Azhdarchid

So You Want to Write Iambic Pentameter

tragedians

Seven or eight years ago, when I was working as a localization writer on the English version of Pathologic 2, I was faced with the question of how to localize that game's Tragedians.

The Tragedians in Pathologic act as ushers, as 'shadows' of other characters, as deliverers of tutorial dialogue. They're very explicitly drawn from the tradition of stage hands dressed in all black – same one that gives us the literary image of the ninja and the style of performance in which a puppet is manipulated by several performers wearing black morph suits.

They are, in a word, theatrical. The tone of their dialogue was meant to reflect that they live in this heightened space, inherently brushing up against the fourth wall. I don't know what possessed me to say "what if in English they spoke entirely in iambic pentameter," but once I had I was basically on the hook to do it. So I did it.

This makes me one of very few living people who've written a large volume of iambic pentameter verse drama for money, on a deadline. Honestly I'm not sure anyone else is there who can say they did this, other than Cat Manning who picked up doing a substantial volume of Tragedian dialogue when I got sick during the production of Pathologic 2.

This is an extremely rarefied skill that I am now going to share with you. How, exactly, do you write verse poetry at a reasonable pace, without losing your mind or generating text that is truly incomprehensible to the target reader? Here's how.

First things first: methodology

I was not writing these directly off the dome. I was working off a first-pass translation. If I was writing this kind of verse as original writing, I would also write a first draft mostly in straight prose.

People with a lot of experience doing this kind of thing – freestyle rappers, eg – can just write narrative verse right off the cuff. But until you have a ton of experience, separating out the steps of figuring out what you're going to say from how you're going to say it is critical.

Word choice and structure

There's this persistent idea in discussions of iambic pentameter that the English language is "naturally iambic." This isn't really true at all – it's kind of a meaningless statement. What is true, however, is that English does feature a lot of two-syllable words, and a lot of recurring pairs of one-syllable words that tend to be stressed as iambs; pairs like "up to", "go in", "if I," and so on.

These are the basic building blocks of iambic verse, and most texts written this way will favor shorter words. A very common sentence structure privileges one longer word surrounded by short little words; in the line "now is the winter of our discontent," the only long word is "discontent", which almost acts as a cornerstone for the whole line.

What really eases doing this is, of course, the general wealth of synonyms in English. You can often reach for a shorter word to help you rephrase; the thesaurus is your friend. When that isn't an option – which happened frequent on Pathologic 2, since lines often had to fit in names or specific setting terms – I would usually construct the line around that cornerstone, starting from the position of the harder-to-fit word and then figuring out how to phrase the words around it.

I've done this enough that I can work it out in my head – I still need to count syllables and say things aloud – but when starting out, pen and paper and / * notation are your friends.

Finally: you always have the dirty trick of inserting somewhat contentless words to make the meter work. Now, I don't think Shakespeare or Milton stooped to doing this all that often. But Marlowe? All those other workaday guys who were also writing reams of iambic verse drama, that nobody bothered to save? I suspect they did this all the time.

A particularly frequent example is 'on' and 'upon', which are basically interchangeable but one is an extra syllable. "To sit on a throne of human skulls" can become "to sit upon a throne of human skulls" and suddenly it's a fragment that fits iambic meter.

Rhythmic variation

The most important thing about iambic pentameter is how much of it isn't actually made out of iambs. Which is to say: there are a number of metrical variations that are extremely common, and which a skilled writer uses both to add rhythmic interest to verse and to conform phrasing. If you actually stuck completely rigidly to the meter, you would not write something that sounds like Shakespeare or Milton at all, because those guys absolutely varied rhythm a lot, and sharp rhythmic variation really is what makes all those texts breathe the way they do.

Trochaic inversion: It's very common for the start of a line of iambic pentameter to be a trochee, not an iamb. Again, this is the case in the classic "now is the winter of our discontent" example, which starts on that very emphatic, stressed 'NOW'.

In truth, any iamb can theoretically be a trochee, but there are degrees of how dissonant of a rhythmic break this creates. A trochee at the very start of a verse is generally going to read fine, while one in the middle of a sentence is going to break the rhythm noticeably.

As a rule of thumb, the second syllable pair of a line – the second 'foot' – should definitely be an iamb; but the other four feet in a line have more flexibility, especially the first and last one.

Weak or 'feminine' ending: This is an extra unstressed syllable tacked on at the end of the last line of a verse; famously seen on "to be or not to be; that is the question." This is sometimes almost unavoidable.

Historically, this has particular associations; in practice it tends to come off as hesitancy or trailing off rather than definitively ending a sentence, but it's not really so heavily marked that you can't just do it to make a line work.

Clipped lines: Not at all a common thing in actual Shakespeare or Milton, but something I did relatively often: final lines of a verse that are shorter than a full pentameter, sometimes as short as just two feet. For this to work properly you need a pause or structural break that implies that line break (so it 'feels' like a separate final line, and not like the previous line is just abnormally long). Often, I would pair this with lines that themselves imply uncertainty, incompleteness, or interruption – kind of like a song pausing after the word 'stop'.

You can use these kinds of variations to build a rhythmic language specific to your piece. As in music, repetition legitimizes; if you deviate from the formula in consistent and meaningful ways, those deviations will become an integral part of the iambic pentameter that you are writing. Where I end up drawing the line of what is "iambic enough" to still convey the rhythm and feel of iambic pentamter is that:

Enjambments and pauses

Enjambment in poetry is when sentence boundaries don't line up with line boundaries. Verse drama does this basically all the time; it's almost required. Sentences, by nature of needing to say specific things, will be most of the time either too long or too short to make up a line of pentameter; so they'll have to either end or start mid-line.

Sentence boundaries also act as additional pauses mid-line, which can anchor rhythmic variation. The real goal of becoming an effective verse writer is to be able to knit together all this disparate rhythmic and semantic information and make it all agree.

Knowing when to give up

Finally: Verse drama almost always drops out of the verse meter at least some of the time. The most common example are short lines that don't make up a full line of verse; if someone just needs to say "ack!" because a bear is chasing them, then that's that. In the Pathologic 2 script there are definitely moments where some critical mechanical or quest information needs to be conveyed and the only way to effectively do it is in prose.

Sometimes you have to use a word that simply will not fit into the meter in any sensical way.

I count these as spots where the delivered text is above the required quality bar, but below the desired quality bar. Ultimately in high-volume commercial fiction writing – ie, much of video games writing – you're going to run into those spots, and the art is as much in knowing what is and isn't acceptable to fudge, as in being able to consistently hit the bar on the places where you really need to.

I emphasize, of course, that this is what it's like doing it on a deadline within the context of a broader project with greater needs than the stylistic perfection of your writing – you have to be conscious of how much time you're spending on individual assets, and of the broader context of what you're writing. Pathologic 2 contains tutorializing conversations written in iambic pentameter! That's a fancy trick, but it's one where I was only able to do it because I was thinking very carefully about how to achieve clarity (well, clarity by Pathologic standards).

I have truly no idea if this knowledge is helpful to anyone else. If you have a cool project you're working on that benefited from it, feel free to let me know.

#on writing