Rhythm in writing

The rhythms when I write - poems, fiction, other sorts of prose - are fed by what I've read and been read since childhood. Of this I'm sure. A certain beat in a poem feels familiar, right, and I wonder what, where...? And then it comes to me, often some time later - Dr Seuss! Rupert Brooke!

The same is true of prose. A word often needs to be changed because it makes me uncomfortable for some reason, it might be the wrong word - too strong for the sentence or paragraph, not necessary, inappropriate, sentimental ... Or it could be that it doesn't have quite the right rhythm. The sentence or paragraph is a body and this word is the dicky hip. I keep coming back to it, I can't leave it alone, I know it needs changing. I try another one - and it fits. Ahh.

I know that my sense of the rightness or wrongness of a particular word is informed by my own interior sense of rhythm, and I often wonder what it is about a particular rhythm that feels familiar. It rarely comes immediately. I sometimes think I've stolen the whole thing (words and rhythm) without realising, and wake in a cold sweat.

Nervous - I focus on some of the likely writers I might have raided e.g. my prose favourites - Janet Frame, Colm Toibin, Anne Enright, Paul Auster  ...  It may not come immediately, if at all. When it does, it can be the oddest thing sometimes, not what I expected, not always literary: an advertising jingle, for example ... but there is no doubting that the phrase has lodged in me and been revived.

This happened this week with a poem I spent a few days on. When I got to the end of it,  there was a penultimate line missing. It finished too quickly. Reading it aloud, the line came: whole, intact, absolutely right. I wrote it in, and then worried. Where had it come from? It felt too easy, and somehow familiar. I fretted over it (and about the ultimate line, which was also the first line ... had it come from somewhere? It seemed a double concern now the new line was bouncing up and down declaring itself from somewhere else unknown.)

I googled the ulimate line, nothing popped up. I tried variations of it - nothing.

I walked around with the poem for days worrying at it. I tried relaxing my mind (like I do when I'm trying to remember people's names) and flipped through some possible poet's names. Nothing came that sat easily with what I'd written. Perhaps I was imagining it. Then again, I read so many poems these days, it could come from anywhere.

Then after four days, the penultimate line clicked into place without fanfare. I realised its rhythm and its sense came from a poem written and read by a character in a not-so-recent Hollywood movie, that my daughter and I enjoy and have watched a few times together. Who would credit it!

With that revelation, the genesis of the final line (also the first line) announced itself. I realised it had come from a well-known scene in a play of Shakespeare's, one I've known since I appeared in it at the age of 17. Not the actual words, but the sense of them, the urgency, the rhythm.

Crazy huh?

Write it: embrace the beautiful danger

I have been Rousseaud into the day by the work of poet Jo Thorpe. This lovely verb 'To Rousseau' is in her new collection in/let: 'some ringlet of music/might Rousseau me into the day.' (Twlight and melancholies)

A dancer, dance reviewer and teacher of dance history, the elegant Jo writes poems that do indeed 'dance' - in their language, their musicality, the way they move... Poet Bill Manhire comments on the way Jo's poems 'notice' movement and follow it, and go between 'between stillness and frenzy'.

Amongst other things - not least sinewy/rich poems on being a mother, on being alive, on attending to things, on writing - Jo writes about the stuff of dance and what makes it. How to dance your own body's legend is one of those.

It begins 'Choose the site carefully. Find one that will hold you/ in-side nuance. Create your own mise-en-scene...' It could be a poem about writing just as easily.

Jo continues describing how the dancer enters the 'Now', moves 'through the animal', makes 'room for the bird', follows 'the wind-spool'. She bids the dancer/reader to 'embrace the beautiful danger' at the core:

Watch how it grins and glares at you, that blur

at the edge of field, blur on the edge of shape -- find the

keel of it, the red that pecks, the claw angling for the back.

Brilliant advice for the writer - too many of whom take the safe and familiar path, the place they think they should put their feet or where they think other people want them to go (I read a lot of novel manuscripts...) And even if they (hurrah!) 'find the keel of it', one of the biggest weaknesses in manuscripts I find is that too many writers let it go in the latter quarter of a novel, the boat founders, the red becomes pink, the claw wears a glove, and - god forbid - they start to tidy up (think claw as duster), heading for a tidy end, a 'satisfactory' end .... or maybe they just run out of steam or imagination. Poets do this too.

Jo, rightly, bids the dancer (the reader, the writer) not to give up at this point. 

