Implementing prosodic features - The longer story: The novel - Long-form genres

Creative writing - Mike Sanders 2014

Implementing prosodic features
The longer story: The novel
Long-form genres

Prosodic features are pitch, stress, and length.

Most languages in the world are pitch languages. (English, believe it or not, is in the minority.) What, exactly, is a pitch language? Any language that uses the pitch of a phoneme to differentiate it from other phonemes is a pitch language. The classic example is Chinese, which uses five tones. Pitch allows a language to conserve syllables. Why indulge, like Japanese or Quechua, and create monstrously long words when the same phoneme can express the four concepts of mother, horse, hemp, and swearing?

In the case of pitch, the frequency at which the vocal cords vibrate is not described. Rather only whether they’re vibrating (voiced consonants and vowels) or letting air through (stops). Because pitch is a major feature of a language, it must be included under prosodics. This becomes important in revision when reading your novel—and especially your dialogue—aloud.

Another aspect of pitch must be mentioned: the pitch contour. English may not differentiate between different syllables by pitch, but speakers use the overall pitch of a sentence to imply meaning. What do you get when you raise the pitch of your voice at the end of a statement? A question. The challenge then becomes what’s the best way to convey that in your novel’s dialogue?

Next is stress. Stress is an overlooked feature of English; it doesn’t play as large a role as in other languages, but placing emphasis on the wrong syllable can get you some strange looks. Stress is a very simple device. It’s basically pronouncing a segment of a word more loudly and, usually, lengthening the vowel. Russian changes regularly depending on where the stress is placed in a word, but English is much more complex. Try pronouncing several words with the stress in different places to see what I mean. Most often in novel writing, stress is indicated by the use of italics or capitalization in the places where you want stress to function on words.

Related to stress is length, which refers to how long to keep the airstream flowing through your mouth and nose as you speak. Many writers mistake the difference between vowels of short and long length as the same between tense and lax, but these are not the same. The difference between the vowel sounds of foot and boot is not length, but how tense the muscles in your throat are. I cannot think of any examples of varying vowel length in English, but I do know that Estonian, Japanese, and Finnish have different lengths of vowels. In Japanese, Tsuuji is a proper name whereas tsuji means to move one’s bowels. This mistake in pronunciation has been made repeatedly, obviously with much embarrassment to the novelist.

This has been a short, technical subsection, so let’s conclude by saying that prosody is most helpful to novelists in terms of determining and thinking about how certain combinations of words sound. It’s among the most important reasons for reading your manuscript aloud while revising and especially arranging any dialogue sections.

WRITING PROMPT

Write out a section of dialogue between two characters who use different dialects. Then read the conversation aloud—preferably with a friend reading one of the character parts if possible. You’ll be surprised how many words and phrases will need to be revised after you’ve heard the dialogue read aloud.

Remember that prosody alone won’t make or break your novel. However, used in conjunction with other dynamics such as story and characterization, it will deepen the overall effect of your book.

The least you need to know

·  Story and plot follow your protagonist’s physical and emotional journey.

·  Scenes typically slow down a novel’s pacing while summary speeds it up.

·  Backstory and flashback provide essential history on a novel’s characters and places.

·  Prosody—including pitch, stress, and length—aids your novel in the sound of your characters and your overall writing.