Do we ever learn rhythm in writing at grammar school?
AT A GLANCE
Always be a poet, even in prose. —Charles Baudelaire
I’m usually very conscious of my deadlines when I write but only because I want time to read what I write over and over, sometimes aloud, and to change it here, there, everywhere I can make it sound better. Mostly, I only change for rhythm, what sounds good to my ears.
I have no idea how I trained my ear, but then I also have no idea if my ear is trained enough. I mean, it’s possible that the rhythm I hear in my prose is lost on everybody else. It’s also possible that what sounds like music to my ears is just jarring to somebody else’s.
Come to think of it, has any of your writing teachers in grade school, high school, or college ever taught you about rhythm? OK, we learned about poetry at an early age. In nursery or kindergarten, we learned everything in rhymes, even onomatopoeia (“Baa Baa Black Sheep,” “...with a quack quack here/and a quack quack there...”), but I guess you had to be so far advanced or specializing in language or composition or poetry to cover those things extensively. Otherwise, unless you had been lucky to have a poet on a day job for a language teacher, you were mostly limited to grammar and syntax.
All I know is that you learn much about rhythm from reading constantly, the more diverse the material, the more you pick up. Some writers like Marcel Proust (Remembrance of Things Past) are generally slow and leisurely. Others are mostly fast and furious, say, James Ellroy (Black Dahlia, L.A. Confidential). But all writers must accomplish rhythm by varying the length of their sentences from paragraph to paragraph, lest they sound tedious or monotonous and tire the reader out.
To illustrate the wonders a variety of sentence lengths can do to your writing, here are some basic tricks I learned, which I try not to keep in mind, except unconsciously:
—Start with a short sentence. It gives the reader a jolt, which allows you to hold his attention long enough to follow it up with a long sentence that gives away the reason he is jolted in the first place. (Note: The preceding two sentences are an example of the trick we can call “The Short Sentence Followed by the Long Sentence.”)
—A short sentence that follows a long sentence packs a wallop, wrapping it up, if not punctuating it. Exactly what this sentence does. (Let's call this trick “The Long Sentence Followed by the Short Sentence.”)
—There’s a short sentence. There’s a long sentence. There’s a way these sentences connect. That’s what you call rhythm. (This trick invokes “The Power of Three” or “The Rule of Three,” which is to use a succession of seemingly repetitive sentences, usually short and snappy and most effective if there are three of them. Again, the sentences above are an example: The first three are similar in length and style, and the fourth, departing from what the preceding three sentences have in common, strings them all together into one whole idea, instead of three separate ones.)
—Whatever you do, don’t just do the first trick or the second or the third. You have to do them in combination and together with all the other tricks you might find in the book. In fact, all these three tricks you have to do sparingly and only to great effect.
Maybe, it’s all technical. When I started dabbling in poetry, I used to just play it by ear. I didn’t even know the first rule about haiku, which is to stick to three lines, the first and third line each with five syllables and the second line with seven. In the beginning, it sort of made it easier for me to do haiku, confident that I was at least technically grounded. Later on, however, I started to feel I was counting syllables rather than writing.
In my book Hai[Na]Ku And Other Poems (2016, Anvil Publishing), I wrote “D|SLOYALTY,” a poem of nine passages, each of the five lines in each passage only 10 syllables long, no more, no less. That was a poem of nine passages, 45 lines, and 450 syllables, but I’m not sure: Do nine passages, 45 lines, and 450 syllables a poem make? Surely not. It’s always the beautiful thought, but it doesn’t hurt to make a beautiful thought even more beautiful in a thoughtful package.
At the School of Fashion and the Arts (SoFA), where I taught Fashion Journalism, I had a Filipino-American student, whom I considered the best among all the writing students I’d ever had in that school and in others. She wrote as she spoke and even verbally she was articulate, not eloquent, but articulate. At some point, I told her, “I would be the last one to tell you not to write as you speak because you can’t get more authentic than that, but given that you seem to have ease with words, I’m looking for some craftsmanship in your work.”
Don’t get me wrong: I had no objections to her style. I only wanted to push her further because since her writing was flawless, grammatically at least, I believed she could worry about other things and elevate her writing to an art form, the words well curated to provide images similar to that provided by a painting.
I guess that as her reader, at first impressed by the ease with which she took me from idea to idea, I began looking to be entertained not only by what she had to tell but by the way she told it.
Practice. Practice. Practice.
All of us who went to grammar school (and took it seriously) can write, but not all of us are writers. As Alexander Pope wrote in his Essay on Criticism, "True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.”
