Structuring sentences according to rhythm

rhythm is exceptionally important ( and is one of those things that i think gets folded into "talented writer" - an ear for it)

Take this sentence:

'The time has come,' the walrus said, 'to talk of many things'

Rearrange it. Recast it. Do everything with it

Does it have the same sound? With that sound, does it have the same impact? If you move the words around, does it sound different?


An old editor (who I credit with teaching me more about writing than I care to admit) wrote this blog about rhythm

http://www.samhainpublishing.com/news/got-rhythm/

All of my sentences, including this one, have sixteen sylla—

I am a huge fan of John Donne and several other Renaissance authors who wrote prose without the standardized grammar we have now. Donne especially liked to get long but it's still fairly easy to follow once you get the hang of the rhythms he uses and realize that his sentences use phrasing to create shape and emphasis where we might use a period. The benefit is he constructs these absolutely incredible extended metaphors sometimes over pages. One thought just logically extends from the last. When he uses a period you know you've just read something extremely important.

Odd about the upper limit for words, which is pretty bad advice. The standard I've been taught in journalism is no more than 30 for news ledes. That's supposed to the be shortest, tightest sentence in the piece, essential info only. It is extremely hard to actually hit that suggested benchmark and I've read perfectly good leads at 50+ words. Feature and long-form have even more flexibility. I wonder if anyone giving that advice for short sentences has ever actually counted the words in each sentence? I wonder if they've looked at how much info is communicated, too? Or colour and engagement with the writing? The only creative pieces I've read that seemed to suffer from such a hard rule almost universally had major, major issues with sentence variety. There is more to life than declarative sentences.

Jamesaritchie said:

Absalom! Absalom! by William Faulkner has what is supposed to be the longest grammatically correct sentence in English literature. It comes in at 1,288 words.

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Will have to give that sentence a read.
The only Faulkner novel I managed to make it thru was Light in August.
Not an easy author to grasp, though that may indeed be just me.
Dostoevsky wrote long sentences too. Fit what he wrote to a T.

VeryBigBeard said:

I am a huge fan of John Donne and several other Renaissance authors who wrote prose without the standardized grammar we have now. Donne especially liked to get long but it's still fairly easy to follow once you get the hang of the rhythms he uses and realize that his sentences use phrasing to create shape and emphasis where we might use a period. The benefit is he constructs these absolutely incredible extended metaphors sometimes over pages. One thought just logically extends from the last. When he uses a period you know you've just read something extremely important.

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Donne isn't an easy poet to read. I do from time to time and struggle. One of these days I should take a course in Medieval or Renaissance poetry for fuller appreciation. ps If you want to improve your rhythm reading poetry is definitely a help. Plus it's just darned cool once you get into it.

You have a point there, Fruitbat. Agree to a degree. Comparable or not though one can learn an awful lot from classics. I sure did !

Ken said:

Will have to give that sentence a read.
The only Faulkner novel I managed to make it thru was Light in August.
Not an easy author to grasp, though that may indeed be just me.
Dostoevsky wrote long sentences too. Fit what he wrote to a T.



Donne isn't an easy poet to read. I do from time to time and struggle. One of these days I should take a course in Medieval or Renaissance poetry for fuller appreciation. ps If you want to improve your rhythm reading poetry is definitely a help. Plus it's just darned cool once you get into it.

You have a point there, Fruitbat. Agree to a degree. Comparable or not though one can learn an awful lot from classics. I sure did !

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Donne is one of my favorite poets. I have no problem reading him at all, but this may be because I came to him early, and one of the first serious poems I remember reading was "No Man Is An Island". I can still recite it from memory.

It was a preface to Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, which was one of the first adult novels I read.

VeryBigBeard said:

I am a huge fan of John Donne and several other Renaissance authors who wrote prose without the standardized grammar we have now. Donne especially liked to get long but it's still fairly easy to follow once you get the hang of the rhythms he uses and realize that his sentences use phrasing to create shape and emphasis where we might use a period. The benefit is he constructs these absolutely incredible extended metaphors sometimes over pages. One thought just logically extends from the last. When he uses a period you know you've just read something extremely important.

Odd about the upper limit for words, which is pretty bad advice. The standard I've been taught in journalism is no more than 30 for news ledes. That's supposed to the be shortest, tightest sentence in the piece, essential info only. It is extremely hard to actually hit that suggested benchmark and I've read perfectly good leads at 50+ words. Feature and long-form have even more flexibility. I wonder if anyone giving that advice for short sentences has ever actually counted the words in each sentence? I wonder if they've looked at how much info is communicated, too? Or colour and engagement with the writing? The only creative pieces I've read that seemed to suffer from such a hard rule almost universally had major, major issues with sentence variety. There is more to life than declarative sentences.

