To make your prose flow easily, build crescendos and rhythmic transitions into your sentences and paragraphs. (This is a picture I drew yesterday.)
Clarence’s Rhythm:
Ah Keeper, Keeper, I haue done these things
(That now giue euidence against my Soule)
Musical Rhythm Is Easy
You can do this with word size, consonant choice, phrasing, and sentence length. Let us look at the musical composition below: Clarence begins with a soft train of vowels. “Ah, ee, ee, I, ee, ee” is followed by a parenthetical aside of a fat “Ow! Oh!,” and then finished up with a rising “A, ee, ow! K! T! E!”
Vowels Are The Soft Filling Of Words
As soon as Clarence has offered this opening salvo, he embarks into a long, vowel-stretched appeal to God and the keeper’s mercy, accompanied by the lighter consonant sounds, “th, v, g, d, ss, and n.”
See The Speech Below
When we follow Bill’s example, and arrange our internal sounds with the keeping of the scene, our sentence length and phrasing add immeasurably to the build and emotional impact of the scene.
Here Is Clarence, After His Nightmare:
Ah Keeper, Keeper, I haue done these things
(That now giue euidence against my Soule)
For Edwards sake, and see how he requits mee.
O God! if my deepe prayres cannot appease thee,
But thou wilt be aueng’d on my misdeeds,
Yet execute thy wrath in me alone:
O spare my guiltlesse Wife, and my poore children.
And Now, With Fantasy
How, might you ask, can I apply these entrancing vowel and colon tricks to my own prose? Well, let us look first at a disastrous example of non-built chaos that I whipped up with a look of pained disdain on my features:
Bad Rhythm:
The dragon, how he had crutched his eager way wandering into the arching light-bulb brilliance canyonways, was ill-forgotten. His bills extend and his arm-frills opened long they were sails in the crushed air pieces dazzling in rock walls and carrying dust probably.
His nostrils cup open and snorted, while vivid eyes are moving death in his heart from there to his teeth. Yellowed.
And now, order and musicality enacted upon said chaos:
Strong Rhythm:
White wings clenched like spans of marble, he clung to the canyon walls in the light of the sun. The shadow he cast, unearthly black, ran from end to end of the canyon floor and kissed against the tips of his claws. The dragon opened his jaw and roared, frills snapping wide at his neck and sides.
The wind swept through the canyon in an answering howl, filling his leathern skin like sails; dust expanded from his flared nostrils and hissed through his yellow fangs.
In Conclusion
Writing with rhythm and variety in your sentences requires an attention to the length of your phrasing, an eye for vowels, and a willingness to embrace joining forms of punctuation. And remember, when in doubt, go and read some original-folio Hamlet; nothing like Bard-prose whips your creative vehicle into tune like freestyle Elizabethan patter.
You’re reading Victor Poole. The image above is a study of a photo from here. My cyborg sequel is nearing completion.
Victor Poole 