This is part two of my beginner’s guide to writing musical dialogue. 
How can we use sound and rhythm to create beautiful writing? In part one I introduced the idea of music as a predictable pattern of sounds and beats, and showed how in English we can organise the stressed syllables in words to produce rhythm. In this part I will expand the idea to include the sound of words, through alliteration, assonance and repetition. I will talk about how this impacts rhythm, tempo and pace, before finishing with the concept of cacophony and noting that you can indeed have too much of a good thing.
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Clever people tell us that good writing is musical. Qualities like cadence and cacophony; pitch, rhythm, dynamic; pace, tempo and metre, can improve what we write. To do this, the mystical “rules of music” must be applied.
We are, occasionally, assured that these rules can’t be taught. Which is odd, because musicians get taught this stuff all the time. So, in this series of 5 posts I explain how some of the basic concepts of music apply and show them in some new writing. What simple ideas can we use to make our writing musical?[i]
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This article contains my submission for a screenwriting exercise from the Aaron Sorkin Screenplay Masterclass. The objective is to take a famous (public domain) short story and adapt it to the first ten pages of a screenplay. The story I chose from the list provided on the course was “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allen Poe.
I have tried to adapt the story so that a) Vincent Price could not possibly be envisaged playing a part and b) it wasn’t just another story about the protagonist fridging the only woman in the story and then experiencing a lot of man pain.[i] I’d really like to know if it worked out!
I have never written a screenplay before, so I’d appreciate feedback. Don’t feel you have to be nice or lie to spare my feelings, but do remember Bill and Ted’s maxim.[ii] Yeah. I’m dead nervous about sharing this. Here goes:
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Planning writing can feel pointless. A lot of us depend on deadlines, caffeine fuelled all-nighters and forgetting how last time we promised we would never do that again. But for a book or PhD sized project – really anything where the finish line is years away and the work too large to write in a night – that approach is unsustainable. Probably. I mean, I’m prepared to give it a go. But there has to be a better way!
This article is about making the choice between planning your work based on content objectives (five thousand words by Friday, a 12 chapters by December) or duration objectives (20 hours a week, 0800-1200 Monday to Friday). We are always operating a balance between the time we have, how much we are prepared to invest and how good the work is going to be. Choosing the right intermediate objectives helps you prioritise the outcomes you want. So how do we choose the right sort of targets?
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Last month I finished the first draft of my first novel. I had a beer and took a holiday. I’m back and the manuscript keeps looking at me. I try to ignore it. It laughs, says “I thought so,” and then stops looking at me in a way that makes it really clear it is still looking at me. So what do I do with it now?
Obviously, I’m not going to let anyone read the first draft. There’s a long process of editing to get through before I even think about trying publishers or agents. But how do you turn a first draft into a final draft? (more…)
How can we use sound and rhythm to create beautiful writing? In part one I introduced the idea of music as a predictable pattern of sounds and beats, and showed how in English we can organise the stressed syllables in words to produce rhythm. In this part I will expand the idea to include the sound of words, through alliteration, assonance and repetition. I will talk about how this impacts rhythm, tempo and pace, before finishing with the concept of cacophony and noting that you can indeed have too much of a good thing.
