Stephen King, in his book On Writing, says that he listens to music while writing, often hard rock. This surprised me. I can’t hear any music while I’m writing as it interferes with the rhythm – the music if you will – of my sentences.
Then recently I listened (not while writing) to an interview with Pico Iyer, who talked about reading his new book for an audio book. It was the first time he had done it, he said, and he was happy to do it because the exercise allowed him to give his sentences the rhythm they had had in his head when he wrote them. He pointed out that the rhythm the author has in his brain while writing his sentences is not the same as that which readers have when reading them. He noted that when others recorded his books, they gave the prose a rhythm that wasn’t the one that he had had in mind. And I realized that all my efforts to give my sentences a perfect rhythm – my search for a word containing two syllables instead of one, or for one containing three syllables instead of two – are probably all in vain. I may as well put on some music.
