The Music of Language Balanced with Plaintext Prose
One of the hardest things to do when writing prose with ornamentation is to ensure the novel still sounds like a novel at the foundation.
In Crown of the Orphic Queen, the music of language is an important component, with some sentences reaching into prosody without turning into full-verse lines. There are sections of the work that are spoken in verse, such as the locutions of the Muses.
Some of the lines are chiastic in structure, a feature often seen in Middle Eastern works from the ancient world.
One feature of the novel that needed care is the distinction between the dialogue of the day versus the dialogue of the night, and the culminating library mystery of the book.
Also, Seph and Hadrian speak in archaisms mixed with such things as modern slang to give the novel an ancient feel and modern leanings.
That the novel is a simulacrum of Orphic traditions of the story means that the entire novel isn’t written as a rhyming hymn for the whole stretch. That would grow tiring far too quickly, and the sections that stand out apart from the plain would have far less impact that way.
However, whenever a Muse offers the characters a locution, then the words are written with matching or stressed syllables, giving them a poetic feel, as fitting for such beings.
The concepts of memory and recurrence are prime territory in the novel, meaning the cycle of reincarnated souls and the ancient mystery path are the key themes for the initiation of the characters.
Hadrian is written as intentionally theatrical, but there is a funny aspect to this because this will only happen at night.
There is a looming mystery in the novel and the answers of the Under Library. However, the Under Library isn’t a library of books, but rather pieces of visual art in the normal sense.
The school is ultimately a mystery school for the initiation of the characters into identity.
I play with the notion of the supernatural in the novel as well, with some actions written intentionally as magical when all it might be is a highly stylized description that sounds like magic, when it was a simple gesture or action.
The novel isn’t literally a poem or song, yet the chapters are called hymns because there are stretches at night that lean into this heavily. Some of the dialogue rhymes, and some of it is plain.
As the story moves along in the ultimate direction I have intended as the narrator, ordinary language may take a backseat to the ornate, and vice versa.
Parallelism is important in this work as well, with frequent motifs and leitmotifs throughout the novel. There is even a sequence later in the story where a song “plays” in the background of the characters’ interactions, formatted differently from the surrounding prose. That is a stylistic choice from my Orchestrylus Odyssey series.
The book is supposed to read as dense and musical, but does not use verse as its primary vehicle, as then it would not be a novel.
Some sections are A to B, then B to A to form a mirror image.
There are stress-focused rhythmic lines, and then there are simple lines to stand out from the rest.
The characters might speak in archaisms, but they are performing the story as much as they are living it.
I suppose you might liken it to an opera, and some of the dialogue is balanced in units. Some syllables are identical, while others are varied.
This is a story about initiation into the truth of the world using the vehicle of a simulacrum of the original myth.
This construct for the story is intentionally specific because this is not Persephone and Hades, but Seph and Hadrian. The question a reader might ask about the novel is whether this is a retelling or a continuation, and that’s deliberately gray until further chapters.
The characters make further progress into the Under Library as the story moves forward, into the depths of what looms in the main character’s head and in the counterpart in the library.
I’ve worked super hard on these novels, and I hope they were worth all the effort.
Happy writing and reading!
