Beating myself up

[desperance]

matociquala was posting about beats a few days back (and if you didn't read that, go do); so here's a whole nother kind, the line-by-line stuff that I do instinctively, barely see I'm doing it.

Coming to the end of a paragraph, where a woman and her family are trying to keep ahead of soldiers caught in a killing frenzy (think the siege of Jerusalem, the rape of Nanking), she's hoping they'll just exhaust themselves before they reach the river, and this was the last line:

"perhaps by then they would let be, walk past doorways they would have kicked through before, not search in darkened warehouses, not care."

And then I thought, whoa, this is the East, they have their word for warehouses, which is godowns. Which makes the line:

"perhaps by then they would let be, walk past doorways they would have kicked through before, not search in darkened godowns, not care"

- and that's wrong, because there's a beat missing from that final cadence, it jars and you lose the dying fall. So you remake it:

"perhaps by then they would let be, walk past doorways they would have kicked through before, not search in darkened godowns, just not care."

And that's all it needs, that unstressed syllable either side of the comma, doesn't matter which: just a verbal hesitation between the last two stresses. That flows, where the other stumbles.

And yup, I do this every sentence, every clause. Sometimes I wonder if I worry too much. (But, with reference to another subject that crops up here, what words you can or can't use in a fantasy: I'm reading a book I'm enjoying enormously, but it's a second-world fantasy and the author used the word 'sophist' and I tripped over that because it is so explicitly linked in my head with a school of Greek philosophy, never mind what other meanings it may have acquired since; and anything that makes a reader trip needs smoothing over, so no, I don't worry too much. It's impossible to worry too much.)

Comments

[martyn44.livejournal.com]

I think I'm with you - about godown at least, 'cos I know what one is - or maybe its just me, because authors who get details wrong get right up my nostrils. If they can't convince me of what they can check, why should I accept their central fictitious concept (oh dear, I'm back to Dan Brown again . . .)

On the other hand, we are writing in English for English readers. Oh, I think that's my tail I can see in front of my nose rather than my tale.