story rhythm

[beccaelizabeth]

The book I'm reading on TV writing has about a half a page talking about story rhythm. It says "You don't want to cut from one high-pitch sequence to another. After a while that gets tiresome. Instead, cut from a high-pitch sequence in the A story to a dramatic beat in the B story. Cut from a serious scene in the A story to a comic beat in the B story." And it talks about mixing it up and slow dramatic beats and fast action beats.

What I was thinking is that the poetry book has a much larger section on rhythm, and maybe some of it still applies. Poetry rhythm is all about stressed and unstressed, not funny-serious or something, but you still have a pattern formed. Lots of different named patterns actually. So there's lots of suggestions for how to mix things. And then theres metre, patterns of rhythm, and how it influences meaning. In a poem there can be a tension between poetic metre and normal speech metre, so that the metre of the poem can make a word that would normally be unstressed and insignificant be stressed and significant.

I was wondering if that translates to plots too. Like, if you have a rhythm pattern that goes serious-funny serious-funny and then you drop in a scene that could be read either way, would the reading be influenced by the pattern? Or if there were a sequences of important-to-the-plot scenes mixed with trivial-character scenes, and then there was a character scene where a plot scene was expected to be, would it be linked to plot more? Or could plot importance be deemphasised by hiding it where trivia had been so far?


Since I've never seen anything like that in books the answer is probably 'no'.
But the question was fun to think of.

Comments

[ceruleancat.livejournal.com]

Yes, you could define it that way, but you probably won't find books that would explain it in that way, since they think of poetry stress rhythm as reflecting prosody and intonation and of plot rhythm as reflecting cocnepts, ideas, and primarily genres.

You're actually making a wider generalisation that stresses alternation and variation of neighboring sequences, which translates to different types of concepts in different fields or aspects. The use of prosody terminology is just illustrative or 'borrowed'.

[beccaelizabeth]

*nods and is enlightened*
:-)