How To Make Your Writing Sing

Taking part in a fabulous WOW! Women on Writing blog tour, I am pleased to present a guest post by Carolyn DiPasquale, author of Reckless Grace - A poignant mother-daughter memoir with a piercing message: Rampant mental illness leads to untold loss.

Carolyn has a double major in English and French, and a Master’s in English. Over her career, she taught literature and composition at various New England colleges; worked as a technical writer at the Naval Underseas Warfare Center in Newport; and wrote winning grants as a volunteer for Turning Around Ministries, a Newport aftercare program for ex-offenders. She has also been an active member of the Newport Round Table, a professional writing group (founded in 1995), since 2013.

So you can see why I’m so excited to have such a highly-skilled writer, share some great tips on tightening and adding rhythm to your sentences, ensuring they hit the right notes.

Over to you Carolyn.

After writing my cover blurb for Reckless Grace, I ran it by my editor, who said it was good. “But does it sing?” I pressed. This was the verbiage, I reminded him, that had to lasso potential readers. He admitted it wasn’t there yet. Though the blurb underwent countless revisions before being printed on the back cover, in my mind, it still doesn’t sing. I only hope it carries enough of a tune that people open the book and begin reading because that writing sings.

What makes writing sing varies among authors. I’ve reduced it to four things.

First, it must be tight. When I shop, I try to get the most quality merchandise for the least amount of dollars, and I approach writing just as frugally: using as few words as possible to convey my thoughts. But deadwood invariably drifts in. Excess words and redundancies muddy my meaning. I stalk unnecessary sentences, phrases, and words, slashing them like an assassin. Swapping weak for strong verbs wipes out those clunky articles and prepositions, causing what was fuzzy to leap into focus, like adjusting the lens on an old-fashioned camera.

Imagery also makes my writing sing. I try to season my text with visual details and rich sounds, smells, and textures. There’s a blind dinner date scene in Reckless Grace where I initially described Phil’s “handsome, animated face and manly gesticulating hands” as he explains his dull racing escapades. When my editor cut “manly gesticulating hands,” the truncated image was not as effective. Phil’s hands vanished as did the whisper of romance. Sensory details are potent. While reading, I Need To Tell You, a new memoir by Cathryn Vogeley about a young, unwed mother getting pregnant and giving up her child, I was transported inside Vogeley’s first boyfriend’s “midnight blue Cadillac convertible” by her lavish imagery. I smelled the “earthy sweet aroma of leather” and heard the “smooth engine purr.” While drinking in her heady imagery in scene after scene, I thought, I need to do more of this.     

But tight, imagery-rich writing alone doesn’t cut it. My writing must also sound good. It must literally sing. That’s where poetic devices—assonance, consonance, alliteration, and onomatopoeia—come in.  I choose words carefully, matching the inner vowel and beginning consonant sounds in neighboring terms to create pleasing sounds. Words that sound like their meaning (sizzle, murmur, splat) heighten the melody. Obviously, I don’t overdo these devices, or my text will sound contrived. At the same time, I work on sentence rhythms. Uniform sentences sound humdrum: therefore, I try to vary the length of my lines, as often as possible crafting sentences that mimic their meaning; for example, long lines meander and explore, provide explanations and lists whereas short lines explode. Every line in Karen Hesse’s Out of the Dust exemplifies this kind of lovely poetic writing.

Finally, writing should delight and surprise. We know this, yet as much as we loath cliches, they creep into our writing like grubs in a garden. And often they’re just as hard to discern and exterminate. I thought I was above using hackneyed language until my editor called me out on my use of cliches. Some were subtle, familiar phrases like “scared silly” or “in no time.” Others, like “foaming at the mouth” were more obvious. To fix these, one can either use literal language or fresh figures of speech. In the last example, wanting to retain the mad-dog image, I revised the cliché to say, “her mouth would be frothing.”

And here’s the cover blurb:

Fourteen-year-old Rachel guards a collection of secrets for ten years, journaling to vent her terror and loneliness.

Following Rachel's fatal overdose years later, her mother, Carolyn DiPasquale, stumbles upon her daughter's diaries. Shattered, she searches for answers, retracing her steps to figure out how parents and doctors missed three major mental illnesses.

What the single, working mother recalls is a far cry from what happens, as dramatically revealed in tandem chapters gleaned from Rachel's journals. While the mother sprints from task to task, the daughter details the baffling emergence and frightening progression of bulimia, diabulimia, and borderline personality disorder; her eventual substance abuse; and heart-wrenching reasons for not seeking help.

Despite her loss, DiPasquale hopes her story lights a path for victims of mental illness while awakening all readers.

Does it sing? It certainly grabbed my attention, and the writing on the inside of this book is heartbreakingly beautiful!

More about the Author:

DiPasquale currently lives in Richmond, Rhode Island where she has started working on a sequel to Reckless Grace. She has also ventured into writing children’s books. In her free time, she enjoys cooking and baking with healthy ingredients, hiking and trapshooting with her husband Phil, and volunteering at the New Hope Chapel food pantry in Carolina, Rhode Island. 

Thank you and well done Carolyn! You have created a book that not only lights a path for victims of mental illness and awakens all readers, it is a moving tribute and exceptional read!

You can follow Carolyn DiPasquale on Instagram or Facebook, and purchase a copy of Reckless Grace via Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Bookshop.org

Or add Reckless Grace to your GoodReads reading list. 

Thanks for stopping by!

Kelly