(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Write On! Chapter 4 of Steering the Craft, revisited [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-04-20 Hello all. Time for our Thursday night diary on writing. Welcome! Pull up a chair, grab a mug of your favorite beverage, and settle in. We focus on fiction mostly, but all are welcome, be they memoirists, creative non-fiction types, screenwriters, dabblers of all stripes, or (ahem, as is yours truly), the common lowly blogger. Beware the least grebe. I hear their diet consists primarily of common lowly bloggers. Once upon a time, long ago, in precisely this living room, I used part of Chapter 4 of Steering the Craft for a Write On guest post. I shall now excerpt from another part of Chapter 4 which focuses more on structural repetition. Prose can’t rhyme and chime or repeat a beat as poetry can, or if it does it had better be subtler about it than the first half of this sentence. The rhythms of prose — and repetition is the central means of achieving rhythm — are usually hidden or obscure, not obvious. They may be long and large, involving the whole shape of a story, the whole course of events in a novel: so large they’re hard to see, like the shape of the mountains when you’re driving on a mountain road. But the mountains are there. (snip) Folktales often repeat themselves exuberantly, both in the language and the structure: consider “The Three Bears” with its cascade of European triads. (Things in Europe happen in threes, things in Native American folktales often happen in fours.) Stories written to read aloud to children use a lot of repetition. Kipling’s Just So Stories are a splendid example of repetition used as incantation, as a structural device, and to make you and the child laugh. (snip) Structural repetition is the similarity of the events in a story, happenings that echo one another. It’s hard to talk about or give an example of in a brief space, as it involves the whole of a story or novel. If you’re familiar with Jane Eyre, you might re-read the first chapter of it, and think about the rest of it as you do. (If you haven’t read Jane Eyre, do; then you can think about it, possibly for the rest of your life.) The first chapter contains a good amount of “foreshadowing” the images and themes that will be repeated throughout the book. For example: we meet Jane as a shy, silent, self-respecting child, the outsider in an unloving household, who takes refuge in books, pictures, and nature. The older boy who bullies and abuses her goes too far at last, and she turns on him and fights back. Nobody takes her part, and she’s locked in an upstairs room that she’s been told is haunted. — Well, grown-up Jane is going to be the shy outsider in another household, where she’ll stand up to Mr. Rochester’s bullying, finally be forced to rebel, and find herself utterly alone. And there’s an upstairs room at Thornfield which is, indeed, “haunted”. The first chapters of many great novels bring in an amazing amount of material that will be, in one way and another, with variations, repeated throughout. The similarity of this incremental repetition of word, phrase, image, and event in prose to recapitulation and development in musical structure is real and deep. I’ve been pondering this short discussion of Jane Eyre’s first chapter as an arc in miniature of the entire book’s plot. First chapters are terrible things for me, as I tend to begin in the middle and discover I should probably write an actual beginning somewhere near the end of the middle. What a nice way to start a book — with a tiny precis of the plot. Tonight’s challenge from Le Guin: Part 2: Syntactic repetition Write a paragraph to a page of narrative (200-400 words) in which you deliberately repeat the syntactical construction, or the exact rhythm, of a phrase or sentence (or more than one) several times. Le Guin’s examples: syntax: With her hands in her pockets, she walked to the door and faced the stranger. His eyes on her face, he stood there a moment and said nothing. rhythm: We always went to the mountain in summer. But I never knew what happened to Bunny. She goes on to say that this is an exercise for practicing awareness of what you’re writing — you wouldn’t want to keep on going with this very long before it would become monotonous. “The fun is to keep that from happening for as long as you can.” Psst, if this challenge doesn’t excite you, feel free to head back to the link at the top and check out the challenge from the older post. That one was fun, and there’s a lovely piece by mettle in the comments that I highly recommend. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/20/2157213/-Write-On-TBD Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/