A Conversation on Craft
Critical Mass met on Wednesday night, and it was a lively and productive discussion, and then I continued the conversation with Daniel Abraham (go and buy the first two books of his series THE LONG PRICE QUARTET. I just finished reading book 4 and it is stunning. The entire series is stunning, and like many series it has an _end_.) But I digress.
I’ve always known that music has been the model for how I write. I know a sentence is right because its rhythm is right. I used the final line of a scene whether in a book or a screenplay as a way to send the reader into the next scene or chapter rather like a modulation within a piece of music from major to minor, or a key shift. But then Daniel pointed out to me that you can think of the entire book in those terms.
If everything in a book is at the same level it feels monotonous like a piece of music without any variation. Composers have to pick the themes and phrases, the lietmotiv if you will, that brings the music to life, and writers have to do the same thing. We have many tools in our trade, and we should move between them in an effort to deepen the reading experience.
It’s our job to communicate to a reader what is important. Otherwise it’s just a stream of information, like a basso ostinato or ground bass in a piece of music, but without any ornamentation riding on top of this foundation. I wish Daniel would do a guest post on my blog. He is so brilliant and incisive about writing. I feel like I haven’t done justice to an amazing conversation, but hey, I tried.
Melinda
September 23rd, 2007 at 10:16 am
Very true about the ‘music’. On a sentence-by-sentence level the punctuation is very important, as part of the music.
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.