Blog 16: International Day of Dance

Hi there, writers, readers, and other creative types. Did you know that in two days it is the International Day of Dance? Well, it is! So, if you need an excuse to crank up the music and hit the dance floor, drop it like it’s hot or boogie the night away, then the 29th is the day to do it.

But what has all this got to do with writing, I hear you ask? Absolutely nothing. Well, not entirely. I’m veering towards the rhythm involved. Rhythm is gonna get’cha, rhythm is gonna get’cha, join in: Rhythm is gonna get’cha—tonight.

Some of you may be a little concerned at the moment, wondering if I’m going to suggest you start adapting your stories into songs. And although that does sound intriguing, I’m referring to the flow of your writing. Because we need our words to dance and carry the reader along with them. The pacing and rhythm can create anticipation, suspense, excitement, or even sorrow. If thought about carefully, the words used, sentence length, and other narrative techniques can manifest those emotions you want to portray in your characters, and of course, in the reader.

Do me a favour (or favor if you’re American) and think back to your childhood. They were full of rhymes to help us learn how to speak and lock things into our memories. Are you getting flashbacks of all those times tables now? I certainly am, but as I hate maths, we will move swiftly on. We were brought up on poems, essentially. Nursery rhymes, for instance: Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, How I wonder what you are, Up above the world so high, Like a diamond in the sky. You see how that flows? The words just roll smoothly off your tongue.

If we compare this with, let’s say, a tongue twister. Have you ever tried those bad boys? They are deliberately written to make them tricky to recite. This is achieved by using a lot of the same letters and similar-sounding words to trip you up. For example, Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper. Where’s the peck of pickled pepper, Peter Piper picked?

Did you read it? Quite the workout for your tongue, isn’t it? I’m actually banned from such things as my husband says my tongue gets enough exercise, as he can never get a word in, apparently. Rude, right?

Anyway, my point is that if you aren’t careful with your choice of wording, your reader could be stifled and confused just trying to navigate their way through a sentence. And let’s face it, we don’t want them to trip up and bash their face on the floor while they’re trying to dance through your book. Your sentence could be grammatically correct and make perfect sense, but the choice of words could just come across a little jumbled and chaotic. As I’ve mentioned before, the best way to catch whether you have inadvertently written a tongue twister is to read it aloud, get another opinion or use a reader on your computer. You may need to change or replace a word, rephrase, or cut something out to make the flow smooth and avoid it sounding jerky.

If you read my blog on repetition from a couple of months ago, you will recall that it is another issue that affects the flow. When the same words are used too often, they jump out to the reader and disrupt the momentum. Every word and sentence needs to be carefully placed to achieve the effect you want.

You can use your sentences to change the atmosphere or to portray how your character is feeling. If they are annoyed, you need the narrative to demonstrate this, you can choose words and sentence lengths that are deliberately short and sharp, as you would in dialogue. A chaotic, fast-paced scene will also have shorter sentences and paragraphs, and a slower scene will have longer ones. If you want to create tension, you could make use of pauses with short sentences, such as: the crowd gasped. Even one word for effect, Bang. And it was done. If you think of all the emotions you want to portray in your writing: confusion, anger, hurt, sadness, love, fear, and elation, you must work that into your narration.

Next time you grab a piece of fiction to read, look at it critically and see if you can work out how the author has managed the rhythm in their writing and what effect it has. And next time you write, have a play around with your sentence structure and lengths, read it aloud to hear which gives you the desired effect.

So read, write, experiment, and then drop me a line and let me know what you discovered. Oh, and don't forget to shake your thang on the 29th.

Catch you next week!