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NEW SERIES! ADVANCED CREATIVE WRITING TECHNIQUES Part two: MODULATION In the second part of his series that will help you hone your writing skills, James McCreet looks at techniques for varying the flow and rhythm of your work on micro and macro levels In music, modulation is the variation between tones to create form and structure – to make the music acoustically interesting. Some writers use the term to describe a similar effect in prose: changes in rhythm and flow that affect how readers respond. You know you’re an advanced writer when you make clear decisions about the position of clauses, paragraph breaks, sentence lengths or, say, the trade-off between semi-colons and full stops. At a micro level, prose modulation is managed with precisely selected vocabulary (as we saw last month), with punctuation and with specific sentence structures. It works at a mostly subliminal level on the reader but should be fully conscious in the writer. If you want to make the reader relaxed, tense, fully immersed or simply delighted with your writing, you’ll need to use modulation. There are limitless ways of doing it – as many ways as there are to write a sentence or a paragraph. Let’s look at just a few examples. Managing flow People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped and murdered. People were hungry, sick, bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. This small part of a longer description of LA in Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye looks like a list and indeed it is. The list is a classic modulating technique whose effect varies depending on how it’s used. Here, Chandler is trying to encapsulate his city in an impressionistic way by heaping negative terms together. The list makes it seem relentless and unending. Note how the crimes in the first sentence escalate in seriousness. The problem with lists is that they can become monotonous if used for too long. That’s where Chandler calls on more modulation. The second sentence looks set to be a mirror of the first (both begin the same way) but he switches the rhythm after ‘desperate’ to send the sentence off in unexpected directions as he expands on forms of desperation before returning to the adjectives and a final surprise with the descriptive phrase ‘shaken by sobs’. The words tell us many things but the flow and the rhythms effected by those comma pauses, the repetition and the absence of a final ‘and create a sensation of breathlessness – even of sobbing? It is a lamentation in form and subject. Immersive description A great silence around and above. Perhaps on some quiet night the tremor of far-off drums, sinking, swelling, a tremor vast, faint; a sound weird, appealing, suggestive, and wild – and perhaps with as profound a meaning as the sound of bells in a Christian country. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is famously rich in description. This excerpt is notable for the way it not only describes the sound of the drums but replicates it. Note how the many commas cause the sentence to pause and ripple like the reverberations of those distant, indistinct drums. It makes for a staccato rhythm that is wilfully awkward and calls to mind the held breaths when one tries to listen carefully. Note also how the description of the drums uses so many adjectives. This isn’t Conrad fumbling for the right word or hammering his thesaurus. It’s him attempting to express the ineffability of a sublime sound. The drumming all of those words and more. 4 SEPTEMBER 2024 www.writers-online.co.uk
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ADVANCED CREATIVE WRITING TECHNIQUES We know this because the second part of the sentence, in contrast, is a clearly expressed summary in terms the reader can understand. Character perspective The foreignness of his depigmentation by unknown suns, his nourishment by strange soils, his tongue awkward with the curl of many dialects – these things fascinated Nicole. Some say that F Scott Fitzgerald’s last complete novel, Tender is the Night, eclipses The Great Gatsby (I’m one of them). The form is reminiscent of Chandler’s list above and uses repetition for each clause. Why? Fitzgerald could also have begun the sentence ‘Nicole was fascinated by . . .’ but chose to modulate his sentence like this. The author wants to show us the character’s infatuation and comingled fear/excitement about her soon-tooccur adultery with this exotic man. Fitzgerald could just describe it, but he chooses to capture its effect in her obsessive gaze. The rolling clauses evoke her panting emotion. The terms of reference are also quite strange. Unknown suns? Nourishing soils? Curled tongue? They’re not typical terms of attraction. Ah, but Nicole is partially insane! Modulation allows us to capture patterns of thought such as the unbroken flow of interior monologue, the staccato stops and starts of breathless action, or panic. A blend of long and short sentences can show rational thought. All are powerful ways to express character rather than merely describe it. Going macro We’ve been considering modulation at sentence level but it also works at page, chapter and novel length. It’s obviously more difficult to quote examples of these in an article of this length so I’ll summarise. Flick through any novel and look at the shape of the text on the page. Some appear dense; others are sparely spaced with dialogue or numerous paragraph breaks. This is not entirely arbitrary. The author chooses how quickly a reader goes through a page. Many short paragraphs seem faster. Dialogue is faster. A single, large paragraph is dense and slow. A variation of long and short can help to underline or add counterpoint. A husband talks for twenty unbroken lines and his wife’s response is a single word. Using various modulating techniques allows you to make every paragraph and page a varying flow. We seldom consciously notice it as readers, but we’d notice it if it were done badly. I find I can often look at the mere shape of a student’s page and know with some accuracy if it’s going to be well written. Chapters, likewise, have their shapes. They begin, develop and conclude. They may contain a single scene or twenty short ones, one storyline or three. How you order those parts will affect how well the chapter engages the reader. Do you start with a bang and build from it? Or do you work up to a revelation? Pacing is important. Description is necessary but generally moves slowly. If you set a scene or provide a lot of expositional detail, you may switch the tone by adding some dialogue, changing scene or flicking to another storyline. Such patterns also move between chapters. You don’t want to leave a character for too long before returning. Storylines must remain consistent. If a chapter ends quickly, you can continue that pace or halt it depending on the plot requirements. This is considered advanced writing because it’s not something that most apprentice writers think about. They’re more concerned with getting the story down. An advanced author knows at any one point how the reader is feeling because they, the author, has engineered that feeling by modulating the narrative. The big picture Naturally, the entire novel has its peaks and troughs, its races and pauses. Most novels begin relatively slowly because you need to introduce characters, locations, themes and storylines. Sure, you can start with an urgent prologue or flash-forward to get round this, but you still need to lay the foundations. People who ‘pants’ their novel sometimes don’t appreciate structural modulations because they’re not seeing their novel as a whole. They’re seeing it emerge in real time. An advanced writer attempts to visualise the entire narrative and builds the story with a powerful awareness of where key scenes will lie. For example, I like to have a selection of attention-grabbing or set-piece scenes in mind before I begin writing. I know that the reader will enjoy them and they are important to both story and character. Accordingly, I carefully distribute such scenes throughout the book as ‘pulse points’ so the reader is never far away from a highlight. In a similar vein, I try to plan something significant for the mid-point and around twenty per cent into the book – notionally the stage when foundation work eases into plot development. Just like the aesthetic shape of the page and its paragraphs, the novel itself should have a discernible shape to the author. Modulation of the reading experience goes beyond the story and characters. You know what’s keeping the reader interested, what’s making them read quickly or slowly, what needs to be well understood and what needs to be lightly narrated. A narrative is a line, albeit not always a straight one. The reader follows the line throughout the book, but their attention is held from page to page. If you lose your modulating power for a few consecutive pages, you could also lose your reader. The very best authors can keep readers interested even when very little is happening story wise. It’s a balance of micro and macro modulation, guiding the reader’s engagement using all the tools you have. Such techniques make all writing better – not just fiction. If you can master them, you become an advanced writer, which in turn opens interesting doors. That’s the next article. Don’t miss Part Three of James McCreet’s Advanced Creative Writing Techniques series in WM October. www.writers-online.co.uk SEPTEMBER 2024 5

