Words as Music

By Karen Ranney
© 2005 All rights reserved.

I’ve always thought that words were strung together like musical notes. They have a rhythm all their own, and the way they’re placed in a sentence gives off a tone. The words you write can sound like a symphony, a poem, or a badly scratched record.

No, trust me, I’m not nuts.

Even as a little girl, I knew that words sounded right in one way and wrong in another. I could “hear” the music of them and knew when I’d gotten a sentence correctly phrased.

“I am, like my father, a blacksmith by trade. I work at the forge from dawn until dusk, making useful objects from bits of scrap iron.”

“I am, like my father, a blacksmith by trade. From dawn until dusk I work at the forge, crafting useful objects from scrap bits of iron.”

“I am, like my father, a blacksmith by trade. From dawn until dusk I work the bellows, creating useful objects in a roaring red hell of a fire.”

“I am, like my father, a blacksmith by trade. From dawn until dusk, I sweat over a roaring red hell of a fire, creating useful objects from scrap bits of iron.”

Four different sentence groups, four different tones. Who you are as a writer will dictate what kind of tone you choose. (By the way, I’d choose the second one.)

Lyrical writing isn’t an excess of adjectives. You can be just as poetic with plain, sparse language.

I loved Maggie-mine. She was the earth to my star.

Not an adjective in sight, but the words still have a rhythm, a sound.

Sound can resonate from words in playful quips, in deep, meaningful prose, in lilting, musical notes depending on the context.

The books published in the 18 th and 19 th centuries, the ones we’ve come to think of as classics, such as Dickens, Austen, and Bronte, were written to be read aloud. They’re books in which the language sings. Take this opening from Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

If you’re not a person who inherently hears sounds in words, can you learn? Yes.

  • After you’ve finished writing, and after you’ve done what you consider the final edit, read a chapter you’ve written aloud to yourself in a silent room. Make sure you can really hear the echo of your words. Try the garage or the shower. Make no notes the first time, even though you’ll immediately hear where words should be changed. On the second reading, edit away.
  • Pay attention, when you read, for those spots where your mind fills in what isn’t there but should be. Change those words to what you said instead of what you read.
  • Tape a chapter, either into a tape recorder or your computer if you have that capability. Play it back or read it back, and listen to the hills and valleys of the words. Not what they say but how they sound. What you’re trying to do here is dismiss the sound of your own voice, to hear the words, instead.

With practice, you can train your ear to hear - and create – the music of your words.

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