Non-fiction. The name itself is the diagnosis. The form is defined by what it isn't — fiction. As if fiction were the primary category and everything else is the residual. Macfarlane: It has this weird name non-fiction... like it isn't fiction. It isn't fiction. That's the only way we define it.1 The structural consequence is that nonfiction inherits subordinate expectations. The reader brings a different set of demands to a nonfiction book than to a novel — and one of the things the reader stops expecting is sound.
In poetry, rhythm is actively listened for. In Joyce's prose fiction, rhythm and sound pattern are central. In nonfiction, the reader expects information, argument, evidence — and rhythm is treated as decoration if present at all. Macfarlane has been pushing against this for twenty-two years. Rhythm and sound pattern are something that I have been obsessed with from the very beginning because they work upon the mind, the reader's mind, the reader's mind's ear in ways that are different to propositional language.1
They're not telling you what to think. They're not an argument. They're not a set of facts. They're not laying out propositions. They're working on what Heaney once called the backwards and the abysm of the mind.1
The Heaney phrase is precise. Propositional language works on the rational mind — the part that evaluates claims, weighs evidence, holds positions. Rhythm and sound work on the backwards and abysm — the older, deeper, less-articulate substrate. The body that moves to music before knowing the beat. The dream-state that responds to cadence before grammar.
When a nonfiction sentence has rhythm, the reader's body responds before the mind processes the argument. The argument lands differently because the body has already been engaged. Information that arrives in well-rhythmed prose feels different — feels true in a body-way — even before the rational mind has assessed it.
Most nonfiction is written as if the body weren't reading. The information arrives bare. The mind processes it; the body is bypassed. The reader can grasp the argument but doesn't feel the argument. The book is forgettable in a specific way: the body has no memory of having engaged.
Three operational techniques recur in his work:
Alliteration patterned across phrases. The wind was rising, so I went to the wood. The w-w-w alliteration plus the rhythm makes the sentence stick in the reader's mind's ear before the reader has consciously parsed why. The first line of The Wild Places. Macfarlane spent more time on first lines than on whole chapters — they get rewritten hundreds of times.1
Internal rhyme. At the foot of a hill on which flints lie white as eyes. Water rises for the first time from a crack in the chalk. Rises and flows.1 The eyes / rises internal rhyme; the rises and flows / rises and flows repetition. The sound-patterning teaches the reader's ear that this prose is operating in a different register than fact-book prose. The reader sits up.
Rhythmic-structural variation matched to subject. Slow rivers get slow sentences. Fast rivers get tumbling clauses with and-and-and. Aerial-overview gets verbless full-stopped fragments. The sentence's rhythm matches the body-state the reader should be in. (See River-Pace Syntax of Panic.)
I probably spend longer on first lines than on whole chapters and they get rewritten hundreds of times.1 The first line carries disproportionate work. It tells the reader: this prose is operating in a different register; sit up; the reader's mind's ear is going to be activated; this is not a fact-book.
The two examples Macfarlane gives:
Both first lines do the same job by different means: alert the reader that the prose ahead will work on the mind's ear, not just the rational mind.
Macfarlane and Deen's sound-as-prose-musicality converge totally on the principle that sound carries information propositional language cannot. Deen frames it from the essay-craft perspective; Macfarlane frames it from the long-form nature-writing perspective. The convergence is striking because the two come from different craft traditions. Both insist that the sound-engineering is not decoration — it is load-bearing.
The split is in genre-expectation. Deen's essays operate inside a literary-essay tradition that grants prose-musicality permission. Macfarlane's nonfiction-books operate inside a publishing convention that treats prose-musicality as optional. Macfarlane has more headwind because his readers come expecting fact-book prose.
Rhythm-and-sound-in-nonfiction maps onto two adjacent domains where the same body-prior-to-mind principle appears: Eastern-spirituality (the contemplative traditions' use of chant and recitation to engage the body before the mind) and Indian aesthetics (the rasa-theory tradition's specification of musical rhythm and tone as carriers of emotional state).
Eastern-Spirituality: Mantra Recitation as Breath Architecture — the chanting traditions across the Eastern world depend on the principle that the body engages with rhythm and sound before the mind engages with semantic content. The mantra works because the body has been entrained by the rhythm; the meaning arrives second and lands inside a body that's already responding. Macfarlane's claim that rhythm works on the backwards and abysm of the mind is the secular literary articulation of the same principle. The structural identity: both traditions treat the body as the primary receiver of rhythmically-organized language, with semantic processing as secondary. The insight neither domain generates alone: the secular nonfiction tradition has been operating under an assumption (the rational mind is the receiver; rhythm is decoration) that the chanting traditions have known to be wrong for thousands of years. A nonfiction writer who has chanted understands viscerally what Macfarlane's rhythmic prose is doing; the chanter who has read Macfarlane recognizes the secular literary instantiation.
Creative-Practice (Rasa Theory): The Tala as Foundation of Performance (Nāṭyaśāstra) — Bharata's Nāṭyaśāstra specifies that a dramatic performance is based on the Tāla — the rhythmic structure is the foundation that other elements (melody, gesture, word) build upon. The performance fails not when the words are wrong but when the tāla is wrong. Macfarlane's claim that rhythm carries the body-state the prose is producing is the same finding in a different artistic medium. The structural identity: both traditions identify rhythm as the foundational layer that other layers (semantic, visual, gestural) depend on for proper transmission. The insight neither domain generates alone: Macfarlane's twenty-second-year nonfiction craft is converging on what Sanskrit dramaturgy systematized in chapter 31 of the Nāṭyaśāstra — rhythm is not decoration but foundation. A nonfiction writer who has studied tāla-theory would have a vocabulary for what their prose is supposed to be doing; the tāla-theorist who reads Macfarlane sees the literary instantiation.
A third connection worth marking: rhythm-and-sound-in-nonfiction has structural similarity to the em-dash-as-liquid-punctuation — both are kinesthetic instruments operating below the semantic level.
The Sharpest Implication
If rhythm and sound carry information propositional language cannot, and most published nonfiction is written without sound-engineering, then most published nonfiction is leaving a significant transmission-channel unused — and the books that remain remembered for decades tend to be the ones that didn't leave it unused. The uncomfortable implication: the nonfiction publishing-and-reviewing ecosystem evaluates books on argument and evidence quality, both of which operate on the rational mind. The sound-engineering layer is invisible to the standard review criteria. So the books that score high on standard criteria can be forgettable in body-memory, while the books that survive decades (Annie Dillard, Wendell Berry, Macfarlane himself) tend to have sound-engineering that the reviewers didn't quite credit. The discipline isn't optional; it's what separates books-that-fade from books-that-stay.
Generative Questions