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NEW SERIES! ADVANCED CREATIVE WRITING TECHNIQUES

Part two: MODULATION

In the second part of his series that will help you hone your writing skills, James McCreet looks at techniques for varying the flow and rhythm of your work on micro and macro levels

In music, modulation is the variation between tones to create form and structure – to make the music acoustically interesting. Some writers use the term to describe a similar effect in prose: changes in rhythm and flow that affect how readers respond. You know you’re an advanced writer when you make clear decisions about the position of clauses, paragraph breaks, sentence lengths or, say, the trade-off between semi-colons and full stops.

At a micro level, prose modulation is managed with precisely selected vocabulary (as we saw last month), with punctuation and with specific sentence structures. It works at a mostly subliminal level on the reader but should be fully conscious in the writer. If you want to make the reader relaxed, tense, fully immersed or simply delighted with your writing, you’ll need to use modulation.

There are limitless ways of doing it – as many ways as there are to write a sentence or a paragraph. Let’s look at just a few examples. Managing flow People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped and murdered. People were hungry, sick, bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs.

This small part of a longer description of LA in Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye looks like a list and indeed it is. The list is a classic modulating technique whose effect varies depending on how it’s used. Here, Chandler is trying to encapsulate his city in an impressionistic way by heaping negative terms together. The list makes it seem relentless and unending. Note how the crimes in the first sentence escalate in seriousness.

The problem with lists is that they can become monotonous if used for too long. That’s where Chandler calls on more modulation. The second sentence looks set to be a mirror of the first (both begin the same way) but he switches the rhythm after ‘desperate’ to send the sentence off in unexpected directions as he expands on forms of desperation before returning to the adjectives and a final surprise with the descriptive phrase ‘shaken by sobs’.

The words tell us many things but the flow and the rhythms effected by those comma pauses, the repetition and the absence of a final ‘and create a sensation of breathlessness – even of sobbing? It is a lamentation in form and subject. Immersive description A great silence around and above. Perhaps on some quiet night the tremor of far-off drums, sinking, swelling, a tremor vast, faint; a sound weird, appealing, suggestive, and wild – and perhaps with as profound a meaning as the sound of bells in a Christian country.

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is famously rich in description. This excerpt is notable for the way it not only describes the sound of the drums but replicates it. Note how the many commas cause the sentence to pause and ripple like the reverberations of those distant, indistinct drums. It makes for a staccato rhythm that is wilfully awkward and calls to mind the held breaths when one tries to listen carefully. Note also how the description of the drums uses so many adjectives. This isn’t Conrad fumbling for the right word or hammering his thesaurus. It’s him attempting to express the ineffability of a sublime sound. The drumming all of those words and more.

4

SEPTEMBER 2024

www.writers-online.co.uk

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