Book Excerpt:

Language is sound by which we communicate. You could say it’s organized sound. Or patterned sound. Or sound charged with meaning. But it’s still sound. You listen to me speak, and you’re listening to sound. But it’s variable sound. It’s sound with—pauses. With emphasis. With, well, you know, a certain rhythm.

In writing, the kind of sound the writer makes on the page is crucial to our liking his or her prose, or not. When we read prose, we hear it. As Eudora Welty wrote in One Writer’s Beginnings, “Ever since I was first read to, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn’t hear. As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me.” How prose writers are different is, among other things, the sound they make on the page. The sound of Raymond Carver on the page is very different than the sound Henry James makes. A sentence is far more than information.

In another way of speaking about this, Jean Cocteau said he knew Shakespeare was a great writer, even without knowing a single word of English. He could hear it in the sounds the words made.

At the highest level, the sound a writer makes on the page is music.

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Topics/Categories:

Creative Writing, Language, Words

Genre:

Writers and Writing

Type of Work:

Book

Publishers:

Transaction Publishers

Purchase From:

Buy The Soul of Creative Writing from Amazon.com


Facebook page for The Soul of Creative Writing

Original Publish Date:

March 15, 2008

Reading Guides:

Here are some exercises/assignments for The Soul of Creative Writing that were created by the writer Nancy Jensen, author of Window, for her writing class. She was kind enough to share them and let me post them: http://www.richardgoodman.org/files/Writing_assign m.pdf

Formats:

Hardcover

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