Words Fail Me (17 page)

Promises can put readers on the alert that something important is about to happen. In these passages, hints of ominous doings create a sense of foreboding:

"Now I thought: There's going to be trouble here."
(V. S. Naipaul,
A Bend in the River
)

"So do not forget this Marvin Macy, as he is to act a terrible part in the story which is yet to come."
(Carson McCullers,
The Ballad of the Sad Café
)

"From my father I inherited an optimism which did not leave me until recently."

(Joan Didion,
Play It as It Lays
)

"Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there."

(Truman Capote,
In Cold Blood
)

Promises are glue, gripping the reader's attention by holding a long piece of writing together. A good writer can juggle three or four or more promises at once, so there's always something else the reader wants to know, another reason not to switch off the light and go to bed.

Some promises, though, are subtle; the reader recognizes them only in retrospect. They may be as unobtrusive as a recurring image, like the umbrellas that pop up at fateful moments in
Madame Bovary.
Flaubert's first mention of an umbrella comes early in the novel, when the
local priest tells the innkeeper he's left his umbrella behind and asks that it be sent on to him. That same evening, the Bovarys arrive in town. They dine at the inn, and then a servant carrying the curé's umbrella shows them to their new home. Later, Emma Bovary will buy her lover a present from an umbrella shop, a costly gift that she has to steal from her husband to pay for. And still later, she secretly meets another lover in a raging storm. As lightning flashes around them, they embrace and kiss—under an umbrella.

Whether they're subtle or not so subtle, promises make a book worth reading again and again because they seem more meaningful with each reading. As you read and as you write, think about promises and keep your eye on the ball—or the umbrella. And anytime you raise the reader's expectations, remember that you have promises to keep.

Mention rhythm and most people think of music: hip-hop, polka, fugue, march, waltz, rockabilly. But almost everything in life has rhythm, from your heartbeat to the clickety-clack of your keyboard, from a jackhammer in the street to rain drumming on the roof. And your writing has it, too.

By "rhythm" I don't mean just the toe-tapping beat created by the rise and fall of syllables as word follows word. I mean all the patterns in writing: the sound of words and phrases, figures of speech, rhymes, repetition, and so on. Taken together, these give a piece of writing its flow, its stride, its timing—that's rhythm.

Open a book, any book, and start reading aloud. Forget for a moment what the words mean. Just listen to the rhythm. Is it jerky because the phrases are short and choppy? Is it leisurely because the clauses are long and drawn out? Does the monotony of the cadences make you drowsy? Does the pulsating drive get your adrenaline going?

It should come as no surprise that language has rhythm. Our first acquaintance with it, after all, is through our ears. As children we hear language before we can understand and speak it; we speak before we can read; we read before we can write. And the language we write has something of the language we hear—the quality of rhythm.

We know that poetry has rhythm. So does prose, though its rhythms may not be as obvious. Great prose writers have always used rhythm to give their words another dimension. We mere mortals may not be able to do that. But when we're trying to write our best— in a love letter, a short story, an essay for admission to medical school—we should make sure that our rhythms don't detract from our words.

Not everything has to sing, of course. If you're writing a recipe or instructions for assembling a tricycle or dosage directions for an aspirin label, rhythm may not be your first consideration. Readers won't mind monotony or a bump or two, as long as the facts are right. A lot depends on how much time you have to fuss. A reporter covering a plane crash on deadline won't play around with rhythm as much as someone writing a feature story about the birth
of a panda. Then again, rhythm may not be as critical in a news story that has its own excitement and drama.

The most important lesson about rhythm is also the easiest to learn: Too much of it may put the reader to sleep. And that's the last thing you want to do, unless you're writing bedtime stories. A repetitive rhythm can have a hypnotic effect, lulling readers instead of holding their attention. This is the kind of writing I mean:

In the still of the night, a crack in the floor caught the heel of Mae's shoe, and she fell down the stairs of the rickety house. The bump in the dark put a limp in her walk and a run in her hose, but it didn't disturb a hair on her head.

