Was reading Nine Minds again and got to the part about Naoise Dolan, an autistic fiction author who writes "rhythmically," treating words and sentences like music. She never knows exactly how a scene might turn out, she just lets the words come to her in a way that makes rhythmic sense.
This is basically how I write. Even if I plan something in my head, the words that come to me in the moment might not match how I imagined it. I rely on cadence when I write. When the words manifest, they must agree with each other rhythmically, metrically, syllabically. There must be leitmotifs. There must be a traceable rhythmic journey of each paragraph in whatever I write. When I read over what I have written, I mentally taste each word and tap my foot. If the pattern makes sense I keep it. If not, I discard.
Naoise and I both grew up playing musical instruments. Rhythm, pattern, flow; that is how we process the world. That is how we transcribe the stimuli around us. And the written word is a beautiful instrument to express it.
