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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.

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.

• Descriptions slow down the pace, producing a sensation of time stopped, especially due to verb choice (and tense) and the use of qualifiers (adjectives and adverbs).
• So do internal states of characters and their musings, but only as long as they don’t have…
• …action, which speeds up the pace. It’s irrespective if that’s stemming from actual events in current diegetic time or from memory.
• Dialogue is interesting, for it puts us in the very present diegetic moment, as the pace we take to read the dialogue is the very same pace at which it happens.

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).

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:

• plānus: 2nd and 5th;
• tardus: 3rd and 6th;
• velōx: 2nd and 7th;
• dispondaicus: 2nd and 6th.

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.