Writing For the Body

I've been thinking about how the words of a story can get all the way inside your body. Meter can feel like a drum beat, like a heartbeat, like your own blood thrilling to it. The structure–the pauses: the commas and periods and m-dashes–of a sentence can change your breathing, too. This is obvious when you read out loud, but also true for many of us when we read to ourselves. I know it's true for me.

(Some of the following is adapted from a few different "Reading Like a Writer" columns that I wrote long ago and which are no longer live.)

Carmen Maria Machado is one of my favorite writers and she seems incredibly attuned to breathing. "The Husband Stitch" (collected in Her Body and Other Parties) is a fairy tale retelling that includes parenthetical instructions for the reader and addresses breathing directly: 

If you follow the instructions (and you should!), it puts the story physically–perhaps painfully or exhaustingly–into your body.

And if you don't follow the instructions? If you're the sort of no-fun reader who rolls their eyes and moves on? Maybe it still happens for you. After all, it's not necessarily the specific breaths taken that matter, so much as the awareness of breathing that the passage creates. The breath is necessarily heavier once we notice it. It has presence, which can be followed by meaning. 

I love the metafictional play, but of course it's not for every story. So how can a writer manipulate the reader's breathing without a direct command? 

Machado provides an example in "Mothers," another story from the same collection. It's a lot more subtle, but the following sentence, which occurs during a sex scene, does the same thing. 

The rhythm of the sentence dictates when you breathe—the repetition, the stop and go. Read it again, out loud. (Especially do this if you happen to be in a public place.)

The pauses at those early commas, as well as at the ands, become like short intakes of breath. We may or may not take the breaths, but even if we don't, we feel them. The extra breaths, of course, are sexy, as are the noticeably breathless patches that follow. 

Don't all sentences contain breath? Sure, but this sentence is remarkable because it contains too much of it. There are too many pauses and they are too close together for comfortable breathing. As the reader tries to keep up, it gets difficult, heavy even, and thus becomes more noticeable.

Heavy breathing is a cliché of arousal, but it's a good one. In terms of making a scene sexier, it works. If the only detail you get is heavy breathing—if it's the only sound, say, from behind a closed door—your first thought is going to be sex.

This careful breathwork means that the sentence can feel sexy without being very explicit. Not a single word is dirty or crude. The only anatomy directly named is "hand." (Of course we know what's going on—there's the bed and the allusion to making a baby, in addition to the unquoted parts before and after.) In a less rhythmic sentence, non specific words might make the actions seem abstract—a summary of sex, a memory of it—rather than a play by play. But the rhythm makes it feel like a real scene, unfolding in real time. Each beat becomes a physical movement of the body.

Sex writing isn't the only sort that does great work with rhythms and breathing. Suspenseful scenes, for example, or scary ones, do it quite frequently. Any strong emotion might be intensified by this special attention to the beats and pauses of sentences. 

Another favorite example of mine occurs in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea. The rhythm of the sentences puts on a show that is connected to the meaning, but also operates independently of it. In the following passage, a man is working himself into a rage about his wife and he is just about to decide on a horrible revenge:

The rhythms of the language mimic the crescendo of the character's emotion—his temper, his rage. (Maybe even the crescendo of sexual abandon he’s imagining his wife has with other men.) Even though events are not unfolding action by action, something profound and explosive is happening in his mind.

Those things happen in the reader's mind along with the character's. But I also think they happen in the reader's body.  

Look at the drumbeat of repeated "and." 

 If you read it aloud, you feel it in your chest. Then there's the double pound at the end. "Or could" is iambic, meaning the second syllable is stressed, in this case like a hammer landing. The first occurrence comes after an m-dash which feels to me like a sharp intake of breath. Then the period and new sentence create both a bigger pause and bigger thud. Not to mention those italics. 

If I read the passage out loud, or breathe along with it, I find that my chest is heaving. I'm almost hyperventilating. Talk about getting an emotion into a reader's body!

I won't go into it here, but you can also use revulsion to get into a reader's body–make them gag or shiver or gasp. (Here's a time that I did write about that: Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone and Gross Details.)

When a sentence is breathless or heart-poundy or makes you squirm, it moves the reader from head space to body space. We feel the words instead of just knowing them intellectually.

 Consider:

Which do you want said about your writing?

I was talking to some other writers about words that enter the breath or the heart or the bloodstream, when someone noted that bodily literature is often considered low brow. Genres like romance, horror, action–the ones reputed to make us feel horny or horrified in our bodies–don't get as much respect as other forms. Literary fiction, on the other hand, keeps it cleaner–we are expected to consider those stories more intellectually. Of course this is a generalization. (It's also deeply and grossly tied up with patriarchy.)

But I want to feel all kinds of stories in my body, no matter which of the many and glorious genres I'm reading. And I do! Reading is bodily. It’s fingers turning pages (paper or electronic) or reading Braille, eyes scraping letter-shapes, eardrums tickled by an audio book. It's brain synapses firing. And then those synapses activate nerves in our chests and our stomachs and our arms and our legs and our feelings.

The mind and the body are not separate entities. Fiction that recognizes that fact has the opportunity to create an even deeper connection with its reader. 

From Erin Kate:

I really like thinking about how this framing acknowledges the mediating forces of our bodies and objects. A story is not merely an idea transferred from my imagination to yours; it is first captured by word choices, word shapes, enjambment, print or pixels, the weight of pulp, the texture of a page, the visual or auditory rhythm of a line. I love how all these mediating elements don’t have to disappear in the union between reader and writer; instead, they become part of the sensual play, or even the erotic charge. Words mimicking breathing becomes breathing mimicking words. I expect that many of you, like I do, occasionally get lost in how to describe a physical or emotional sensation shortly after, or perhaps while, experiencing it — an impulse that I think, rather than distancing or intellectualizing, can elongate the pleasure of sensation. The intercourse between body and text can change both.

Try This:

Take any scene you've written with intense emotion and play with the rhythms. To do this, first print it out and mark it up. Accent the stressed syllables. Mark where the pauses and breaths are too. Find a pattern that is already there and see what happens if you intensify or repeat it. See what happens if you undo it completely. Shout the words to hear them and feel them and inject them straight into your bloodstream. Make music, but make it strange.

Talk to Us:

How do you make your stories get weird in a reader's body?

IMPROMPT2 is a project of writers Erin Kate Ryan and Allison Wyss.