I was just asked to contribute something to the Fairfield MFA blog, and I thought I'd copy my post here. The following is a revised, abbreviated version of a piece I wrote a few years back for Bret Anthony Johnston's Naming the World.
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Style is a very simple matter; it is all about rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words... Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.
I came upon that quotation from one of Virginia Woolf’s letters a few years back. I circled it, came back to it again. I typed it out and found myself quoting it, days later, to the students in my fiction workshop. Woolf seemed to say something I’d been trying to articulate to myself for years: what exactly happens on those rare occasions when it feels as if the work’s coming from some source outside us? I don’t think we’re talking about latching onto a cluster of quirky details, though that may be part of it. I don’t think it’s simply about coming to know one’s characters so fully that they begin to take on independent lives, though that may be a part of it too. It seems to me that that sense of supreme immersion might have something to do with matters of rhythm--or more precisely, finding a rhythm that matches the meaning of the drama. A rhythm that isn’t decorative or distracting but crucial: the crucial music that makes a piece of writing sing. Of course this is something that can’t be willed into being. Talk to any poet and she’ll assure you of that, which is probably why poets, unlike prose writers, might be more sporadic creators than we are—we poor, poor prose writers, with our chair-bound work ethic. I wonder what the interrelationship is between rhythm and the condition we typically describe as “inspiration.”
So my question is, how can we bring one of the central tools of the poet to our work and be more conscious of pauses, sentence-length, stops, even alliteration and assonance in the prose we read and write? Not to will our work into being, but to open ourselves up to our own rhythms--the patterns of our everyday speech, the quirkiness of the way we move and walk--and to engage those on the page.
2 comments:
I guess I shouldn't be surprised, Paul, knowing what a Woolf fan you are... But I too read this same letter sometime back in the 90s. (I remember I was taking the train across country--train travel is about rhythm, too--and was deep in a Virginia/Vita phase.) Just the statement "style is a very simple matter; it's all about rhythm," was a huge epiphany for me; it knocked me out, and transformed the way I thought about writing.
I agree with you (if I'm getting you clearly) that rhythm is 1) what we often mistake for inspiration and 2) something poets are often more attuned to than prose writers.
I used to love to write sonnets, I think for the simple reason that the discipline of writing them works some transformative magic over the mind. You start out thinking you have all these restraints--a determined rhythm, really--of rhyme and meter, and it seems impossible that anything worthwhile or not terribly cliched might come out of it. And then you immerse yourself in the rhythm of the pentameter, and suddenly it all starts to fall into place, as if naturally, as if it really were just a matter of following the thread of the poem through its own meanders. What a feeling! Unless, of course, you come upon the Minotaur...
I definitely think it is about "finding a rhythm that matches the meaning," but I wonder if it isn't also about immersing oneself in the rhythm of play to the extent that your critical, conscious mind is temporarily suspended, and a subconscious, creative mind takes over which, as it happens, is much cleverer than your conscious mind anyway! So maybe not matching the meaning so much as suspending the meaning for the sake of experimentation and play...meaning always has time to rush in and take over and eventually (worst case scenario) enbalm the text...
Sorry to go on about it, but I loved this post!
Love this post, Paul, and Christopher's comment. Much appreciated.
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