Feel the Rhythm of the Words

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

I had a few questions about rhythm from yesterday's post, so that seemed like a good post to do today.

Rhythm in writing is very important to me, both as a writer and a reader. The better the rhythm, the more drawn into the story I am. The choppier it is, the more apt I am to skim. Choppy writing is often list-like, with flat description, more what than who or why. There's no sense of storytelling, just explanation.

Dozens came down the hall in long lines. The zombies in front groaned the loudest. The ones in back shuffled without a sound. The few that broke out of line moaned a little. The moans made Bob want to scream. 

Pretty meh, isn't it?

This reads so flat because there's no break in the rhythm or sentence structure. It's all roughly the same amount of words in the same basic format doing the same basic thing. It's as if someone is simply jotting down what happens as quickly as possible. But let's vary those sentences and move some words around.

Zombies came down the hall, dozens of them in long lines. The ones in front groaned the loudest -- the back just shuffled without a sound. The few that broke out of line moaned a little. That made Bob want to scream.

Better right? Just breaking up a few of those sentences made a difference. It's still not great, but it's more interesting than the first example. So let's polish some more and work on adding a rhythm that builds the tension to the end of the paragraph.

Zombies came down the hall, dozens of them in long lines. The ones in front groaned the loudest -- the back just shuffled forward without a sound. A few of the fresher ones broke ranks, stumbling into the hall, clawing at the posters, the walls, the lockers, looking for something. Or someone? They moaned, just a little. Bob swallowed his scream.

Now we're getting scary. Not only is the flow better, but the sense that there's a person here is stronger. It's not just flat description of events, it has some judgment there. "the freshers ones" is Bob's opinion about the age of the zombies. "Broke ranks" suggest Bob has some military background. "Bob swallowed his scream" is what he does, not what someone says he does. The alteration scattered throughout helps build tension. "shuffled forward without a sound," playing off the S, F, O, and W. "A few of the fresher" plays off the F, "Swallowed his scream" plays off the S.

Repetition builds tension in: "...stumbling into the hall, clawing at the posters, the walls, the lockers, looking for something. Or someone?" It sets up an expectation that the next words after "clawing the posters" will be a "verbing the noun" phrase, but it's not. I switched it up and tossed in double nouns to defy that expectation, then gave you the expected "looking for something." and followed that with a short, punchy "or someone?" The short phrase after the long rhythmic one makes that "or someone" really stand out, which it should since this is what Bob's afraid of. This is also what I want readers to worry about too. Are the zombies looking for Bob?

Varying the structure and thus the rhythm creates unpredictability in the narrative flow. Unpredictability is interesting. Predictability makes readers skim. So when you write sentences with the same structure and rhythm, it's like dull white noise droning on and putting them to sleep. Different structure and rhythm keeps them awake and draws them in. Like a great beat that makes you tap your toes.

Rhythm applies to dialog and dialog tags as well, and that'll be Monday's post. Tomorrow, plotting and unconscious goals.

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Janice Hardy is the award-winning author of the teen fantasy trilogy The Healing Wars, including The Shifter, Blue Fire, and Darkfall from Balzer+Bray/Harper Collins. The Shifter, was chosen for the 2014 list of "Ten Books All Young Georgians Should Read" from the Georgia Center for the Book.

She also writes the Grace Harper urban fantasy series for adults under the name, J.T. Hardy.

When she's not writing novels, she's teaching other writers how to improve their craft. She's the founder of Fiction University and has written multiple books on writing.

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