Writer Unboxed

It’s something music can do well: evoke the feeling of a text in underlayments, make it palpable through rhythm and phrasing. Even without accompaniment. There’s an a capella version of Shenandoah in which you can hear the sound of the river in the current of voices.

Poets do it too, with phrases that twist and turn and make us feel exactly what they’re describing–with word choice, of course, but also through phrasing. Consider this segment of a poem called “To Be of Use” by Marge Piercy:

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo,
with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

Can you feel the pull described in this graph? Almost like you are the ox, your heels dug deep in the earth?

It’s something fiction writers can do to great effect, too. Like music, a masterful text has the power to transport people more completely into a written moment. I snatched several of the following examples from the book A Dash of Style by Noah Lukeman–another of my favorite craft books, dog-eared to the max.

Here’s an excerpt from Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl:

Rosa did not feel hunger; she felt light, not like someone walking but like someone in a faint, in trance, arrested in a fit, someone who is already a floating angel, alert and seeing everything, but in the air, not there, not touching the road. As if teetering on the tips of her fingernails.

What Lukeman points at here (p 195) is that Ozick’s use of commas create a buoyant, light feeling–exactly the kind of emotion she’s describing. The abrupt break before the teetering fingernails line makes us feel a little like we’re hanging on the edge as well.

Here, a segment from the short story by Jean Toomer, Blood-Burning Moon:

Up from the skeleton walls, up from the rotting floor boards and the solid hand-hewn beams of oak of the pre-war cotton factory, dusk came.

Commas create movement and can show the passage of time, says Lukeman (p 48). Here they help create the feeling of a growing dusk.

In Herman Melville’s The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids, we travel with a character down passages as we wend our way through a single sentence.

Sick with the din and soiled with the mud of Fleet Street–where the Benedick tradesmen are hurrying by, with ledger-lines rules along their brows, thinking upon rise of bread and fall of babies–you adroitly turn a mystic corner–not a street–glide down a dim, monastic, way, flanked by dark, sedate, and solemn piles, and still wending on, give the whole care-worn world the slip, and, disentangled, stand beneath the quiet cloisters of the Paradise of Bachelors.

Granted, that is one seriously long sentence (with too many commas for my taste) and you wouldn’t be able to use this effect very often without wearing down your reader, but–Lukeman’s point (p 135)–did you feel the journey?

In this next example, taken from Victoria Lancelotta’s What I Know, “We almost feel as if we’re suffocating, drowning in her commas, which is exactly the type of air she’s trying to describe,” says Lukeman (p 51).

This is the sort of air that sticks, the kind you want to pull off you, away from your skin, or wipe away in great sluicing motions and back into the water where it surely belongs, because this is not the sort of air that anyone could breathe. You could die, drown, trying to breathe this.

And here, perhaps my favorite example, from Home for A Bunny, a children’s book by Margaret Wise Brown:

In the Spring a bunny came down the road. He was going to find a home of his own. A home for a bunny, A home of his own, Under a rock, Under a stone, Under a log, Or under the ground. Where would a bunny find a home?

Mr. Lukeman didn’t include this fine illustration of words working double-time in his book, but can’t you feel that bunny’s hop?

Music lovers can listen to the aforementioned version of Shenandoah, performed by The Cologne Cathedral Boys’ Choir HERE via an audience member’s YouTube video. The magic kicks in around 2:15, though it’s all beautiful – and you might get a kick out of seeing the young boy in the front row drum his fingers over his face when it’s the older boys’ turn to sing.

Is there a line or three in your manuscript you can play with to create a sense of movement or weight? Do you already use this technique? Care to share something from your manuscript or another example from a book on your shelf? Open invitation.

Write on, all!

Bunnies courtesy, Flickr’s Amy Muir

Therese Walsh co-founded Writer Unboxed in 2006. Her debut novel, The Last Will of Moira Leahy, sold to Random House in a two-book deal in 2008, was named one of January Magazine’s Best Books of 2009, and was a Target Breakout Book in 2010. She's never been published with a lit magazine, but LOST's Carlton Cuse liked her haiku best on Twitter, and that made her pretty happy.

Therese Walsh

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