P.S.Write song lyrics? Are you looking for opportunities to get your **repetition of the initial word in successive clauses Still, ‘My mother was a swan’ writing is the number one reason why I’m sometimes unable to click with books that other people recommend to me. However, the truth is probably that my own priorities are just different, and that other people genuinely enjoy and appreciate this kind of lyrical writing to a greater degree than I’m able to. The crotchety part of me is tempted to just say, “Meh, these kids are operating off received notions of ‘good writing.’ They don’t have an ear for language, so they’re mechanically adopting certain tips and tricks without understanding the downsides of what they’re doing.” Still, if you read any randomly selected science fiction or fantasy short story, or pick up any critically acclaimed YA novel, you’re more likely than not to find writing that’s of the “My mother was a swan” variety. Not only does it leave you unable to describe what things look like or how people live or where they came from, but you also become unable to capture the rhythms of ordinary speech. Instead, the lyrical wrapping constrains the prose so much that it becomes difficult to actually say or do anything. It feels and sounds like important statements are being made, but they’re not. Sure, it does sound good, but it’s the prose equivalent of Muzak. Because, I just don’t think the effect of the lyricism is worth the downsides. I’ll open a book and read three sentences of “My mother was a swan” and then put it away. Personally, I cannot stand this sort of writing. When I was young, she was absolutely silent, but sometime around my seventh birthday, my father tied bells to her feet, and after that, her presence always carried the sound of tiny, tinkling bells,” then, as you can see, we’ve pushed too much information into our paragraphs, and now the lyricism is starting to crack. A very large swan, actually: perhaps half the size and weight of my father. But that was seldom.” However, if you were to write something like, “My mother was a swan. I rarely saw her, though, since she’d only appear when I was unhappy. For instance, I could say, “My mother was a swan. This writing style can be expanded a little. In this case, what do we know about my character’s mother? All we know is that she’s a swan. And that, in turn, allows you to work directly with archetypes. Which means that the noun pretty much has to stand for itself. You can put a noun in there and you can have the noun do things, but you can’t say very much about who and what that noun is, and why it’s different from all the other nouns. I think perhaps this is because it’s hard to hold very much information in short sentences like this. You see writing like this in some literary fiction, but it’s also a style that’s very prevalent in fantasy novels. Part of the reason for these tricks, is, I think, that a lack of variation in the structure of your clauses means that the writing becomes very boring, on a sonic level, unless you find ways to contrast the clauses with each other. I am indifferent to myself.”) and all those other little syntactical tricks that people have been picking up from the Greek and Roman orators for the last few thousand years. They are filled with chiasmus (“I don’t like my mother, and my mother does not like me”) and parallel construction (“Every morning, we pray to the sun, and every night we sing to the moon”) and asyndeton* (“My mother cleans and cooks and prays and fights and picks lice from our hair with her shiny beak”) and anaphora** (“I hate my mother. These novels often have a very poetic syntax, in that they’re full of the sorts of poetic devices that abound in poetic speech, but are absent from regular speech. My sisters and I had little to eat, and our growth was stunted. My mother was a swan. My father kept her in a cage, and eventually her feathers fell out. These are the books with lots of short declarative clauses that contain short little Anglo-Saxon verbs and short little Anglo-saxon nouns: “I grew up in Eastwick. I hope you know the books I am talking about, since they are legion. And when I’m listening to poetry, I can tolerate it.īut sometimes I’ll find myself reading a novel, and I’ll find that the writing reminds me, in some way, of poetry voice, and that is a thing I cannot tolerate. They’re taught to read poems this way, in order to let the words speak for themselves. For an example, listen to the following recording.Īnyway, it’s not the poets’ fault. Almost every poet that I know is afflicted, to some degree, with ‘poetry voice:’ a form of speaking that’s characterized by an even volume, even pace, and a steady rise and fall in tone.
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