Are you thoroughly anesthetized? The problem with the passage is that too many phrases (
still of the night, heel of Mae's shoe, crack in the floor
) have the same rhythm. Two or three similar phrases may be all right, but a long string of them becomes monotonous. The solution is easy. Break up the singsong pattern by changing a few words or moving them around:

In the dead of night, Mae's heel caught on a crack in the floor of the rickety house and she tumbled down the stairs. The fall tore her stocking and left her with a limp, but it didn't disturb a hair on her head.

Can you hear the difference? There are still a few phrases with similar cadences, yet the overall rhythm isn't sleep-inducing. Don't be obsessive about avoiding repetitive
rhythms. Use them but don't abuse them, particularly if you're trying to convey excitement or tension.

Here's Irritating Situation Number 47. You're in a romantic restaurant, enjoying an intimate meal with your one-and-only, when some jerk at the next table starts shouting into a cell phone. Kind of spoils the ambience, doesn't it? A piece of writing can be spoiled, too, if its rhythm is out of sync with its content.

Imagine you're the president of a family-owned company beset by rumors that it's about to close and everybody's going to be laid off. Your object is to assure employees that the rumors are false and that their jobs are safe. You draft an e-mail statement like this:

Dear friends: You're upset. Of course you are, and we are too! Who wouldn't be? The rumor mill is out of control. But all the loose talk is untrue. This company is not closing. It's doing well financially. Sales are up. No one's being laid off. We expect to be in business for many years to come. And we hope you'll all be here.

That doesn't sound very soothing, does it? The choppy rhythm gives the writing a nervous edge, and the employees are nervous enough as it is. So let's fiddle with the rhythm:

Dear friends: We're just as upset as you are over false rumors about our company's future. None of them are true. In fact, our sales are up, business is good, and we're doing well financially. So there's no reason we would close or let anyone go. We'll be here for many years to come, and we hope you'll be here with us.

The first version could have been written by Barney Fife, the jumpy deputy on
The Andy Griffith Show
. The second one sounds more like the laid-back Sheriff Taylor.

Sometimes, though, an edgy, percussive rhythm might be just what you're after. In
Miami and the Siege of Chicago,
Norman Mailer describes demonstrators during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and he does it in a marching cadence, one that swells along with the crowd:

"In broken ranks, half a march, half a happy mob, eyes red from gas, faces excited by the tension of the afternoon, and the excitement of the escape from Grant Park, now pushing down Michigan Avenue toward the Hilton Hotel with dreams of a march on to the Amphitheatre four miles beyond, and in the full pleasure of being led by the wagons of the Poor People's March, the demonstrators shouted to everyone on the sidewalk, 'Join us, join us, join us,' and the sidewalk kept disgorging more people ready to march."

In that single sentence we feel the sting of the tear gas, hear the wagons rolling, and see the march growing in strength ("Join us, join us, join us"). He's got rhythm.

Avoiding inappropriate rhythms is easy enough. Only the best writers, however, can go a step further and use rhythm to make their meaning more meaningful. That takes a good ear and plenty of practice. If you'd like to try, listen to what you read, and learn from it. The writers you
admire probably use rhythm in ways you've never noticed; look up favorite passages and start listening.

Here's a sampling to get you started, from writers who use rhythm so well that it becomes part of the action. The first is from James Baldwin's
Go Tell It on the Mountain
. Listen to the biblical cadences in this rising storm of words:

"The morning of that day, as Gabriel rose and started out to work, the sky was low and nearly black and the air too thick to breathe. Late in the afternoon the wind rose, the skies opened, and the rain came. The rain came down as though once more in Heaven the Lord had been persuaded of the good uses of a flood. It drove before it the bowed wanderer, clapped children into houses, licked with fearful anger against the high, strong wall, and the wall of the lean-to, and the wall of the cabin, beat against the bark and the leaves of trees, trampled the broad grass, and broke the neck of the flower."

