Creative writing - Mike Sanders 2014

Commonalities in prosody
The collective book of essays/stories
Long-form genres

As with backstory and flashback, I’ve discussed prosody in other places in the book. However, how it functions across pieces of a collection is worth considering here.

Earlier I mentioned the editor who published my memoir and thought the narration resembled that of Elizabeth Bowen, a British novelist of the early twentieth century. The book certainly doesn’t read that way to me or anyone else I’ve spoken with, but it was the intonation the editor heard as she perused the manuscript. In other words, to her ear, my prosodic narrative qualities resembled Bowen’s.

Collections of stories and essays face a fundamental prosodic question of either including similar narrative pieces or utilizing variant ones. The advantage of the former is that it provides the book with an overall narrative flow, regardless of what the different pieces cover. On the other hand, because collections contain different free-standing pieces, as the author, you’re at liberty to make each one prosodically different if you wish.

Of course, I’ve been describing prosody in terms of the narrator. It’s going to be much more variable throughout a collection in terms of dialogue. Indeed, the functions of prosody are many and truly fascinating. Where speech sounds such as vowels and consonants function mainly to provide an indication of the identity of words and the regional variety of the speaker, prosody can indicate syntax, turn-taking in conversational interactions, types of utterance such as questions and statements, and character’s attitudes and feelings.

The forms (or elements) of prosody—pitch or frequency, the length or duration, and the loudness or intensity—are derived from the acoustic characteristics of speech. All are present in varying quantities in every spoken utterance. The varying quantities help determine the function to which listeners orient themselves in interpreting what the characters say.

So if you decide to have lots of disconnected character dialects in your collection’s dialogue, it could easily function as a destabilizing force to the book’s organization. On the other hand, if you have several dialects, but they recur periodically across different pieces in the collection, the overall language of the book is going to seem much more balanced.

Also, don’t forget that the narrator’s voice can be a powerful force and can counteract whatever is going on with the dialogue. To return again to the example of my memoir, the editor found the narrative formal and eloquent because it reminded her of Bowen. However, the crassness of the content was at least in part due to the dialects, many of which were those of poor rural Virginians. It’s hardly surprising, then, that to her cultivated British ear, these voices seemed grating, strange, and often crude.

WRITING PROMPT

As a way of exploring the prosodic dichotomy between narrative and dialogue, write out a narrative description in your journal. Then go back and convey the same information through dialogue that uses different dialects and also varies from the narrative voice.

Essay and short story collections present their own sets of challenges. Pragmatically, however, they constitute wonderful ways to group together single pieces and make a book out of them. Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as simply throwing together the different pieces, but with revision, patience, and proper organization, the prose collection is still a viable book publication.

The Least You Need to Know

·  Commonalities in plot help unite a book of short stories or essays.

·  Likewise, similarities in scenes and summaries allow your collection to have better flow.

·  The use of backstory and flashback in collections basically takes the form of different pieces in the book.

·  Prosody can be an important connective or destabilizing force in a prose collection.