Back, safe, from the flight through the intuitive

resist even now the wanting-to-be-calmed,

the 'clear-lit custody of knowing'. Furrow-up the stone path.

Lick your way through the glittering city (its fabled glass).

Play in the slipstream. This is how the story opens. 

This is how the necessary heat rolls in.

Bravo!! (Note: there shouldn't be gaps between the lines - blame blogger formatting)

Oh I love this poet. Her book is only $20 at good bookshops or online at Steele Roberts. And you can read one of her find-the-keel, glittering poems about a dancer here on Tuesday Poem.

Tricking the reader - Didion

Love this from Joan Didion - essayist, novelist, memoirist, journalist - in the rich vault of the Paris Review interviews: 

Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it. . . . Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to it.

And this:

Interviewer: You have said that writing is a hostile act; I have always wanted to ask you why. 

Joan Didion: It’s hostile in that you’re trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture. It’s hostile to try to wrench around someone else’s mind that way. Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else’s dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.

For more, go here.  

through the resistance

US author Jayne Anne Phillips, praised once by Nadine Gordimer as "the best short story writer since Eudora Welty", believes that the tension of balancing the roles of writer, mother, director and teacher in an MFA program for writers feeds her work.


“Everyday you force yourself through the resistance you are working with and you get deeper into the material. This way you get to stuff you wouldn’t have access to otherwise,” said Phillips.

“My work has to be so deeply compelling that I can put it down and return to it, re-enter it, at another time. I don’t have the kind of life where I can set a (per day) page count or a word count. The tension of needing to do the work affects the intensity of the kind of prose I write.”


Hallelujah for that. I was just thinking today how I am writing too much of my new novel in my head at the moment mainly because I am tied up with too many other things -much along the same lines as Jayne Anne Phillips - and there aren't enough hours in the day. I have many scenes waiting to be put onto paper - varying from those with strong definition that change very little, to those that continually shift and change and blend and re-form much like oil paints on water before you lay white paper on top to create a marbled effect. I guess Phillips is right that when I get to the computer in the key hole of time I am able to make for myself then the writing has to rear up and push its way through - there is no time for mucking around - and the novel sucks in some of this intensity/tension and is able to go deeper than you'd think it would.

Sometimes, though, I delay writing because I still need to think things through. That's certainly happened in the last few days when I have come to realise that the end of the novel [which I always write early on] isn't what I wanted at all. I get it now. This new ending - the one in my brain with a small picket fence around it - is much better than the last one which had a frenetic and desperate feel to it. I had another realisation watching my daughter play netball today - it has something to do with a fur coat and what someone else told me yesterday about a book she loved as a child. Suddenly those two things connected with something else inside the novel and a stray thought I had a while ago - and bingo! Just need to get it down on paper now.

More from the Jayne Anne Phillips interview here.

My words echo thus, in your mind. But to what purpose

I discovered T.S. Eliot in the sixth form. I remember opening a book of his poems while I was babysitting for the neighbours, and feeling the immediate painful thrill of words like small darts hitting home here and here and here.


I fell in love with Eliot, dear reader, and bought his Collected Poems 1909 - 1962 the following year. Sometime after that - I don't know when - I lost it. Last week, my friend Whena Owen gave it back to me [picture above] wrapped up in an old dress pattern. Apparently her brother, Dylan, was cleaning out his bookshelves when he found it and found my name in the front, and underneath excerpts from Eliot's poems written in fountain pen with curling daisies instead of full-stops (eek). Whena and I were at school together and flatted together once, too, so somehow the Collected Poems of T.S. had migrated into her shelves and then into Dylan's.


My excitement at getting the book back was partly about the book itself and partly about what it had gone on to become for me in the intervening years. You see, when I wrote The Blue I deliberately wrote several passages which reflected the key literary influences of my life - in style, ideas and/or content. One of them is Eliot. Others are Janet Frame, Katherine Mansfield, Rupert Brooke, Virginia Woolf and Witi Ihimaera. The connections aren't at all obvious and I don't expect people to make them - and oh, when I read this I think how pretentious it all sounds - my motivation was primarily to slip in a small tribute to each of those authors and poets and partly to satisfy myself. I hoped that some readers might make the links sub-consciously or consciously and that would give them a deeper understanding of the text itself, and some insight into the shady places from which my writing springs.