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One of my majors in college was journalism, and it's an entirely different ballgame. I do think, however, that I learned more about writing good fiction in journalism classes than I did in all the creative writing classes put together.

Journalism has pretty tight space requirements, even in feature articles, but I specialized in columns, mostly humor, and in human interest pieces. Every letter counted, every space, every everything.

Jamesaritchie said:

Readability has nothing to do with how long a sentence is, but with how well written the sentence is. It's cadence, rhythm, flow, word choice, clauses, and knowing where to put in pauses so the reader can even read it out load without running out of breath.
...


I think one of the best things many, many writers could do would be to go through their manuscripts, and combine sentences whenever possible.

Individual short sentences are easy to read, but too many short sentences can make writing choppy or sing-song, and both of these are bad. Choppy writing kills readability in a story. Good writing demand a variety of lengths.

...
If a long sentence is difficult to read or comprehend, it isn't because of length, it's because the writer didn't construct it well, or write it well, or because the reader just isn't very good at reading long sentences.

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^This.

jonblondyn said:

what about using sentence rhythm as a means of setting a pace for the reader?

taking into consideration that the writer knows the length of a chapter and the way the narrative is structured, why is there anything 'irregular' about customizing the sentence via rhythmic pauses if the style better fits the flow?

plus, sentence-break forces the pause. if a writer wrote according to some rhythm, why not use the effect, especially when the comma is such a small thing;

to break the sentence forces the pause.

but perhaps this all comes to preference and perspective and how the modern novel is to be experienced.

jb

www.blondyn.com

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Good writers do use this technique, but seldom, if ever, by breaking a sentence. I find doing so poor writing, at best. Rather than breaking a sentence, you stop the sentence, start a new paragraph, and use a very short sentence to open it. A paragraph break is much larger than a comma, and a very short sentence following a long one, with a paragraph break between, does the job perfectly.

To me, breaking sentences is artificial, gimmicky, and interferes with reading, especially when there is no need for it.

Of course, I have no clue about the length a chapter will be. Nor does it matter. I think all good writer are masters of rhythm and flow, and both are internal. Good writers do not need sentence breaks in odd places to make every sentence flow as it should.

Even in poetry, there's a heck of a lot more to it than just breaking sentences in a certain place to get rhythm and flow. You might not know this by reading most of the internet poetry out there, but breaking sentence sin real poetery is not as simply as breaking for a pause,or breaking to give rhythm.

It's the internal rhythm and flow and meter that makes poetry works. If you want to use that same internet rhythm, flow, and meter in your fiction, breaking the sentences might work, but if you fail to do this, those broken sentences are just a pain in the butt to read.

As for, but perhaps this all comes to preference and perspective and how the modern novel is to be experienced.

I don't buy that for a second. If anything, modern readers have completely rejected such writing. Why do you think so few read poetry now?

The thing is, any good writer can force a pause wherever and whenever he wishes to do so. It's not difficult. While it may be a way to look at your own writing as an experiment, though I see no reason to do so, in a published book reading lines like that is something I can't imagine anyone, anywhere, wanting to read for long. It simply is not good writing, is not necessary, and hinders the reader in every way. There are too many much better ways of accomplishing the same thing. Good writers know them, and readers rightfully expect them.

Would you really want to open a published novel and find pages of writing broken up like this?

Fruitbat said:

Also, just a note on using "the classics" to back up a position... I think comparing fiction that was written a hundred years ago to what is considered good writing today often just doesn't apply. Otherwise, we'd also be doing phonetic spellings of all the dialogue from a dialect other than standard English, and many pages of static descriptions of settings. What readers expect and accept now vs. then is apples and oranges.

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Yet those classics are still in print, and still being read. How many of today's works will be in print 100 years from now? I'd hazard a much smaller percentage will survive that long, compared to what has come to us from previous centuries.

Jamesaritchie said:

Some are as long as several pages. Absalom! Absalom! by William Faulkner has what is supposed to be the longest grammatically correct sentence in English literature. It comes in at 1,288 words. I think it's a beautiful sentence. Sentences of two hundred to four hundred words are common.

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If I'd encountered that sentence during my school daze, I'd have immediately felt compelled to diagram it. (Well, first I'd have trotted down to the computer room and got some Really Big Paper.) I did so with a 300+ word sentence by Hawthorne.. it was an interesting exercise.