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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Numbers are important.
I don’t remember much about the songs I wrote when I was a teenager and hoped that playing the guitar would help me talk to girls. But this morning I caught myself singing a couple of lines from one of them:
“The sky falls in but you’re exactly the same,
And 41 angels turn acceptance to blame.”
Why would these lines stick in my head?
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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.
