In days gone by I was, for many years, a technology journalist. Over the course of a couple of decades I wrote several thousand articles for newspapers and computer publications in Australia, the USA and the UK.
The main focus of my writing was to explain, in plain English, the ins and outs of operating systems, applications—including word processors, databases, spreadsheets and graphics programs—and, when it began to get public traction, the Internet. I was also a computer programmer and, as a journalistic sideline, I wrote articles on coding and how to create applications that were, as they say, “user friendly.”
Although for the past 20 years my writing has been contained within the very different sphere of criminal justice, there’s a common element that has run through my entire writing output: music. Or, more specifically, cadence.
If music be the food of love, play on
When I write anything—from a birthday card to a Facebook post, from an article on database design to an opinion piece on the privatization of prisons—I listen for the flow of words into phrases, of phrases into sentences, of sentences into paragraphs.
When I rewrite, it is this flow that guides my edits.
Sometimes I want the flow to be smooth and swift, carrying the reader from beginning to end without hesitation. At other times, I am abrupt. Truncated. Forcing a pause or placing emphasis.
There are no rules for cadence in writing. The lilt is the author’s trademark, but not their straitjacket. It must make room for characterization and for the intent of the piece, just as Shakespeare took the fine tool that is iambic pentameter—de dum, de dum, de dum, de dum, de dum—and messed with it to suit his purposes.
Adapting Cadence
My voice, my cadence, is not Sister Helen Prejean’s cadence, although there are similarities.
Helen has the voice of a natural born storyteller, one raised in the intense yet lazy heat of the South. She is informal, friendly, natural.
Take one of the early descriptions in Dead Man Walking of her correspondence with Patrick Sonnier on death row:
“Can we just talk to each other in regular words?” He had had a spiritual adviser who had spoken to him in “scriptures” from the Bible. He couldn’t hold up his end of the conversation and the relationship soon ended.
Sure, we can just talk regular, I tell him. It’s the only way I know how to talk.
That’s a pretty fair description of Helen’s writing voice, too.
My voice is that of a transplanted Aussie, easy going, playful, with the slant of an outsider who has spent almost a quarter of a century immersing herself in a cultural undercurrent. Those far-off decades of writing about technical intricacies for a non-technical audience have also buoyed me in this new realm, especially when I’m writing about the nuances of U.S. Supreme Court decisions or the interplay of chemicals in a lethal injection cocktail.
The differences in our writing voices has implications for adaptation.
When writing the script for Graphic Dead Man Walking, I have striven to preserve Helen’s voice. Much of the time, I use her own words, because they are the heart and soul of a classic. But that has not always been possible or even, necessarily, the best course. I write for a new generation, and I write for Catherine, our illustrator, and those things affect both content and style.
Fortunately, I’ve been Sister Helen’s online ‘voice’ since the early 2000s, collaborating with her on tweets and posts and op eds; sometimes with no more direction from Helen than “Rose, we must get this news out there.” The hours we’ve spent together, working and socializing, have been a solid foundation for writing this new version of her eyewitness account.
Music for writing
While music is central to what we write, it is usually absent from where we write.
I asked Helen whether she ever listened to music as she wrote Dead Man Walking. She said, no, she almost always wrote in silence. Sometimes, though, she’d use music to get her in the writing mood or to inspire her. A go-to song to kickstart a writing session for her was Bob Marley and the Wailers’ “Get up, stand up”. She also found inspiration in Palestrina’s Ave Maria. Here’s a version for four voices.
For me, it’s also silence while I write, but often something classical when I’m researching the piece I’m writing: Angela Hewitt playing Bach’s Keyboard Concertos or, if I need rousing, William Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast.
How about you? Do you use music as a writing tool, or, perhaps, as a reading tool?