Le Guin 1.1: Reading Aloud
Just to remind you, this is a series wherein I am following Ursula K. Le Guin’s exercises and suggestions on developing, enriching, deepening, polishing, and generally improving one’s prose style. You can find her version, which is more interesting than mine, in her book Steering the Craft.
On with the show….
The first point Le Guin wants to make is that sound is where it’s at. Sentences can be slippery, sinuous, and snaky; they can be hot and harsh. (A lot of alliteration for an ambitious author!) And she gives some examples of wonderfully sounding writing: Gertrude Stein, Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling (the Just So Stories).
What have I got to say about this, other than that I agree?
I do some of those writers’ group things—something else Le Guin discusses in this book—and I’ve noticed that there is often a lot of difficulty getting people’s prose to feel right. The writer is ostensibly doing the right things, but it’s all flat and dull and blah. There are many reasons this could be happening, but the root of them is always sound.
Consider the standard, go-to solution attempted by the beginning writer: get out the thesaurus and use cooler words! This doesn’t work, because the underlying sentence still sounds stale, flat, and unprofitable (to coin a phrase), only now that negative quality has been set into sharp relief by a neon-light-surrounded word that’s saying “hey, look at me!”
Back in the day, when we had to ride dinosaurs to work, I used to teach college writing. I found that roughly a third of all problems in college writing can be solved by thorough proofreading, but almost no college student has a clue how to go about it, and not many are inclined to try. I used say that there’s a simple way: print it out on paper (yes, paper), stand up (no, I’m not joking: get up out of your chair), and read the paper aloud in a big, stentorian voice. Your ears will instantly detect all kinds of problems, at which point you put a big star in the margin and keep on reading. Then you sit in front of the computer again, and you mutter those starred sentences, and you analyze, and you look at what the idiot grammar-checker says, and eventually you fix the prose so it sounds okay.
What Le Guin is saying is that fictional prose is just the same, only more so. Reading aloud will not only pick up errors or problems, but can also indicate a space for excellence. If everything sounds like it’s full of deliberate sonic effects, chances are it’s precious and pretentious, although occasionally some genius gets away with it. But at times your fictional prose can sing for the sheer hell of it, or because you want your glorious landscape description to be soaring and extraordinary, or whatever. And that means rhythm, and repetition, and hints of rhyme (though not much), and alliteration and consonance and all that good stuff poets play with.
Le Guin makes the wonderful point that prose like this, if you really pull out all the stops, sounds like it wants to be read aloud, for which reason it can be especially effective in writing for children. She gave Kipling as an example (O Best Beloved); I’ll give another example, something I only fell in love with when I started reading to my son Sam as a very small boy.
If you read A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh stories out loud, you immediately hear something amazing: the characters are absolutely distinct, and consistently so. Each demands to be read in a different voice. I had a tough time with some of them—Kanga means nothing to me, for example—but somehow Rabbit was instantly clear. He speaks very sharp and precise, and very quickly [*], and he never listens to anyone; he also always sounds just a little impatient, because everyone else is just a little slow. [* Note: in my first draft, I wrote “fast,” but that’s wrong; Rabbit speaks quickly and not fast, in lots of little bits darting after one another, not one long, steady rush.]
Our favorite story, when Sam was about three, was “In Which Pooh Goes Visiting and Gets Into a Tight Place.” Pooh visits Rabbit, eats far too much, and gets stuck trying to get out Rabbit’s door. In the following excerpt, note particularly the two underlined longer speeches:
“The fact is,” said Rabbit, “you’re stuck.”
“It all comes,” said Pooh crossly, “of not having front doors big enough.”
“It all comes,” said Rabbit sternly, “of eating too much. I thought at the time,” said Rabbit, “only I didn’t like to say anything,” said Rabbit, “that one of us was eating too much,” said Rabbit, “and I knew it wasn’t me,” he said. “Well, well, I shall go and fetch Christopher Robin.”
Christopher Robin lived at the other end of the Forest, and when he came back with Rabbit, and saw the front half of Pooh, he said, “Silly old Bear,” in such a loving voice that everybody felt quite hopeful again.
“I was just beginning to think,” said Bear, sniffing slightly, “that Rabbit might never be able to use his front door again. And I should hate that,” he said.
“So should I,” said Rabbit.
“Use his front door again?” said Christopher Robin. “Of course he’ll use his front door again.”
“Good,” said Rabbit.
“If we can’t pull you out, Pooh, we might push you back.”
Rabbit scratched his whiskers thoughtfully, and pointed out that, when once Pooh was pushed back, he was back, and of course nobody was more glad to see Pooh than he was, still there it was, some lived in trees and some lived underground, and—
“You mean I’d never get out?” said Pooh.
“I mean,” said Rabbit, “that having got so far, it seems a pity to waste it.”
Christopher Robin nodded. “Then there’s only one thing to be done,” he said. “We shall have to wait for you to get thin again.”
“How long does getting thin take?” asked Pooh anxiously.
“About a week, I should think.”
“But I can’t stay here for a week!”
“You can stay here all right, silly old Bear. It’s getting you out which is so difficult.”
“We’ll read to you,” said Rabbit cheerfully. “And I hope it won’t snow,” he added. “And I say, old fellow, you’re taking up a good deal of room in my house—do you mind if I use your back legs as a towel-horse? Because, I mean, there they are—doing nothing—and it would be very convenient just to hang the towels on them.”
Apart from flagging those two speeches, I’m just going to stop there. If you read aloud, you’ll immediately hear (I hope!) that Rabbit is indelible here. If you want to know why, consider the rapid-fire usage of speech tags (he said, he added, etc.), and the way he breaks up long sentences into lots of little bits that chase each other off the page, and then compare this to Pooh going slowly (or to Eeyore, for an even stronger contrast).
For an exercise, Ursula Le Guin asks us to write short passages—just a couple of hundred words—of prose that wants to be read aloud. Next time, I’ll display two (probably very bad) attempts.
Thanks for reading!