[This prompt is from May 2022]
Greetings, writers—
Yesterday I was driving a handful of middle schoolers home from an 8th grade promotion ceremony (when did they stop calling it graduation?), and they were entertaining themselves by alternating individual words in song lyrics.
For example, when one sang “Let,” the next would sing “it,” and the third would sing “gooooooooo!” Though my first thought was Oh god, I’ve heard this song way too many times for my one precious life, my second was, Listen to all those monosyllabic words! Out of 25 words in the following lines, only one has two syllables. “It’s time to see what I can do/To test the limits and break through/No right, no wrong, no rules for me/I’m free!”
Then I remembered a review I’d read of a new Jean Rhys biography, which quotes Rhys as saying that she wrote Voyage in the Dark “almost entirely in words of one syllable, like a kitten mewing.”
The syllable is the basic unit of poetry and song. But what about prose? What happens when you pay as much attention to the length of the words and the rhythm of the sentences as you do to their meaning?
Your prompt this week is to write a scene using short words. Set it in a place that is somehow fraught: a doctor’s office, a courtroom, a broken-down bus, an ex’s kitchen, whatever.
If you’d rather not start from scratch, take a scene that you’ve already written and rewrite it so that its words are predominantly monosyllabic. See how the tone and feeling shift—or not.
Happy writing!
Emily
P.S. In Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” 89 of the 108 words are monosyllabic.