On an even smaller scale, the word has to “ring” right for the setting you’ve put it in. You can _tell_ when one is wrong; it ‘clunks’.

Sort of as if the reader’s eyes were the hammers of a xylophone, the words were the bars, and the punctuation set the timing of the strokes.

When you’re getting things really right, the effect goes beyond the concious reading of words and hits directly at a deeper level of the brain.

Yeah, Dan did manage to end the LONG PRICE just about the only way it could be ended, didn’t he?

I told him at the meeting that he achieved what Tolkien was trying for but missing at the end of RETURN OF THE KING, in getting across what “ending” means in human terms.

If Dan has a fault, it’s writing as if every reader were like him. He doesn’t do that nearly as often anymore, though. He certainly didn’t there. I particularly liked the recurring image of the flowers as symbols of both mortality and recurrence.