By Virginia Parker Staat
Punctuation is a courtesy designed to help readers to understand a story
without stumbling. ~ Lynne Truss
It was early in my college career, long ago and in a time when students learned to diagram sentences. One of my English professors challenged the class to diagram a 1,288-word sentence. It was a convoluted, rabbit-trail of a sentence, filled with countless clauses. I took the challenge… and failed miserably.
Continue reading A Run-In with the Run-Onby Virginia Parker Staat
When the lyrical muse sings, the creative pen dances. ~ Aberjhani
I am working to revive an old manuscript. The story is the retelling of a myth I found buried in the ancient Mayan Popol Vuh. It is a strange and lovely story but has remained so incomplete and unsatisfying to me that I tucked it away in a drawer for nearly twenty years. When I pulled it out of its hiding place several weeks ago, the secret to what is missing fairly exploded in my face. Quite simply, my words lack rhythm. They do not dance.
We use rhythm in our writing to set our story’s mood. It is not about writing rhyme or flowery and fancy words. It’s about combining words like a composer builds a symphony to make his music a sensory experience.
Author Henneke Duistermaat writes, “In music, tone length and the silences in between tones define rhythm. When long notes blend together without silences, the music flows smoothly. In contrast, when you play short notes with clear pauses in between, you get a more abrupt style of playing. It wakes you up. In writing, rhythm is defined by punctuation and the stress patterns of words in a sentence. Long sentences sound smoother, while short sentences make your content snappier. When each sentence follows the same structure and rhythm, your writing becomes boring.”
Writing lyrical prose is especially important in our nature writing. In addition to setting our story’s mood, it pulls our readers in, helping them connect with landscape and subject. For a more recent example, I invite you to read The Eagle’s Way by Jim Crumley. A more thorough examination of writing lyrical nature prose can be found in Mark Tredinick’s The Land’s Wild Music, which focuses on the prose of outdoor writers Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiesson, Terry Tempest Williams, and James Galvin.
To briefly illustrate rhythm and how it sets our story’s mood, let’s look at a few lines from the children’s book The Man Who Could Call Down Owls, by Eve Bunting. An award-winning and prolific writer, Bunting is best known for her quiet, lyrical prose. These few lines offer an excellent example of how she draws emotion from her readers using rhythm.
“An owl no bigger than a sparrow came to nestle in the shadow of the wide hat.
‘Elf owl.’ The man smoothed the pale chest feathers till the owl eyes closed.
Deep in the dark of the trees was a hoot, hoot, hooting and a great horned cut the air to land on a stunted branch, so close that the boy could see the ring of white feathers that lay mysteriously at its throat.
Owls everywhere. And the man in the middle, his cloak drifting about him like marsh mist, and Con, always Con, and the man with the owls around him.”
Bunting uses similes and metaphors to evoke images in her words. She uses alliteration and repetition to create patterns. She uses a syllabic style to set her cadence. She uses punctuation to control pace and space and rhythm. She uses sentence length to establish tone and topic. In short, her words dance the mystery surrounding the man who could call down owls.
With a strategy found in Roy Peter Clark’s book Writing Tools, we can use math to analyze how the lyrics flow in these few paragraphs from Bunting’s work. Bunting writes 102 words in six sentences. These sentences contain 17, 2, 12, 43, 2, and 26 words respectively. The longer the motion described, the longer her sentence.
Clark writes that the rhythm becomes more interesting when we match sentence length to content and use it to create suspense and control emotion. He continues, “The writer controls the pace for the reader, slow or fast or in between, and uses sentences of different lengths to create the music, the rhythm of the story.”
In Bunting’s last sentence, using 26 words, readers can nearly feel the cold wind in the man’s cloak as it swirls about him. Gary Provost explains this technique in his book, 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing. He writes that a sentence of considerable length “burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals – sounds that say, listen to this, it is important.”
To repair my Mayan myth, I am studying our photographs from the great Mayan city of Teotihuacán and its surrounding countryside to awaken memories. I am listening to ancient Mayan songs to familiarize myself with the beat used during the time of the Popol Vuh. I plan to rearrange my words to fit the rhythm that best evokes the story’s energy, building my cadence with appropriate metaphors, similes, alliteration, and repetition. Finally, I will sound out my words, reading them aloud to make certain the story’s intensity ebbs and flows until it reaches a crescendo.At our best, when we write, we write music. Our words resonate with rhythm. They blend together like a melody. They mesmerize and pull our reader in, creating mood, emotion, and tone. In essence, they make our pens dance.
