syllable backwards up until the eighth from last.

This practice was called clausula (literally: “little close”). Discussed both by philosophers and rhetors, it added finesse to a sentence’s ending, showcasing the author’s abilities.

Some classical authors, known to adhere to the Attic (or plain) style, did not take rhythm into consideration. The ones adhering to the Asiatic style did care for rhythm, and their prose remained in the highest esteem, considered the finest possible, until the early 19th century.

Pope Gregory VIII formalized the main four endings, which he labelled:

Effectively, there are 128 possible combinations, but these four were the most praised end-of-sentence rhythms.

I invite you to experiment. It can get real fun, and it will provide more writing skill. Maybe, like me, you’ll have to check a thesaurus every so often to achieve adequate rhythms, enriching your vocabulary as I did mine.

21 Comments

  1. Rhythm is extremely important. I create it in the writing phase, but always listen several times to pieces, and the whole of a scene. So many tools exist – sentence length, stress on words or sentences, synonyms used to affect the number of syllables, the presence or absence of an initial conjunction – just to name a few.

    Practice writing haiku helps (mine are NOT classical themes, but I stick to the 5-7-5 syllable pattern for the discipline). No formal study, but, if you read enough, including in the classics (even if only in English and Spanish), you will have a subconscious layer to draw on.

    The change of the perfect word to a synonym that is slightly less perfect but works the rhythm is one of the small editing changes that feed the soul.

    1. Igor Livramento Igor Livramento

      Your last sentence makes me think of a lesson hardly learned, encoded in the Portuguese language saying: melhor feito que perfeito (roughly: “better done than perfect”, conveying that perfectionism hinders one from finishing anything).

      On the topic of classics: it was the reading of Brazilian classics that lent me most of my taste, even when it gets to guilty pleasures (fantasy, sci-fi, erotica, noir…). I have to admit most anglophone classics do not appeal to me. One who seems to be hugely appreciated is Henry James and gosh do I still have to find something even more awful and boring. At the same time, Ross Macdonald’s Sleeping Beauty (noir), Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (spec-fi I guess), and Ernst Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea remain my favorite novels, and they’re all originally anglophone. Alas! Behold such mysteries, mind! Taste is indeed a mystery.

      Do you have any other practices you’d suggest? I always derive something great from your suggestions.

      1. Chris🚩 Chris

        If I may interject a thought, one tactic I’ve been experimenting with in the novel I’m currently working on is alliteration. I’ve noticed that it can be extremely efficient for rhythmical purposes (perhaps more so in prose than poetry), and particularly efficient in steering the reader in certain interpretations.

        As an example, I could mention the following: “all the fruitless
        possibilities, all the false starts, all the futures that, like fallen
        fledglings, faded away succumbing to feral realities.”

        There is a concept consistent with what is expressed here, a word beginning with f-, which I want the reader to become (subconsciously?) aware of, without reading it explicitly. This can go unnoticed with careless readers, but it can be very effective with serious ones.

        In the end, I’m only writing to please myself (that sounded funny), so it doesn’t really matter.

        1. You must please yourself FIRST. Otherwise you’re a hack. Fine, if you need to eat or pay for you kids’ college. But it’s not funny at all. It’s fundamental.

      2. I agree with Chris on alliteration. Here’s a recent favorite (f):

        The second full draft of Akiiya’s story was almost finished. And [she was] in the perfect mood to be ruthless with the final cuts. Every speck of fat would be flensed from the carcass, the long lean line of the story laid bare, characters purified in ritual fire. Her ferocity, penned and dammed, found outlet in Akiiya’s service. She had closed her eyes, transshifted, Akiiya’s world for once safer than her own.

      3. Henry James likes a literary device which is one of my biggest pet peeves – the ambiguous ending. The resolution is left up to the reader. Not my idea of an ending, but some like making their own decisions.

        1. Chris🚩 Chris

          Ah, I have to admit I love ambiguous endings! In recent years, my own literary endings are stubbornly ambiguous. Basically, I feel an almost obsessive need to force the (intended) reader to share responsibility in deciding.

