Music and writing

Writing is more like music than the visual arts. You read words with your eyes, but you hear them in your mind. The best writing, like the best songs, carries us along with its melody, rhythm, and flow. It moves us. Think of each paragraph as a little sonata, one that uses timbre and tempo to convey meaning to the reader.

Gary Provost, in his book 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing, shows us how it’s done: 

This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes when I am sure the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals – sounds that say, ‘Listen to this; it is important’. (1972/2019: 58-9) 

On one level, Provost is making a point about sentence length. Too many short sentences and our writing becomes dull, repetitive, mechanical. Try mixing it up instead, he suggests. Construct short, medium, and long sentences to maintain the reader’s interest. Figure out when to keep it tight and syncopated, and when to cut loose. Used sparingly, a long sentence can elevate a text from the humdrum to the extraordinary, from the informative to the truly transformative – an effect the reader will notice only as the words steadily accumulate, gather in pace, and eventually take flight. 

But Provost is also encouraging us to write with sound in mind. Get a feel for rhythm, he says, and your paragraphs will pulse with vitality. Cultivate a sense of melody, and your paragraphs will sing – and the reader will want to hum along. Write like a composer of music, whether you take your inspiration from Miles Davis, Brian Wilson, or Kathleen Hanna. Experiment with genre. Play with mood. And try to stay in tune.

How can we learn to hear the music in our own writing? Here’s the most direct route: turn up the volume and read your text aloud. Your ear will hear what the eye cannot see on the page. Try it. I guarantee you will identify all the bum notes, all the missed beats, simply by listening to the text. No one likes singing to themselves in an empty room. But sometimes that’s just what it takes to get the job done.

In Get Back, the fly-on-the-wall documentary about the Beatles, we see Paul McCartney working on ‘The Long and Winding Road’. The song goes through multiple variations and gets a little better, a little more recognizable, each time. McCartney doesn’t compose the song entirely in his head. He sits down at the piano and plays the song over and over again, feeling the lyrics form in his mouth and the melody rise up from the keys, until it sounds good enough to record.

Treat your writing in the same way. Listen, then revise.