Alison and I have been having a mutual blog discussion on lyricism, writing, wordsmithing, and storytelling. This reminded me of a post I wrote back in Dec. called The Symphony of Writing.
Click on the link above to read the post and the comments to that post, but the gist of it was:
I forgot to factor in the symphony of writing.
I’m not certain if anyone else hears it or uses it. We all have individual ways with which we approach our writing. My way of writing uses a cadence. Alison once called it “the lyricism†of my voice.
Basically, I hear a rhythm to my writing, some people call it “the flowâ€Â. It’s not one instrument, but a symphony, consisting of the sentence, then the paragraph, then the scene, then the chapter, then the story as a whole. All of it must sound beautifully or I’m not satisfied. To me it’s like listening to music where one of the instruments is out of tune. It completely wipes out the beauty of the other instruments.
So here I am correcting newbie author mistakes, too many “he†and “sheâ€Â, similar words used too close together, etc. etc. Should be easy, right? It’s not. Because changing one word, can sometimes change the rhythm and I’ll have to rewrite the whole sentence, which sometimes causes me to have to rewrite the whole paragraph. In the end, the information is exactly the same, but the presentation is different to continue the lyricism. Chapter One was a pain because I could hear that something was off-key, but I couldn’t pin it down. In the end, it took 4 cps to pinpoint 4 different things and a bit more tweaking on my part to get the start of the music flowing that would carry through the rest of the story.
I think this is what we mean when we say, “Finding someone who “gets†our writing.†I think it’s also why there are some authors whose writing I can’t enjoy. Their writing is just off-key to me. I can’t get into their flow. This is also why I think some editors will turn away writing that’s good, but “not for themâ€Â. They just don’t listen to the same music you do.
I always thought this rhythm was related to storytelling. Now I’m wondering if the cadence I hear is related to wordsmithing instead.
