Variation in Tone, Poetry in Prose
the shape of sentences matters
In her Paris Review interview with Elissa Schappell, Toni Morrison says, "I work very hard [...] to remove the writerly-ness from it, to give it a combination of lyrical, standard, and colloquial language. To put all these things together into something that I think is much more alive and representative."
This prompt is designed to help you choose with greater intentionality the level of diction to use in a given passage of your work. Morrison threw down three classes of language she draws on: lyrical, standard and colloquial. You may have other mode of writing or deploy other types of material — say, ecstatic landscape description, comically oblique technical jargon, lucid dreams cast on the page without punctuation, or acronym-packed snapchats.
If you're a writer who uses ecstatic landscapes descriptions, ask yourself if every landscape should be described with equal lyricism. Possibly yes, but what if they all were except for that one devastating location where a terrible crime occurred?
Consider tethering a level or style of diction to character, for example by being ruthlessly consistent about the way a certain POV is rendered — always staccato with Cousin Bette, or always digressive and dreamy when you're channeling the mind of Thoreau's Woodchuck. This sort of variation invisibly assists readers in tracking the governing voice in a work with multiple POVs. And then think about character growth over the arc of a work. Should Cousin Bette sound different after her spiritual awakening (or rape, or loss of faith, or whatever crucial thing happens to her)? Is the tone you set for her initially still the right one? There are certain times when consistency is important, and other when it makes sense to introduce variation.
The point here is to take care to tailor your language to your content. If you're aware of the tone you are using, you are also in control. The balance between consistency and variation in diction is a delicate one, individual to each writer, each text.
This passage from Melanie Rae Thon's story "Necessary Angels" displays admirable and meaningful variations in word stress and the tempo of the sentences:
"The first time it happened, she was five years old, thirty-six pounds. While Mother dozed in the shade of her striped umbrella, Dora wandered up the beach, into the cool waves. She felt sand shifting under her feet, her small body sinking in the tug of an undertow. One man up the shore was close enough to save her. One fat white man burned red seemed to stare. But he didn’t come. Was he blind behind his glasses, or was he curious, wanting to see what the child might do?"
The first three sentences center on a young girl under threat and her mother. All three of those sentences unfold with several phrases, each phrase several words in length. Then come three blindingly staccato sentences whose subjects are men. These three sentences have no internal punctuation. In the fifth sentence ("One fat white man burned red seemed to stare."), all the words are equally stressed monosyllables, and the description of the man is grammatically quite unusual. A more typical expression of the same information might have used the word sunburned instead of the phrase burned red, but that would have broken the pattern of single-syllable words. To my ear, the words in that sentence land like hammer blows. The man described does not himself harm Dora — in fact, he doesn't move a muscle — but his explosion onto the page presages a grave harm. To me, this paragraph is a wonder, laying out a cryptic map of the narrative to come, sheerly through the poetry of its syllables.
“The Tomb of Wrestling” by Jo Ann Beard also tackles the violence of its subject matter through variation in tempo and level of diction in its prose. Beard explores the compression and dilation of time during an adrenalin-charged flight-or-flight moment by setting long, rambling meditations against explosive, pugilistic declarations. The story’s first phrase, “She struck her attacker in the head with a shovel,” opens the action with unvarnished directness — no adjectives, adverbs, extra words of any sort — but it takes four pages for the shovel to make contact and six for the attacker to fall to ground. Beard takes us through a dozen “pulses of understanding,” about subjects including cheese-food, turtles, composting, aggression in hummingbirds and how to swing a hammer, deploying paragraphs that are complex and digressive, sentences that are compound and littered with em dashes. But periodically she interrupts this rhythm with short, unadorned staccato bursts of information about the fight that is taking place in the protagonist’s kitchen: “It rang, titanium on bone, like a clapper on a bell.” The wedding of two distinct tones begets narrative energy, a lyrical and dramatic suspense that manages to make a long story that begins with its very climax enormously suspenseful.
PROMPT: Revisit a passage you've already drafted — an important or problematic one. Start by briefly assessing the length of each sentence, the number and placement of adjectives and adverbs, the activity or passivity of verbs, the level of sensory detail, the nature of the information conveyed, the punctuation. Rewrite it so certain sentences are longer, others shorter, and there's a logic to which is which. Push the phrases, the words and the larger rhythms of the sentences so their sound reflects their content.