Rhythm - then rhyme - then reason

Why the sound and rhythm of your words is the foundation, not merely the flourish, of your prose.

On March 16th 1926, in a letter to Vita Sackville West, Virginia Woolf wrote this:

Style is a very simple matter, it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words … This is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it, and in writing one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit in.

I don’t find ‘style’ a very useful concept in talking about writing (as I discussed here), but I do think there’s something very useful here, even if it does need a bit of unpacking.

Woolf starts where the whole chain of communication starts: with the writer’s experience of some piece of the world which she then evolves into words on the page for onward transmission. But what does that mean for what readers read?

Photo by Yana Marudova on Unsplash