I am awfully surprised that I haven't had this thought before.

[kiya]

Someone on rasfc made a response to me that got me off on thinking about how my writing twines up with music so readily. (Of course, given the way my life tends to twine up with music, this isn't a surprise.)


I responded noting that it's a rhythm and cadence thing for me too, the way the sentences evoke the rhythm of the actions, and described one bit as:

At most it's a chord of events with a grace note trill into something that really happens all at once. I can't break the chord, distinguish into separate sentences, without slowing down the motion.

This as part of describing a sequence in the WIP: Jaci has entered combat with an opponent with a knife. She blocks the attack on her forearm, catalogues its effects, and hits her opponent in the chest hard enough to break the breastbone pretty much all in the same thought and action. Context is someone (goodness, is that green_knight starting that thread? Shows how much I'm paying attention, as usual) talking about difficulties in writing action, and people suggesting short sentences with concrete detail in response.

Hrm. Will include relevant sentence: Jaci caught the blade on the side of her forearm, felt it bite, slide off the bone, felt the unnatural burn of the poison, and then the heel of her other hand struck the woman's breastbone and she heard the crackle of shattering bone.

(It's hard for ^me to verbalise this, I'm finding; ^I'm not as adept with pulling the images into language as some of the rest of us. Bear with, please.)

The way that language forms rhythms is important to the feel of a piece; sentence length and cadence is a part of that. A sentence composed of several short clauses strung together, comma-differentiated, has a different pattern than those short clauses as independent sentences, has a different pattern than the "same" sentence would set up with semicolons. The motion comes out differently, the sense of the speed of it and the fluidity. It's very Jaci, the way it went.

Mikel fights differently. More deliberately, with semicolons, with commentary; like the bystanders in one of those anime combats saying what all the techniques are called, what's going on, what each move means. (I judged his speed with several feints, watching the lazy way the staff drifted up to deflect my blade's drift; I stepped back to invite his attack; I gathered talent in the blow that deflected his spear, straightening my arm in a combination of strike and kinetic pulse that drove the speartip into the ground.) But again, when he's in the speed, going fast as the eye goes, the sentences have the length and rhythm. He's more deliberate, he thinks things through, uses the subjectivity of the talent to take time to judge each action.

There's something about the logic of the appearances of minor characters that flows with the logic of where pieces of music repeat, where the themes surface again to reinforce themselves. Lengthy pieces of music, in the case of a novel, with themes and submotifs and particular chord patterns that signify certain spaces. Patterns that go in and around the melodic progress of plot with the underlying bass, the chords shaping themselves around to suggest the next part without pointing at it. Lay the tension of this upcoming event carefully, making its context important, repeating its themes with embellishments, making it matter when it suddenly modulates into the minor.

Associate the flow of words with this character, this location, give them something subtextual, something rhythmic to resonate with; then tweak that, change the pattern, not entirely, but change its pitch, or its speed, or embellish the cadence, all to convey a different transitory state. Give the instruments the moments they need to breathe between phrases, see the suggestions of the rhythm of the events before and know where to add the stacatto, the sudden syncopation, the chords, the modulations. It's all of a piece, there's flow and context from moment to moment -- and there's the ability to recognise where the past events have set up expectations of future tonal resolutions and either use those or do something else, something that makes the listener-reader-observer sit up and say, "Oh!" at the atypical way of resolving the seventh.


Argh. It's all there, shape-colour-sound. I can't . . . I may just have to use the metaphor in the future and not try to explain it.

Comments

[autumnesquirrel.livejournal.com]

Is it Peter and the Wolf that has each character as a different musical instrument, and you can hear the story without any words at all?

[kiya]

'At'saone, yup.

[kaifu.livejournal.com]

That's a very good explanation, I think, coming from someone who doesn't operate musically generally - I can resonate with music which has been pointed out to me, but don't tend to have internal soundtrack effects show up on their own. So you are not being, perhaps, as incoherent as you might think.

That last bit, about the overall feeling of a piece of writing being the same as a piece of music, is a very cool way of looking at pacing and flow.