Does Meter Matter?
by Randy Ingermanson
Advanced Fiction Writing
I’ve been thinking lately about meter. I’m been doing final polishing on a novel, and I’ve found myself tweaking sentences so the rhythm of the words work better.
Another word for “rhythm of the words” is meter.
So What?
Which raises the question: does meter matter?
It certainly matters in certain kinds of poetry. You can’t write a good limerick or sonnet, for example, without paying very close attention to meter.
But fiction isn’t poetry.
Does meter matter in fiction?
One way to study that question would be to look at some example sentences from a few novels to see whether they have meter, and if so, how much.
As a quick test, I chose several novels off my shelf and looked at the first sentence in each. Then I asked whether the sentence had any recognizable meter, and what kind of meter, and for how long it ran.
Testing Some Example Novels
Here are the novels I chose, along with their first sentences:
From The Hunt for Red October, by Tom Clancy:
Captain First Rank Marko Ramius of the Soviet Navy was dressed for the Arctic conditions normal to the Northern Fleet submarine base at Polyarnyy.
From The Promise, by Chaim Potok:
All around us everything was changing in the order of things we had fashioned for ourselves.
From The Matarese Circle, by Robert Ludlum:
The band of carolers huddled at the corner, stamping their feet and swinging their arms, their young voices penetrating the cold night air between the harsh sounds of automobile horns and police whistles and the metallic strains of Christmas music blaring from storefront speakers.
From The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini:
I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975.
From Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, by J.K. Rowling:
Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.
From A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
From Outlander, by Diana Gabaldon:
It wasn’t a very likely place for disappearances, at least at first glance.
What do you think? Is there a discernible meter in these example sentences?
Some Observations
My first observation is that the sentences from The Kite Runner and A Tale of Two Cities show the clearest signs of meter. They aren’t nearly as regular as the meter you’d find in a limerick, but it would be weird to write a novel with a meter that regular. I judge them to be somewhat more regular in their meter than ordinary English.
My second observation is that all of the examples show some hints of meter, even the examples from Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum. Neither of those writers would be called literary novelists. They were commercial writers through and through. Yet both show some signs of rhythm.
The first four and a half words of the Clancy example (“Captain First Rank Marko Ramius…”) have exactly the same meter as the first five words of The Raven, by Edgar Allen Poe: “Once upon a midnight dreary…”
Likewise, there’s a sequence of words in the Ludlum example with the identical rhythm: “…strains of Christmas music blaring…”
And the Gabaldon sentence has almost the exact same meter here: “… wasn’t a very likely place for …” (if you pronounce “wasn’t” as a single syllable, which is common.)
Accident or Design?
What’s going on here? Is this meter we’re seing accident or design?
I suspect that part of it is that English has a lot of two-syllable words with the accent on the first syllable. And it has a lot of one-syllable words, some that are naturally accented and some that aren’t. So it’s fairly easy to write a short sequence of words that alternate stressed and unstressed words, purely by chance.
As an example, I wasn’t thinking of meter when I wrote the last sentence of the previous paragraph. Yet, without any planning at all, I began the sentence with a sequence of three feet in this alternating meter. By tweaking things a little on the rewrite, I could easily extend that to eleven feet: "So it's fairly easy then to write a sequence having alternating stressed and unstressed words.” You wouldn't pronounce this with a heavy stress on the accented syllables, and you might not even notice the meter consciously when reading it. But the sentence flows well.
My hunch is that, consciously or unconsciously, a lot of authors edit their work to extend these sequences. Because “it sounds better.”
But of course there are other kinds of meter than simple alternation (which is called either Trochaic or Iambic depending on whether the stressed syllable comes first or second.)
English also has many Latin-based and Greek-based words, and these often have three syllables. Most of these words have a natural meter with one stressed and two unstressed syllables in various patterns (Anapestic or Dactylic or Amphibrachic are your options here).
So again, if you happen to string together a couple of feet that are almost in one of these meters, it’s fairly easy to tweak things to make the meter exact for two or three feet.
Notice that in the preceding paragraph, again without thinking about it at all, purely by accident, I began with three feet in Anapestic meter: “So again, if you happen to string…” It would be very simple to extend this another foot with a simple rearrangement: “So again, if you happen to string a few words…”
I don’t know how many authors do this consciously. I know that I often notice a couple of feet of meter that happened at random in my writing. When I see it, I sometimes reorder words or tweak my word choices to get a slightly more regular meter. I might notice that I’ve got two feet in some particular meter and stretch it out to three or four. I do it because it sounds better when the voice in my head reads it back to me.
What I don’t do is to try to force entire sentences into a single meter. That would draw undue attention to the meter.
Recently I listened to the famous “I have a dream” speech by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This speech is absolutely brilliant on several different levels. Since I’ve been thinking about meter lately, I noticed that the speech works very well on the level of meter.
Listen to it yourself on Youtube and see if you agree:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I47Y6VHc3Ms
Conclusions, Such as They Are
So what’s the bottom line on meter?
I don’t really know, so I’d hesitate to tell anyone what to do.
My thinking is that meter is the sprinkles on the icing on the cake. The cake is your story—your characters and plot and story world and theme. The icing is the structure of your paragraphs and sentences that show your story in an emotively powerful way. Until you’ve got the cake baked and the icing smeared on, it’s premature to put on the sprinkles.
Here are the guiding principles I use for thinking about meter in my own work:
- Meter happens naturally at random when you write normal English.
- When doing your final edit, if you listen to the sound of the text, you’ll find short stretches of meter all over the place.
- If you find a few feet in some given meter, you may choose to extend it another foot or so by tweaking your word order or word choices.
- This really onlymakes sense if it sounds better that way AND doesn’t monkey with the meaning.
- But it would be weird to go overboard and try to force a long sentence into a single meter.
Homework
- Do you use meter intentionally in your fiction?
- Does it show up at random, even if you aren’t trying? (You’ll need to read a few paragraphs to see.)
- Does it improve things to tweak the words to get more meter in your work?
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