Awkward Rhythm and Showing vs. Telling

rhythm

Southern_girl29 said:

Hi, everyone. I queried an agent who only deals with Southern writers. Anyway, he gave me a couple of comments. He said that my story didn't have a rhythm that flowed well. I didn't know I was supposed to try for a rhythm in a novel. This is one reason I stay away from poetry; I hate coming up with a rhythm. He told me to read it aloud to instrumental music and I would see what he meant.

The second thing was he said I telling the story instead of showing it. He said newspaper people often fall into this trap. And, I already knew that because I have to fight against it falling into my newspaper voice every time I write fiction. But, I thought I had succeeded with Ships.

Anyway, I've posted the first chapter of Ships in the Romance/Woman's Fiction section. If you don't mind, do you think you could take a look and see if you agree with the agent?

I would so appreciate it.

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Pretty much all writing needs rhythm and flow, something that can be easy to forget if you're used to writing basic news articles. But even in journalism, human interest pieces, columns, and opinion pieces should have a basic rhythm and flow that carries the reader along with it.

I'll take a look at Ships.

Rhythm and flow in prose are different than poetry. I don't think the agent says you should have meters, rhymes, etc. However, prose does have a "sound" and cadence to it. Pick up a great book, a classic even, and read it out loud. Can you feel how it flows? Can you hear how the words come together and how they sound together to create that rhythm? Is it "musical"? When people read, they don't just read words on the pages. They also hear the words, and how the sentences and paragraphs flow and turn and rise and fall.

Prose can "sound" like music to the readers and that's why some describe a novel as "lyrical," etc. Read it loud. Do you have staccatos, say, when the pace is fast? Do you linger and slow down and present a sweet legato when the pace slows down? Do you stop abruptly for suspense? Do you have crescendos? How about beats in dialogue? Beats in narrative? Syncopation?

Consider the words as "notes" -- prose is like melodies, and sentence structures, etc. are like musical passages. They work together to create a feeling, be it happy, scary, edgy, funny, light, heavy, quick, lethargic...

Listen to a good piece of music that is close to the tone of your story. Then read your story out loud. Did you achieve a similar cadence and rhythm?