Rhythm. We all love rhythm. Music. Beat. Songs. Speech. I guess it comes from the womb. From the heart. The heartbeat we've heard, before born, it was rhythmic, is rhythmic. Comfortable. Soothing. Or exciting. Or maybe it's the sound of life itself, and we love listening to it, to know that we're alive. I'm not the first one to say it, and you've probably heard it a lot. Have read about it, thought about it, seen it in books, in your own writing. There is a certain rhythm to every piece of writing. Think poetry. Poetry is where its loudest. But in prose it's there, too. Think about your favorite book, open it, look at the sentences. Don't read them, simply look at them. At their length. At their structure. Every comma is a beat, every segment of a sentence is saying something, sounding something out. Every period is a louder beat, a stop, a pause. I'm not a musician, so I don't know proper terms. You know what I mean, though. See how no one sentence is alike? See how each new sentence picks up the rhythm and changes it into something new? See how when there is repetition, it only goes on for 2, 3, 4 beats, rarely more, because otherwise you will get tired as a reader and start perceiving it as a list?

It struck me this week (yeah, yeah, I know, things tend to strike me, laugh now.)