By Virginia Parker Staat
“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” ~ Neil Gaiman
I suppose some may consider it an odd place for a nonfiction writer to begin, but for me, the fairy tale structure is the one I use most frequently. Fairy tales use a narrative structure, which lends itself well to nonfiction. I’m not talking about fairy tale formula. I can’t recall a single piece of nonfiction that includes magic beans or a pumpkin turning into a carriage. Rather, a fairy tale narrative structure uses specific building blocks to tell a story. This narrative structure determines how our plot is unveiled to our readers.
Continue reading Believing in Fairy TalesText & photo by Virginia Parker Staat
Writing is like painting with words, the paper is the canvas, the pen is the brush, the words are the colors and the verbs, nouns and adjectives are the blending of the hues that add depth to the picture you are creating. ~ Reed Abbitt Moore
On our recent visit to the Kimberly region of Australia, we discovered the baobab. These trees are truly magnificent with their massive, bottle-shape trunks, spreading crowns, and finger-like branches. They only reside in the drier regions of Africa, Madagascar, and northern Australia. Known as trees of life, a single baobab can hold 120,000 liters of water in the fibrous pith of its trunk and branches. In times of drought, Bushmen poke holes in its trunk to draw out the water while animals chew on the baobab branches, using them like straws to drink.
Continue reading Sensory PerceptionBy Virginia Parker Staat
“Don’t tell me the moon is shining;
show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
~ Anton Chekhov
When we travel into the city, we almost always stop by our favorite Italian restaurant. It is a third-generation bistro begun in 1938 in the home where the owners raised their children. At one time it was billed as one of the top five restaurants in the world to visit. Now, with his beloved Josephine gone and Sammy in his eighties, the restaurant still has excellent fare but not the five-star quality it once boasted.
Continue reading Ode to a Chippendale DancerBy Virginia Parker Staat
“In the family of punctuation, where the full stop is daddy and the comma is mummy,
and the semicolon quietly practises the piano with crossed hands,
the exclamation mark is the big attention-deficit brother who gets overexcited and breaks things and laughs too loudly.”
~ Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
On September 24, our nation will celebrate its 16thNational Punctuation Day. Jeff Rubin founded the event in 2004 as “a celebration of the lowly comma, correctly used quotation marks, and other proper uses of periods, semicolons, and the ever-mysterious ellipses.”
Continue reading Happy Punctuation Day!By Virginia Parker Staat
“People seem to think there’s a magic formula to writing.
I just write one word at a time.” ~ Stephen King
Earning my college degree certainly had its fits and starts. David’s career sent us to six states and a foreign country before we landed for good back in Texas in 1991.
Continue reading I Have a Poor AttitudeBy Virginia Parker Staat
“Cut a good story anywhere, and it will bleed.” ~ Anton Chekhov
I remember my first attempt at writing a young adult novel. It took nearly six months of my life to complete it. I immediately put it in a drawer to let it heal itself. When I read it in its entirety several weeks later, I was astonished to discover the book actually began about sixty pages into the piece.
Continue reading The Cutting Room FloorBy Virginia Parker Staat
“Some things are so unexpected that no one is prepared for them.”
~ Leo Rosten, Rome Wasn’t Burned in a Day
After the death of her archaic computer, my 90-year-old mother recently purchased a new one. She is still adjusting. As an example, she always closes her emails to me with “Love you, Mother.”
In her last email, she wrote, “The computer thinks it is cute to add Nature to my Mother. I DON’T.” I nearly fell off the stool in laughter. Welcome, my dear mother, to the world of the infamous autocorrect.
Continue reading Predictive MurderBy Virginia Parker Staat
“Don’t gobblefunk around with words.” ~ Roald Dahl, The BFG
One of my most recent favorite reads was Love Does by Bob Goff. It was a fantastic book. I savored every line… so much so that I even read the acknowledgements, which were oddly placed at the back of the book rather than in the usual front matter. In the acknowledgements, Goff included a curious tribute to his friend and fellow author Donald Miller, “and to Don Miller, who taught me not to write thatinto my life…” In Goff’s entire book, it is the one sentence that puzzles me.
Continue reading That That and Which Hunts