Reading Direction

Shakespeare was a master at developing characters, building them not so much out of stated descriptions but in the language – even the very sounds of the words as much as the words themselves.

Think of Romeo and Juliet, for example. Romeo’s mother. She appears only twice in the whole play, has three lines, then dies offstage without any great explanation. My roommate in Seattle majored in theater at Cornish, and one of her instructors had a theory based on textual analysis – the words she speaks, the sounds within those words, and the shortness of her lines – that Lady Montague had some sort of respiratory condition. In which case, her seemingly random death at the end, reportedly caused by grief, becomes a little more believable.

While that’s only one expert’s theory, it has stuck with me.

I have been told that writers relinquish control of a story once it’s out of our hands and into a reader’s. Each person reads how she will, with different emphasis, and pronunciation, and pacing. Emphasize a different word, and the meaning of the whole changes.

But that isn’t entirely true. I see it with poets. They often direct how someone will read (whether they know it or not) with sounds and line breaks and punctuation, or lack thereof. Children’s picture books are another fantastic example.

A comma is a quick breath, a period is a long one. Semi-colons are languid and generally to be avoided when you want to set a fast or frantic pace.

Alliteration can be corny, but well-placed sibilance can give life to a forest’s rustling leaves. It’s easy to forget, when the words exist on the page and in our heads but not in the air, the simple magic of sound.

It is another layer to the craft of writing – one I certainly haven’t mastered but can admire and attempt to learn from.

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