It’s fair to say that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is a lot more successful than my fifth day of NaNo has been. Then again, Beethoven’s Fifth is a lot more successful than 99.7% of human artistic endeavour, so I’m not feeling too disheartened about it. I’ve only done 962 words, but I also wrote some cheesy limericks for an evening class on prose rhythm:

There was once a balloon that deflated

On its owner’s poor ear drums it grated.

It went round and around

With a terrible sound

As if someone was being castrated.

 

I’ve been reading a lot about metre today. As I said in a previous post all my writing is done to a rhythm. I can’t seem to stop it. I free write sometimes purely for the sound of words, because trying to balance meaning and sound gets too damn frustrating now and again. It’s only in the last few years that I’ve known what anapaests and amphibrachs and dactyls are, though I’ve always (it seems like) known instinctively that I need a TUM-ti-ti rather than a ti-ti-TUM to make a sentence ‘scan’. I could write till the cows came home about sausages burning in cauldrons and yellow-tipped whiskery ladies and bombs dipped in sugar for no other reason than this: that I worship the sound of the words (and I even chose that pretentious word, ‘worship’, because love didn’t fit with the rhythm). I learned today that Jean Cocteau knew Shakespeare was a great writer, because – without speaking a word of English – he could ‘hear’ his greatness. Some words just sound nice together. (Although let’s also quote Auden here, in an essay on poets in translation: ‘A poet like Campion […] whose principal concern is with the sound of words and their metrical and rhythmical relations, cannot be translated at all. Take away the English language in which his songs were written, and all that remains are a few banal sentiments.’ Quick confession: I don’t know who Campion is.)

It’s not to be forgotten, though, that the simplest and plainest of sentences – ‘It felt nice’ are the final three words of one of my stories – can offer an impact, in context, that can’t be achieved by sound alone. When I read young people’s writing, now, I can hear the same cockiness I recall from my own early pieces: rejoicing in words for the pure sake of words, and the cleverness of it all. When you don’t know a lot about life you’ve got nothing but words. This is not to say someone who’s young has no hardship to write about – that would be stupid – but only that those of us not in the first flush of youth have had longer to process those hardships, and being a little bit closer to death you do tend to assess your life differently. I am wiser, now, and a better writer, than I was at twenty-one, or thirty-one. I no longer hear rounds of applause in my head when I find a new simile (I can still recall typing the toothpaste tips of the waves on the crappy old plasticky typewriter I took to university and thinking I was nothing short of a genius). I like writing dialogue now – whereas I used to hate it: I couldn’t be quite so pretentious when writing dialogue. It felt like a waste.

If there’s one thing a word-freak like me can be thankful to NaNoWriMo for, it’s the useful reminder that novels are stories, and stories are all about people, and words are the medium through which we elucidate character – not the other way round. There’s no time, writing close to two thousand words a day, to get precious or picky: you have to do what the novelist Julie Myerson once advised, on the subject of ‘getting stuck’: lower your standards, and move on.

Let’s finish with a picture of the band Five to ensure we cover the whole musical spectrum.

On second thoughts, let’s not.