          In Illiterary Fiction, one character reads an excerpt from an unnamed book to another (which, indeed, is yet another of my novels, The Other Side of Dreams). When the character read to wants to know how the book ends, he hears it’s ambiguous, and the ending is what the reader wants it to be. He replies: “How on earth can something written on a page be ambiguous?! Some things are either or. God, readers give me a headache sometimes!”

          Yes, self-reference is another of my teasing tricks 😀

          1. We shall agree to disagree on endings.

            Self-reference I do.

        2. Igor Livramento Igor Livramento

          To answer both of you in the outskirts: I like ambiguous endings. They’ve been around in Brazilian fiction since 1891, and made famous in 1899 with the extremely undecidable narrative of Dom Casmurro (the whole novel is a dude writing his own memories, so book-within-a-book to begin with and then resentment all over the place through unreliable narration via memory). Can’t get much more ambiguous than that before reaching experimental literature. From the same author (Machado de Assis) we get self-referential moments in an 1881 novel. These things shaped my taste! But his style is nothing like the long run-on sentences of H. James I found in his translations (published by none other than Penguin). Instead, Machado de Assis wrote for feuilleton publication, so almost every chapter is short and ends on a (realistic) cliffhanger, to keep readers interested in next week’s chapter (ensuring they’d buy the next number of newspaper). Hence, his novels end up having 150+ chapters, most of them stretching for maximum five-pages long. It’s just stylistic preference really.

          On another note: alliteration is hard as heck in Portuguese, but assonance (repetition of vowels) is easier. Albeit we have a vocabulary rich in synonyms so phonetically different from each other, e.g. “red” is either vermelho, rubro or carmesim. All these are pronounced unlike each other (and have semantic connotations of their own, the first attached to shame, the second to war, the third to blood – a combination that sounds like a Russian novel, haha!).

          On yet another note: I’ve been writing with my eyes closed. Have any of you attempted that? It’s been helping me tons with writing without editing as I go. It also makes scenes appear so much more vividly in my mental theater.

          1. Chris🚩 Chris

            Writing with eyes closed — now that is something I need to try! I can imagine it must be particularly suitable for stream-of-consciousness, oneiric kind of scenes.

          2. Igor Livramento Igor Livramento

            Oh if it does! I’ve written a 1000+ words long SOC in mere 20 minutes or so by just closing my eyes and immersing myself in the character. Something slightly psychoanalytical free association of ideas (but with a strong characterization going on useful for later, as tension builds which later becomes guilt).

          3. I definitely go through a stage writing with my mind’s eye open – it doesn’t matter whether MY eyes are open or not, as I’m not here.

            That’s because I can’t focus on language if I don’t know plot. The language is in service of plot, for me, not the other way around.

            I don’t know Portuguese, but I’ve never tried writing fiction in Spanish, so I don’t know what problems I’d have, except that by comparison to Spanish, English is more compact – Spanish takes forever to say the same things. I’ll watch for assonance, but don’t read much in Spanish any more. My sisters do, but they live in Mexico.

            Personal preference. We read Don Quixote in the original, and picaresque novels.

            Your serializing author is similar to Dickens in writing to fill a daily space. Soap operas on paper. And there were no movies or TV or even radio stories back then, so people depended on print plus an oral tradition.

          4. Igor Livramento Igor Livramento

            No doubt about Quijote, but that’s slow as heck.

            Dickens is fascinating, but I have yet to defeat one of his humongous volumes. The opening paragraph to A Tale of Two Cities is amazingly ironic, gotta love that.

            But far from mere filling pages – Machado’s novels are notably short, pocket editions hardly reach 220 pages – he was condensing information to the minimum necessary. I’d say he was respecting the reader’s time and interest. He was also an undisputed master of the short story, of course.

            He also translated Victor Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea and Poe’s infamous Raven preserving rhyme, a fascinating feat later to be repeated by Fernando Pessoa, Portuguese legendary modernist poet.

            Soap operas… I guess that’s why our televised ones are worldwide famous..? Somewhat of a tradition. And I don’t belittle it, it’s amazing.

