The Music of Prose

Does your manuscript sing?

You've followed Noah Lukeman's advice and prepared a flawless copy for submitting - no typos, no smudges, proper format and the like. You've even gone that next step and cleaned up the prose. Not one excess adjective or adverb is lingering on the pages, cluttering up your story. Your verbs and nouns are well chosen, some coming from your head but others finding their source in the thesaurus that is always at your fingertips. Those on-line dictionary/reference manuals are remarkably handy.

What next, then, before you send your sample pages to a literary agent? You listen to the words and determine their rhythm, or lack thereof.

Chapter 3 of Noah Lukeman's manual describes the flow of prose that is its musical rhythm. Here is where your beta readers come into play, but it helps to read your pages aloud as well. Good writing has a flow to it, not unlike poetry. When you read aloud, you should hear clunky parts, the dissonance that mars your literary symphony.

While reading out loud, you should hear the parts that sound off-key, perhaps because you have used too much alliteration, describing the last, lingering lock of Lorna's long tresses or some such stuttering. Maybe you thought it brilliant at the time, but as you speak and hear with your ears, the clunking should send you back to the keyboard to re-write that line.

It could be that your character names aren't working. Melvin and Malva might be unique appellations, but the reader is going to get confused pretty quickly. Then if you start referring to Melvin LaRue, Mel, LaRue, Mr. LaRue, etc., and all within the first five pages, your beta readers will really be scratching their heads.

And you thought that all you had to do was keep the plot coherent and double check the continuity. A lot of work, this writing business.