ADVANCED CREATIVE WRITING TECHNIQUES

NEW SERIES! ADVANCED CREATIVE WRITING TECHNIQUES

In the second part of his series that will help you hone your writing skills, James McCreet looks at techniques for varying the flow and rhythm of your work on micro and macro levels

In music, modulation is the variation between tones to create form and structure – to make the music acoustically interesting. Some writers use the term to describe a similar effect in prose: changes in rhythm and flow that affect how readers respond.

You know you’re an advanced writer when you make clear decisions about the position of clauses, paragraph breaks, sentence lengths or, say, the trade-off between semi-colons and full stops.

At a micro level, prose modulation is managed with precisely selected vocabulary (as we saw last month), with punctuation and with specific sentence structures. It works at a mostly subliminal level on the reader but should be fully conscious in the writer. If you want to make the reader relaxed, tense, fully immersed or simply delighted with your writing, you’ll need to use modulation.

There are limitless ways of doing it – as many ways as there are to write a sentence or a paragraph. Let’s look at just a few examples.

Managing flow

People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped and murdered. People were hungry, sick, bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs.