Chapter 164: Dancing to the Melody
It is time once again for my students to come to class with the first 100 words of their stories. Which for years has meant the moment when I feel most humbled as a teacher.
First, let me explain the assignment: before they write the full drafts of their stories I ask the students to write just the first 100 words. I do not use the words lede and nut graf because I do not want them defaulting to form. Instead, the goal in those first 100 words is to leave readers wanting more.
Why 100 words? People read at the average rate of 200 words a minute. 100 words=30 seconds, which is all you have to draw readers in and hook them.
I read each of their first 100 words aloud. The class serves as a jury. This is not an exercise in workshopping. Rather, it’s the moment to try out the opening of their stories on an audience.
The best response is not necessarily in words. Rather it comes in a slow and knowing nod of appreciation – yep, she’s got it.
Over the years and with hundreds of students, I have seen how nailing the first 100 words of a story – committing at the outset to an idea and direction – makes the writing of the rest of the story far easier. The right 100 words allow you as the writer to know and feel what comes next and where the story will go.
The right first 100 words will result in first drafts that, I have seen time and again, are three-quarters the way to being just right. The editing we then do – we work together on the same doc, with me reading the stories aloud – is often mostly cosmetic: wording, maybe some re-ordering, but none of the “what is this story about” that vexes editors as much as it frustrates writers. We’ve already done that editing in the weekly letters they’ve been sending me.
For each of the past four weeks my students have been updating me on their reporting in letters that begin: Dear Michael, This is what I learned this week.
Those letters are a revelation: Free of the pressure to write, the students instead use their singular voices as tools to express in words the knowledge they have acquired. They write these letters very well. When I say this to them they reply, “really?”
But the first 100 words feel different. It is the moment when they leave the assuring comfort of “just writing a letter” and actually do what can feel so terrifying: “write.”
Many of them find this moment humbling. So do I.
For years I felt that I was not succeeding as well as I’d like in helping many of my students close the gap between their letters and their stories. Even though they have already been writing sections of their stories in their letters, they still experienced those first 100 words as a leap across an impossibly wide and deep canyon.
I’ve encouraged them to accept that understandable fear, to write themselves a Dear____ letter in which they ask themselves what they’re trying to say. I’ve pushed them to commit, to be bold, to remind themselves that they are closer than they appreciate.
Some get it on the first try. Some are close and are a well-placed word or two away. And some appear to do everything right but still fall short.
I ask myself: What am I missing? Why was this approach not working as well as I hoped?
Perhaps, I was to discover, because I was relying on the wrong teaching method: in helping them write I had become overly reliant on words.
The other day a student sent me a revision of the opening of her story. The first version had been a bit too studied; she was, I explained, trying too hard to sound writerly. The opening 100 words were filled with images, so many that my eyes flitted hither and yon, unsure where she wanted me to look.
The second version was closer but not quite right. She was still being indirect, as she herself put it, trying to be intentionally mysterious even as I, the reader, needed clarity. I assured her that she possessed the talent and skill to get it right; that was clear in the prose.
As it happened, she had mentioned that she had been a serious musician for many years, and had taught music as an undergrad. I suggested that missing from the story was an element taken for granted in music: a rhythm.
Instead of establishing a rhythm and working off of it, I explained, she was dancing to the melody.
We know what that looks like on the dance floor. We wince, perhaps out of fear that someone might think that is us when the music gets cranked up. As it happens, my student is a pianist and so immediately understood what was happening: she was, in effect, forgetting to use her left hand, the hand that provides the rhythm. She was playing only the melody with her right.
You do not have to play an instrument or be able read a note to understand the power of rhythm. We hear it all the time, and respond when the rhythm catches us up. We tap our feet. We nod along. We feel it.
But did that same power extend to writing? I believe it does, even if we don’t experience it as we do in music.
I had my hypothesis, and needed to test it.
First, I’d need a story and a way to assess it musically. I turned to my favorite repository of wonderful narrative nonfiction – the 1973 “New Journalism” anthology, the Bible for journalists of my Boomer generation.
Next I Googled “metronome.” I also needed an instrument to count the beats. A pen sufficed.
I flipped through the anthology looking for a story that, if my hypothesis was correct, I could set to music. I settled on Hunter S. Thompson’s “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved.” It is a classic, a seeming mess of his “gonzo” journalism. Did Thompson, without necessarily doing so consciously, not so much write his story as compose it?
The metronome defaulted to 100 beats per minute. Too fast. I lowered it to 80 and began to read and tap along.
The metronome counted in 4/4 time. The story began: “I got off the plane around midnight and no one spoke as I crossed the dark runway to the terminal.”
I tried it a few times until I could ease into a cadence as I sang/spoke along. I tapped my pen in time with the metronome and it took no time to see how well the writing translated into music.
Thompson, as wild a journalist as there ever was, nonetheless hit every note on the downbeat.“The air was thick and hot, like wandering into a steam bath. Inside, people hugged each other and shook hands…big grins and whoop here and there: By God! You old bastard! Good to see you, boy! Damn good…and I mean it!”
You could sense where the pauses came, when to count 2…3…4 before reading/singing on.
As it happened, just as I was completing my experiment another student stopped by. She too was stuck on her opening, for reasons similar to her classmate. I had the Thompson story open as well as the metronome. So I tapped out and read the Derby story for her. She smiled as she listened. She heard it, too. So we set to work on hers.
At first the rhythm was off; you could sense that immediately. I inverted the opening sentence and shortened the second – again, nothing big, just a few minor tweaks.
We tried it again. And this time you could feel the rhythm and how the first sentence led to the second and the second to the third. The rhythm gave her story what it had lacked: a sense of order, cohesion.
The metronome was ruthless in forcing her to stick to the rhythm, which meant eliminating anything that stood in its way. This did not mean being limited to short sentences. As with the Thompson story a long sentence, paced correctly, could work musically.
Finding and sticking with the rhythm can help writers to do what can be so difficult – making decisions about what is essential, what can be cut, and where you want each sentence and paragraph to land. The rhythm – the metronome – is not an abstraction, like reminders to use telling details and avoid excessive use of adjectives. The rhythm is a force, a power and can feel, especially when dictated by a metronome, relentless. And once established – in the case of my students, in those first 100 words – it sustains itself throughout the story, as it does with a song.
It can also make a writer’s life much easier.
For years I had encouraged students to read their stories aloud, to hear how they sounded. But I had not considered the role rhythm played. Nor had I ever thought to encourage them to use a metronome. Until now.
It didn’t take much to get them to try. After all, no one ever wants to be that wedding guest whose head is thrown back and eyes are closed as they dance, shamelessly, to the melody.
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If you have a question, a problem in your work, if you are feeling lost, stuck, confused, at sea, searching, grappling, or baffled, email me at Michaelshapiro808@gmail.com and tell me what you’re confronting and what help you need.
It is seldom, if ever, the case that one student’s problem or question is their’s alone.
Please indicate if you want to remain anonymous, have your name or just first name included. I will include the question and then answer it as best I can.
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Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture