Gorgeous Language

My critique group is working through Ursula LeGuin's craft book, Steering the Craft.  We take turns presenting sections, and I was up first with the first chapter ("the sound of your writing" which is about lyrical prose) and the second chapter ("punctuation and grammar" which is about using punctuation to control speed and rhythm). 

I had everyone in the group do a version of one of the exercises LeGuin suggests in the first chapter.  She says, "Write a paragraph to a page of narrative that's meant to be read aloud.  Use onomatopoeia, alliteration, repetition, rhythmic effects, made-up words or names, dialect--any kind of sound effect you like--but NOT rhyme or meter."  I said, "Write half a page max." 

People got stuck on WHAT they should write about.  Just write a beautiful paragraph?  About what?  It was so open ended as to be intimidating.  In the end, their paragraphs leaned towards action, towards events that had a natural rhythm.  Other paragraphs showed moments of heightened emotions, more introspective moments where lyrical language could come out.

We talked about how absurd it would be to write a full piece--a novel or a short story--entirely in this style.  I think that's completely true, because in order for these moments to stand out, there needs to be a baseline that juxtaposes them from which they can pop.  It's like those movies that are non-stop action!, where you just get tired 2/3 of the way through and stop even caring.  So this ties back to the moments that people picked to convey lyrically: moments of heightened action or heightened emotion.  Those are the moments that need to jump out from a story, and those are the moments that lend themselves to lyrical language.

I will usually go through a story and note sections that need to be more rhythmic, or scan better, or where I could use words that are more resonant.  But I had trouble in this exercise, because when I do what I usually do I get one of two outcomes: either it works and people thing "wow, this section is lovely!" or it doesn't work and people read straight through it, blissfully ignorant that I tried something that didn't work.  But for this example, my group knew that I was trying to be lovely, so if it didn't work people would know and that would be embarrassing.  It made me self-conscious.

Then we moved on to stage two, the prospect of which I had been excited about for three weeks, but when revealed made everyone else groan.  Everyone passed their paragraph to the person on their left, who read it aloud for the group.  I know how I intend my work to sound, and when I read it out-loud I can make it sound that way.  But it's hard to know how a reader will read your work when they're off on their own.  It might not have the cadence I intended, or maybe their accent or mine makes the words sound different.  So we listened to someone else read our work, and then compared it with our vision and then we talked about how we could use punctuation to to make it closer to what we intended (chapter 2). 

The paragraph I read aloud was about a strenuous hike and it used long clauses that I had trouble saying in a single breath.  I, the reader, was breathless by the end, almost as though I was the one hiking. 

There was one passage made up Jabberwocky style of made up words, and two different people read it aloud.  The first person made it sound playful, like a children's book.  The second person made it sound more grave, like this was the climax from the audio book of a thousand page epic-fantasy.

It was fun, and I'm pretty proud of myself.

***

My favorite part of these two LeGuin chapters is unrelated to this post, but it's so perfect that I want to share it. 

"Correctness isn't a moral issue but a social and political one, often a definition of social class.  Correct usage is defined by a group of those who speak and write English a certain way, and used as a test or shibboleth to form an in-group of those who speak and write English that way and an out-group of those who don't.  And guess which group has the power?

I detest the self-righteousness of the correctness bullies, and I distrust their motives.  But I have to walk a razor's edge in this book, because the fact is that usage, particularly in writing, is a social matter, a general social agreement about how we make ourselves understood.  Incoherent syntax, mistaken words, misplaced punctuation, all cripple meaning.  Ignorance of the rules makes harsh of the sentences.  In written prose, incorrect usage, unless part of a conscious, consistent dialect or personal voice, is disastrous.  An egregious mistake in usage can invalidate a whole story."