The passage owes its stately tread not just to the beat of the syllables, but also to repetition (
rose, rain, wall
) and to its forceful verbs (
drove, clapped, licked, beat, trampled, broke).

Some mystery writers are wizards at using rhythm to convey fear and suspense. The rhythm in this passage from Elmore Leonard's
Glitz
underscores the confusion of a desperate fight scene:

"And Vincent closed and opened his eyes, saw her juggle the gun and drop it as Teddy slammed into him and Teddy's gun went off between them into the grocery sack of bottles, went off again and went off again, the bottles gone now as Vincent tried to grab hold of Teddy clinging to him and put him down, step on his gun. But something was wrong."

Nonfiction can be equally suspenseful. Barry Lopez, in
Arctic Dreams,
follows a long sentence with several short ones to convey the thrill he feels as he senses the presence of a group of narwhals, then the letdown when he misses a chance to see the elusive unicorns of the deep:

"I strained to see them, to spot the vapor of their breath, a warm mist against the soft horizon, or the white tip of a tusk breaking the surface of the water, a dark pattern that retained its shape against the dark, shifting patterns of the water. Somewhere out there in the ice fragments. Gone. Gone now."

Joseph Mitchell raised journalism to art in his profile of Joe Gould, a wandering Greenwich Village eccentric. In this passage, which you can find in Mitchell's book
Up in the Old Hotel,
the peripatetic rhythms are as circuitous as a typical day in Gould's life:

"I would see him sitting scribbling at a table in the Jackson Square branch of the Public Library, or I would see him filling his fountain pen in the main Village post office—the one on Tenth Street—or I would see him sitting among the young mothers and the old alcoholics in the sooty, pigeony, crumb-besprinkled, newspaper-bestrewn, privet-choked, coffin-shaped little park at Sheridan Square."

Note how the "I would see him"refrain and the
-ing
word ending reappear at intervals, just like Joe Gould. Then there's that loopy stream of adjectives at the end, as cranky and off-beat as Joe himself.

In her novel
Their Eyes Were Watching God,
Zora Neale Hurston invokes rhythms that re-create what's happening on the pages. Here she helps us hear as well as see the tossing of dice, the shuffling of cards:

"All the rest of the week Tea Cake was busy practicing up on his dice. He would flip them on the bare floor, on the rug and on the bed. He'd squat and throw, sit in a chair and throw and stand and throw....Then he'd take his deck of cards and shuffle and cut, shuffle and cut and deal out and then examine each hand carefully, and do it again."

You can almost dance to some authors rhythms, and what better way to write about dance than to imitate the rhythm of the movement? D. H. Lawrence, in an evocative essay called "The Dance of the Sprouting Corn," describes a Pueblo Indian ritual:

"Thud—thud—thud—thud—thud! goes the drum, heavily the men hop and hop and hop, sway, sway, sway, sway go the little branches of green pine....The men are naked to the waist, and ruddy-golden, and in the rhythmic, hopping leap of the dance their breasts shake downwards, as the strong, heavy body comes down, down, down, down, in the downward plunge of the dance."

In much the same way, the sportswriter Red Smith used words to convey the rhythms of the boxing ring. This is from his column about the historic 1964 Sonny Liston–Cassius Clay match:

"Dancing, running, jabbing, ducking, stopping now and then to pepper the champion's head with potshots in swift combinations, he had won the first, third, and fourth rounds and opened an angry cut under Liston's left eye."

Some of the most rhythmic writing anywhere can be found in the Bible. Here's a passage from the Song of Solomon, in the King James Version:

"My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For, lo, the winter is
past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come; and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land."

Rhythm doesn't get much better. But then, we expect rhythm in biblical writing. We don't expect to find it in writing on, let's say, mathematics. Unexpected pleasures are the sweetest. In their book
The Reader over Your Shoulder,
Robert Graves and Alan Hodge tell a story about a mathematical work that included this sentence: