Le Guin 1.2: Being Gorgeous
I’m working my way through Ursula Le Guin’s Steering the Craft (see the last two posts on this), and the first chapter is about sound. After some amazing examples and a little bit of discussion, she gets right on to the exercise, which I present in its short form, without commentary or variations:
Write a paragraph to a page (150-300 words) of narrative that’s meant to be read aloud. Use onomatopoeia, alliteration, repetition, rhythmic effects, made-up words or names, dialect—any kind of sound-effect you like—but NOT rhyme or meter. (STC 26)
I made two stabs at it:
Bollocks, I say, blasted bollocks. He did it, did it did it! I blame the bloated bureaucratic bastards, I do. I’d like to line ‘em up, ninepins in a row and heave and hurl and blow them away in smash and crash, smithereens and shattered blocks. What’ve they done! My beautiful boy, my golden one, what is he now? He sits. Still, stolid, sullen. Where’s energy, excitement, that fiery flicker lighting up his blonde head? A single figure, sitting, staring at a screen. They say he failed, and now the fire is out, flat. Cold cinders and ash now. And what becomes of me? I watch him age and not grow, and I too age and don’t grow, and too soon I’ll be gone and there’ll be nothing but ash and cold cinders. Each chance missed is one too many—how could they? Is it me or him, though, that’s what I want to know, and can’t know, and before I can ask he’ll be off and gone, and I’ll be alone with the dead fire and a heart full of cinders.
And:
She gasped, great gulps of air.
The Thing descended, clad in its own light, a mazy aura drifting mistily around its luminous form. It retained something of the mortal, yet its mortality was as though set aside, a shifting, slithering mortality. No chains, no moaning and wailing; only ominous, empty silence along its sinuous descent.
She knew that this was the Maiden of Wellingham, the lost lady of the well, and she tried to speak to it—to her, but the words caught and clogged and stopped, choking her. She felt the tiny hairs on the back of her neck prickle, and she thought, how trite, how obvious, how boring, but her pounding heart didn’t believe what her mind was saying.
It came closer, yards then feet then inches; she tried to touch it but could not raise her arm, could not make her muscles obey; and then it had passed, gliding through the banister and down the passage and on into the study, and was gone.
I found this exercise extremely difficult. When I started, I thought I wanted to do children’s prose, in the vein of Kipling’s Just So Stories (which Le Guin quotes) or Winnie-the-Pooh (which I talked about last time). But I found that my efforts either sounded like bad Kipling imitations—not the point—or immediately drifted into semi-verse (bye, Baby Bunting sort of stuff). It makes me admire really excellent children’s prose all the more, but it’s not something I’m at all comfortable with. She talks about giving yourself permission to do it, but for me it wasn’t permission: I just couldn’t seem to come up with any reason to write like this, and without a reason, you’re just flinging words at a page randomly.
The first version is a kind of simpleminded Faulkner stream of consciousness thing, a father raging. I can see making real use of that—but I found it tricky to balance the sound-effects tastefully. One too many consonances and you’ve got crap. The second follows Le Guin’s suggestion (one of them), and presents the climax of a ghost story. I don’t know why that flowed more easily, but it did. I noticed that I was a lot more comfortable with assonance than consonance, although to be fair I was fine with sibilance (repeated S-sounds). No idea what that means, if anything.
So what have you learned, Dorothy?
It’s a tool, and one that belongs in the toolbox, but it’s an amazingly dangerous tool. As soon as you use it, the reader can’t help but be aware of it, and drawing attention to the prose as such is one of those things we don’t usually see as a good thing. Indeed, lots of the “how to be a successful writer” schlock will tell you that drawing attention to the prose is exactly what you should not do: it’s “jarring,” or “takes the reader out of the story,” or whatever. Le Guin with her examples beautifully demonstrates that this is BS taken as a general principle… but it’s got a grain of truth.
In the stuff I can imagine writing, there’s very little use for “gorgeous” writing in this sense, except when it comes to dialogue. Le Guin gives the example of Mark Twain, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (if you haven’t read it, stop right now and go read it, and come back when you’re done laughing). By the time you even figure out what the story is about, you’re already laughing, because the voice is so funny:
There was a feller here once by the name of Jim Smiley, in the winter of ’49 or may be it was the spring of ’50 I don’t recollect exactly, somehow, though what makes me think it was one or the other is because I remember the big flume wasn’t finished when he first came to the camp; but any way, he was the curiosest man about always betting on any thing that turned up you ever see, if he could get any body to bet on the other side; and if he couldn’t, he’d change sides.
This is extremely useful, and the point about Le Guin including it here (I’m quoting a different passage than she did, which don’t make no never mind) is that right from the start, the cadence and rhythm of the thing tells us that this is an old man speaking, telling a tale by the cracker barrel or whatever (no, Autocorrect, I don’t mean that with capital letters, I mean the actual thing and not the restaurant chain). Sound is what does it; as Le Guin says of Twain’s narration, “There are lots of ways to be gorgeous.”
Nevertheless, I can’t see myself making a lot of use of sound-effects for their own sake in my own prose.
If you thought anything was interesting about this discussion, or about my attempts, please do let me know. I’m a little stumped for evaluation, so I’m crowdsourcing it.
Thanks for reading!