This is the final part of my 5-part beginner’s guide to musical writing. How can we use sound and rhythm to create beautiful writing? So far I’ve explored the use of stress and sound to create patterns and rhythm, both in individual phrases and then how to draw it together to produce cadence in a scene. In this final part I’m going to bite the bullet and try to give an example of how to take a bare bones scene and make it musical. I’m not promising great writing (would that I could). But you should be able to see the musical process in action, and then steal it and do something better. Good luck!
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This is part 4 of my beginner’s guide to musical writing. How can we use sound and rhythm to create beautiful writing? Parts 1 and 2 looked at the building blocks; stress, alliteration, assonance and repetition to create satisfying patterns. Part 3 starts pulling these things together with the concept of cadence. In this part I will talk about how cliché and rhetorical figure can be used to create pattern, and how building a toolbox of rhetoric sets you on the path to writing musical dialogue.
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This is part 3 of my beginner’s guide to musical writing. How can we use sound and rhythm to create beautiful writing? Parts 1 and 2 looked at the building blocks; stress, alliteration, assonance and repetition to create satisfying patterns. Part 3 starts pulling these things together with the concept of cadence. How do we build an overall pattern, and how to unify it with a satisfying final note?
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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 is the final part of my 5-part beginner’s guide to musical writing. How can we use sound and rhythm to create beautiful writing? So far I’ve explored the use of stress and sound to create patterns and rhythm, both in individual phrases and then how to draw it together to produce cadence in a scene. In this final part I’m going to bite the bullet and try to give an example of how to take a bare bones scene and make it musical. I’m not promising great writing (would that I could). But you should be able to see the musical process in action, and then steal it and do something better. Good luck!
