Flash Extravaganza Day 26: The Music of Your Prose - July newsletter for all subscribers
"sound carries emotion"
“Young Spanish Woman with a Guitar” ~Auguste Renoir, 1898 (public domain)
“Style is very simple matter; it is all about rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words….Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.” ~Virginia Woolf
Hi friends,
It’s Day 26 of our Flash Immersion Extravaganza, but it’s also the middle of the month, when I send out my monthly newsletter to all subscribers. So hi, everyone! I hope you’re having a fun summer and are finding ways to stay cool, happy, and creative.
In a few days, I’ll be traveling to Trinity College in Bristol, England to teach and take part in the annual Flash Fiction Festival, run by the wonderful Jude Higgins and her equally wonderful and hardworking team. I can’t praise this event highly enough. Imagine spending a whole weekend with other writers passionate about the form, and never once being asked, “What the heck is flash fiction?”
NEW ROUND OF 3-IN-90 LIVE ONLINE WORKSHOPS REGISTERING SOON!
“Kathy Fish worked her magic today! The magician waved her wand, and in 90 minutes, we had three new flash pieces, rough, unsteady on their newborn feet, but moving. Thank you!” ~
Heads up, friends! Later this month, I’ll be taking registrations for a new round of my popular live 3-in-90 workshops on the dates below. All workshops will run from 1:00 - 2:30 p.m. U.S. Eastern Time.
Saturday, August 16th
Saturday, September 13th
Saturday, October 11th
Watch this space for further details and to sign up!
Okay, what follows is a bit of what I’ll be teaching in my festival workshop, “Play it by Ear: Writing Flash that Sings.”
“Sound carries emotion before meaning arrives. A paragraph can hum, stutter, ache, or punch depending on what it’s made of—how it’s built sonically, not just semantically. The body responds before the brain translates. That’s the magic. That’s what we’re after.” ~Rena Willis
How Important is Sound / Music in Flash Fiction?
I touched on this a bit in my recent post on punctuation, “the breath of your prose” as Benjamin Dreyer describes it:
Sound is hugely important in my own flash writing. I was delighted to come across the quote from Virginia Woolf above, as it speaks directly to my own process, where I, not always, but sometimes begin with sound, or rhythm. Only then do I plug in words / images / story. This was the case for my piece, “Praise Rain,” as well as “One Purple Finch,” “Alligator,” “once mighty,” and others.
Prose poets seem to naturally know how to employ sounds / rhythm / music to their work. Many of my favorite flash writers also write prose poems or write flash with a poetic sensibility (and, as we know, the line between the two is very thin). Writers such as: Francine Witte, Lydia Copeland Gwyn, Sarah Freligh, Pat Foran, Sabrina Hicks, j.j. peña, and more.
A few findings about the importance of sound / music for the human brain:
“[Harvard Medical School lecturer Patrick] Whelan believes the answer lies partly in evolutionary biology. The earliest mammals, most of them likely nocturnal, had to rely on their hearing and sense of smell as defensive mechanisms — they were hyperfocused, hyperattentive. According to Whelan, the modern experience of listening to live music can be viewed as a vestige of that primeval adaptation.”
And…
“Plato considered that music played in different modes would arouse different emotions, and as a generality most of us would agree on the emotional significance of any particular piece of music, whether it be happy or sad; for example, major chords are perceived to be cheerful, minor ones sad. The tempo or movement in time is another component of this, slower music seeming less joyful than faster rhythms.”
It may be that we’re so attuned to music, so needful of it, we actually seek it out. It may be that we “hear” music in non-musical settings. Prose, for instance. Certainly poetry. If not spoken, then inside our heads.
I remember my grandmother reading me nursery rhymes when I was very young. She read with such a lively, sing-song voice, full of expression. Of course, the experience was intricately connected with the comfort I felt nestled on her lap. I credit her for fostering my love of language, the music of it, early on.
And I’ve written before about how rich memories are often evoked for us from hearing certain songs. Music brings us back to a time or place, evoking sense memories and emotions. And we just generally recall anything much better when it’s set to music or a jingle.
Okay, but prose & poetry are not music…
No, but we can aim to make our flash prose, any prose, musical, in order to create the same felt experience our readers experience when they listen to music. As always, flash writers need to find ways to tell big stories and have a big impact, in the limited space afforded them.
YOUR PROMPT
Read “It is the night of the suitcase moon” by Francine Witte
Read “mi corazón quiere cantar así” by j. j. peña.
Read “Cotton” by Lydia Copeland Gwyn
Read “A Little Called Pauline” by Gertrude Stein
Do you hear the music in these pieces? Do you think the “sound” of the prose contributes to the emotions evoked? J.J.’s piece is quite different from the other two (note as well how lightly punctuated it is). If you heard them read aloud from another room, words muffled, could you still discern the emotional weight of these pieces?
Today, I’d like you to write a very short piece (150 words or fewer) that employs musicality based on the type of story you are conveying. Choose one or both. If you do both, post them together for us to compare:
A beautiful memory from your (or your character’s) childhood. Let the words flow. Give us long sentences. Employ alliteration maybe. Go for soft, lilting sounds.
A brief scene full of some alarming action, a fight that erupts in a convenience store, for example, where you need to convey bursts of activity and confusion. Write short, staccato sentences. Hard sounds. This might be a place to use creative or no punctuation as well.
This is a prompt that is more for practice and learning than anything else, but if it results in a full flash draft for you, wonderful!
Happy writing, friends.
With love & gratitude,
Kathy
SMASHED
At fifteen we walked the streets. The middle of dark streets where no cars drove because everyone else was tucked up in bed. We swaggered, laughed, smashed bottles. We sat in concrete pipes, smoked. Tobacco or weed. None of it legal at fifteen. The streets were ours.
Until they weren’t. One of us knew him, nobody knew his mates. Drunk and filthy. Louder. Bigger.
Bigger fists.
Except for John D. He was seventeen but hung with us. He knew how to fight.
Heads sound like watermelon smashing on bitumen.
He was one of theirs.
We sobered quick, ran fast, left them huddled.
I didn’t hear a siren.
I never forgot that sound.
Rehearsal for a Suicide
Every day, my father picked me up from school. He drove in silence, eyes fixed on the road. Every evening, driving home in a stream of metal – brash, electric, screeching of brakes, braying of horn, every evening competing with the racket of the rush hour traffic, every evening, desperate to hold him steady, I sweated an endless stream of words.
That particular evening, his knuckles turning pale as he gripped the wheel,
'For God’s sake, why will you never shut up?'
Glancing in the rear-view mirror, he dropped into second gear, indicated left, turned the wheel to mount the kerb, and drove slowly enough into a puzzled lamppost to scarcely dent the bonnet, softly, tenderly, as if rehearsing the crash which, two years later, would prove my failure to give him enough to live for.
He moved the gear stick into neutral and switched off the ignition. Neither of us spoke. The engine ticked as the metal cooled.
I suspect that this only has aspects of the music, Kathy talks about, so any suggestions to improve it would be welcomed.