Write music

Create a sound that pleases the reader's ear. Don't just write words. Write music.

Gary Provost, 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing

Gary Provost

Roy Peter Clark includes the above lines from Gary Provost's book in his own book Murder Your Darlings. He also quotes a similar idea from Steering Your Craft by Ursula K. LeGuin: "Every sentence has a rhythm of its own, which is also part of the rhythm of the whole piece. Rhythm is what keeps the song going, the horse galloping, the story moving."

I have never put it so eloquently, but I have long believed it. Writing should have rhythm. We expect it in poetry, but the same thing is true in prose, any kind of prose short of a shopping list. You might accomplish this with beautiful words, beautiful metaphors and such tricks as alliteration, but the best tool may simply be variety: words of different length, sentences of different length and even paragraphs of different length.

Many of us of a certain age learned to read with Dick and Jane, where every sentence was something like "See Spot run." In these readers it wasn't just the stories that were dull. All these brief sentences filled with one-syllable words became tedious, even for first-graders. Even six-year-olds like a little music in their books, which is why so many children's books have lines that rhyme. Not all words and sentences need to be short, but some should be. And some should be longer.

Ernest Hemingway was famous for his short sentences, but he threw in enough longer sentences and longer words to create a rhythm that became famous and even distinctive.

"A good writer, like a good reader, has a mind's ear," LeGuin wrote. This means, I think, that good reading involves listening to the music in the writing. The better the writer, the better the music. For writers, that means reading one's work aloud, whether to another person or not, or at least reading it silently as if to an audience. Listen for the music. Listen for false notes. Then go back to work until it sounds right.