The opening of Rick Moody’s Purple America uses a similar pattern for a different effect: The repetition of the arcane “whosoever” elevates the protagonist’s personal sacrifice to something religious and reinforces the overwhelming nature of being a middle-aged son who must care for, in every way, his debilitated mother: The repeated subject-verb-adverb pattern torques her idea and reinforces how inventive the teenagers were with their kisses just as the writer is with her sentences.
#Kiss i can hear your voice how to
In A Natural History of the Senses, Dianne Ackerman recounts how in the early sixties many girls made kissing an art form:Į kissed inventively, clutching our boyfriends from behind as we straddled motorcycles, whose vibrations turned our hips to jelly we kissed extravagantly beside a turtlearium in the park, or at the local rose garden or zoo we kissed delicately, in waves of sipping and puckering we kissed torridly, with tongues like hot pokers….Īckerman knows how to kiss with her lips and with her tongue (her language, that is). (I was glad to see a blogger such as Jonathan Fields tackling this evasive topic recently.) A sentence can repeat words, phrases, or clauses for a consistent musical rhythm and for emphasis of ideas or feelings a sentence can repeat grammatical structures and parts of speech, too, to play upon readers’ conscious or unconscious expectations of what idea or impression will come next. A sentence often spirals or shrivels depending upon its rhythm-a sentence’s basic unit that gives it musicality. If we can hear syntax’s rhythms, we can learn how to use or vary them according to our intent. Our sentences may pucker up and peck or be way too much tongue and saliva, but a writer tuned into syntax’s rhythms may be able to wield sentences and lines that will kiss a reader from cell to sole.
Words and sentences are writers’ raw material, and if a writer has no love of them, then her writing likely may never move beyond the transliteral or the purplish. Our body’s natural rhythms suggest that we’re formed as much for sentence shaping as for lovemaking.Īlthough thinking about sentence structures while enjoying writing might seem like being on vacation with an uptight lover obsessed with rigid rules, tending to the syntax of things actually may liberate us from unconscious patterns of thinking and writing. Syntax is not an arbitrary term devised by rhetoricians it is a natural expression and translation of our body’s (especially our central nervous system’s) rhythms. Syntax, simply defined, is the patterned structure of words in a sentence. Over years of thinking, of breathing, of listening and of reading, in certain patterns, we’re drawn back along ancestral waves to interior caves where we write in patterns that we’ve unconsciously inherited. Sentence rhythms that we hear and read can recall, in our brain’s neuronal wiring, the ebb and flow in which predecessors uttered first syllables and words. Syntactical patterns haunt and shape our thinking. In short, approach something as simple as sentences with wide-open wonder as if you’ve discovered how to write again for the first time. And then learn to send your love out to readers via rhythmic sentences. If you want to be remarkable as a writer or blogger or web-preneur, fall in love with sentences.
With all due respect to the master of grammatical lyricism and whim, I disagree. “Whoever pays attention to the syntax of things / will never wholly kiss you,” e.e.
#Kiss i can hear your voice series
This article is the second in a series about voice and mastering your craft as a writer, blogger, or web-preneur. But play with it by studying other writers who for centuries have taken their life’s work to innovate language. In which case, my response is not to toy with language but to study it. I’m also glad to see some discussion about bloggers wanting to be taken seriously as writers.
And you’ll craft it by studying your medium. Note: Several writers, bloggers, and web-preneurs ask me questions about “finding their voice.” I suggest you won’t find it.
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