Writing Like A Song

When I write, I try to do more than slam arbitrary words together. I compose careful sentences and group them into musical phrases that reflect what I am trying to feel about what I am saying. My paragraphs are my own a cappella songs. Anyone can write a series of facts and connect them with transitions to make a point. Anyone can write a logical presentation that takes a premise and builds to a conclusion. I want to do so much more than that. I want my words to inspire you, to move you to tears or shock you with their clarity. I want you to HEAR what I mean, not just read my sentences for the words they say. I want you to get a glimpse into my heart. I want to write prose.

When I first began composing my essays and stories, I thought the way to make a sentence great was to pack it with adjectives and adverbs. It wasn’t a room, it was a quiet, brilliant, blue, lonely, thickly painted, cold and barren room with too many clocks on the walls and unpleasant paintings hung askew. How much more powerful to say: It was a room. Its stillness was thick as fog. The blue of its walls smothered me. There was a violent Kandinsky by the window. Three clocks shouted the seconds and I knew I had to leave that place. I plunged into the sunlit hallway and I was at peace.

In that paragraph, I told you where I was and how I felt and I did it in a staccato rhythm. That is the “tune” I chose for that paragraph because I wanted the mood to be unpleasant.

Your writing will take on its own melody if you allow it to do more than burden the reader with endless sentences packed with subjective words that mean nothing. Blue can mean millions of things to millions of people. The blue in my paragraph was not any blue. It was smothering. Stillness can be peaceful, relaxing, restful or uncomfortable. My stillness was oppressing.

The more specific you can be in your descriptions, the more the reader will hear what you mean as well as way you say. But to make your writing memorable, you need to let it sing its own song. Hemingway’s music was lyrical but still lean and spare. He told you very little. Your imagination had to fill in the gaps:
Ernest Hemingway:
1929 “A Farewell to Arms"
“The wind rose in the night and at three o'clock in the morning with the rain coming in sheets there was a bombardment and the Croatians came over across the mountain meadows and through patches of woods and into the front line. They fought in the dark in the rain and a counter-attack of scared men from the second line drove them back.

The wounded were coming into the post, some were carried on stretchers, some walking and some were brought on the backs of men that came across the field. They were wet to the skin and all were scared. We filled two cars with stretcher cases as they came up from the cellar of the post and as I shut the door of the second car and fastened it I felt the rain on my face turn to snow. The flakes were coming heavy and fast in the rain.”

There were hundreds of ways Hemingway could have described that tense, frightening scene. He chose to let the music of his words create the tension in the reader and he contrasted the portent of gloom in the first paragraph with the repetitious lyrics of the next one. He used triads of phrases to bring you into the action as the fighters filled the cars and Robert Jordan shut the door. We feel the cold, we know the fear and we experience the horrible, bloody sacrifice of that war.

My favorite writer has to be Alan Paton. This is the finale of his classic book about the immense human sacrifice we pay for apartheid in his “Cry the Beloved Country” Listen and weep with him:
“Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of it all. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him of all if he lives too much. Yes cry, cry, ..”

Modern writers often are terse and direct. But no one describes the human condition more accurately, more deeply and more simply than John Donne in his “Meditation XVII”:
No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

You can’t say it better than that, can you? These masterful verbal composers, these creators of the symphonies that became their books live forever in the hearts of every generation that followed them. They used few adjectives, fewer adverbs and developed personal rhythms with their words that gave us glorious and unforgettable music.

That is the kind of writing I try to do. I am not there yet, because everything I write gets closer to what I want to say because of the composition I wrote before. That is the glory of writing. Everything I put down on paper is building into the writer I will eventually bec

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