            As for Portuguese, I don’t know, English feels stiff to me, with both Spanish and Portuguese feeling much more fluent (and compact if need be).

          5. I read a lot of Dickens in my youth, nothing recently. I spend any energy I have writing, and there is little left for reading (which tends to become consuming).

            Are you a writer, Igor?

            If I had more energy, I’d write much faster, but then I wouldn’t be writing the story I’m writing (which has a disabled main character of three), so it’s a wash.

          6. Igor Livramento Igor Livramento

            I am a cosmic entity [I wish there was a comedic marker I could use here]. But alas! I write. Not consistently; in bursts. Working on that, as consistency helps a ton, I’m aware. The question puts me at such an uncomfortable position, though, I have to admit I’m not as much a professional-like writer as I wish I was. But I do believe every single word written with intention and/or conscience counts.

            I’ve worked with disability during undergrad. Then and there I’ve adapted lots of teaching materials for students with … I think in English it’s called “print disabilities”, but I’m not sure. Well, visual impairment. One of my favorite novellas is written as
            a single humongous stream-of-consciousness, it puts us on a blind girl’s shoes, written by Peruvian-Mexican author Mario Bellatin. The title can be roughly translated as A letter about the blind to be used by those who can see.

            As for an example of my aforementioned writer, here goes my rough translation. I had to adapt it to English, because Portuguese verb agreement allows dropping obvious pronouns. So I’ve reinserted them, which slows down the text considerably; as they’re absent in the original, it is originally shorter and faster than here:

            Three o’clock still, she was anxious. She walked around, entered the kitchen, prepared some coffee. She turned the TV on, turned it off, opened a book. She watered the watered plant, flipped the phone book’s pages looking for a friend to call. She took the martini bottle, gave it up, it’s strange to drink alone at 3:30 in the afternoon. They may think you’re an alcoholic. She would open drawers, tidy panties and bras. She supervised her husband’s socks, none of which needed patching. There were no socks in bad condition, she forgot that he was a neurotic for socks, at the slightest sign of fraying, he threw them away. He didn’t even give them to the building’s employees, he tossed them straight in the garbage.

          7. I’m not sure I get you. The last paragraph is a translation of someone else’s work?

            Stream of consciousness makes me itch – it it goes on very long. I just stop caring. I am more mainstream than literary in most ways. I need characters, a plot, obvious themes AND great language. The language gets me stuck into the ‘literary’ category for marketing because so many things seem so carelessly written lately. But I can’t abide characters who are aimless, or using language an actual human would not.

            “I’ll know it [what I like] when I see it.”

            I think I would have used ‘examined’ or ‘inspected’ instead of ‘supervised’ for what the woman did with her husband’s socks, if I had written the above, but it’s a minor point.

          8. Igor Livramento Igor Livramento

            Tis my translation of Machado de Assis’ writing. The opening paragraph of one of his short stories. I thought it would illuminate that he did precisely what you described: somewhere between literary and mainstream, because here in Brazil such a distinction does not hold.

          9. It shouldn’t be, but it often is – and once things are separated into categories, they often get pushed toward an extreme.

            When I was a kid, it was mainstream plus maybe mystery and SFF; now you can see a #1 Bestseller in ‘Paranormal Urban Steampunk Romance Crime’ or some other VERY narrow category. It’s all marketing.

  2. Chris🚩 Chris

    I think the line between literary and mainstream can be particularly thin sometimes, and — even more interestingly — it’s a moving target. Perhaps that’s particularly the case with non-realist genres. I mean, much of Gothic fiction was written as mainstream (perhaps ironically enough, considering its functions), yet nowadays we treat it as literary, as a result of its canonical position in the academia.
    Who knows, 100 years from now maybe Weekend at Bernie’s is considered a classic!

    1. Igor Livramento Igor Livramento

      That film is a classic over here in Brazil! Everyone knows it, we even had popular music based off of it!

      1. Chris🚩 Chris

        Haha, brilliant! It deserves it, great film 😀


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