Okay - if you're still reading - where is Eliot in The Blue? First of all, you need to read the extract at the start of this post which comes from Burnt Norton in The Four Quartets by Eliot, and the one below from the same poem. Then read the extract from The Blue at the end of this post about the wedding of Lilian to Ed. It occurs straight after WWI and 20 years before the story opens, but comes near the end of the novel as a memory. The Blue extract is enhanced by knowing the Eliot link, I believe. The theme of all time being 'eternally present' and therefore there being no point in 'disturbing dust on the bowl of rose leaves' is critical to what unfolds in The Blue. Readers of the Four Quartets will also know the bird is likely to be a deceptive thrush, and will know lines like these: 'Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind/cannot stand too much reality', and all the rest....

How marvellous it was to open my old creaking copy of Eliot's Collected Poems and find them there: the garden, the gate, the excitement of the children, the bird calling - all as I remembered them, and as I had written them into The Blue in one way or another [rose bushes become pine trees, the children become silly, trilling Jeannie etc.] There's also a complete change of rhythm in The Blue at this point, and the point of view switches from limited third person to second person, with two possibilities: either Lilian is talking to herself and/or the author is talking to Lilian, or both.

THE BLUE [2007] Extract from Chapter 25

Back a step. Back a step up the path. Back up to the small gate of the small churchyard and make a decision there not to enter. To turn at the sound of the small birds, to turn at the smell of the pine trees, to turn at the first crunch of the gravel, and leave quietly, without fuss or hurt. If you had to go in, you fool, you, Lilian, you should have turned back at the first small gravestone, and if you didn’t turn then, there was a point on that path where you could see him and he couldn’t see you, and you knew with sudden clarity that there was nothing there that was familiar. If it hadn’t been for Jeannie, giggling behind you and running into your back like that, you might have turned at last and, seeing the gate there and the small gravel path, you’d have known what to do. As it was, he’d heard that silly trilling friend of yours, and looked for her and saw you, Lilian, in your borrowed silk georgette and red fox, and come forward, trussed in his uniform, his head dipping bashfully and his large hand out. He’d waited outside to introduce you to his Best Man, the cousin you’d heard so much about, who had even written you a letter or two. And there he was stepping out from behind him, a shorter, stockier man in uniform, too, but filling it differently, with thick black hair and ruddy cheeks, older than Ed by a few years, his eyes an astounding blue. Ed clasped his hands together, and waited to see that you liked him.

You remember how slowly it unfolded, the cousin stepping forward and removing his soldier’s hat and taking your hand in greeting and saying your name in a way you’d have usually thought of as familiar but in fact was less insolent than that. And then he said nothing more, although he looked as if he wanted to. Jeannie came forward, wishing he would smile at her like that, but he didn’t. He took her hand instead and kissed it, and Jeannie chortled, silly girl, and showed her crooked teeth.

‘Come on, Owen,’ said Ed, looking pleased at the way it had gone. And they went inside the church, the two of them, to wait for you.

©Mary McCallum

Feeding the Fish

Apart from feeding the fish - I just love this little widget - I have been feeding my novel. Scrawled words in the A4 moleskine notebook are starting to find their way into the laptop again. See the picometer on the right to see the way it's crept silently upwards after months of languishing.

Of course, the exodus from the moleskine isn't a direct thing. Words have a habit of changing as they move around, and they leave some of their number behind and gather in others I had no mind to include. But the wonderful thing is Precarious is swelling again, pinking under the skin, back to life. And I am deeply excited.

Yesterday, I had an epiphany about the motivation of the main character - I weary of novels and films where the character's motivation is always grounded in their life's experiences - bad and they act bad, good and they act good - you know the drill. In The Blue I let the reader decide whether the way the characters acted was entrenched in their natures or wrenched from them as a result of what befell them. I still don't know myself but I have my suspicions. For Precarious, I wanted something else to shape why my character is a precarious person in terms of her identity - and yesterday I got it.

The idea had been forming after a chance remark made by a customer in the bookshop the other day. One of those comments which spills with story and you long to know more. But the customer had to leave before I could get more out of her. Little did she know she left the story trailing behind her, and I caught the end of it, pinched it off and put it in my pocket.It is simply the most perfect reason for how my character - Nicola - acts. Now I can start laying out the clues. The first one was laid this morning ... a woman comes into the shop (a dress shop in the novel) and ...

I think I'll leave it there.

Oh, and if you haven't worked it out yet, click on your cursor to feed the fish.