The pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, sentence lengths, and pauses in your writing that gives prose its musical quality.
Rhythm in prose is the beat your reader feels while moving through your sentences. It comes from the interplay of syllable stress, word length, sentence structure, punctuation, and paragraph breaks. Unlike poetry, prose rhythm doesn't follow a fixed meter, but it's just as real and just as important. When your rhythm is working, readers fall into a flow state. When it's off, they stumble even if they can't articulate why.
Readers don't just process words for meaning - they feel them physically. Good prose rhythm pulls a reader through a scene the way a good song pulls a listener through a chorus. It's also one of the main components of what people mean when they say a writer has a "great voice." You can have perfect grammar and strong ideas, but without rhythm, your prose will feel flat.
Morrison's prose has an almost musical quality, with rhythmic patterns drawn from oral storytelling traditions, gospel, and jazz. Her sentences are meant to be heard, not just read.
McCarthy builds long, rhythmic sentences that echo the King James Bible and Melville, then breaks them with blunt violence - using rhythm itself as a narrative tool.
Woolf's stream-of-consciousness technique depends entirely on rhythm, with sentences that expand and contract like breathing to mirror her characters' inner experience.
Read your work aloud. If it sounds like a metronome, you need variation. Alternate between quick, punchy sentences and longer, more expansive ones.
Prose absolutely has rhythm. The difference is that prose rhythm is flexible and organic rather than fixed in meter. If you've ever been "unable to put a book down," rhythm was part of why.
Your rhythm should shift with your content. A fight scene needs a different beat than a love scene. Let the story's emotional temperature dictate the pace of your sentences.
Write the same event twice in 100 words each: a character receiving bad news. In the first version, use only short sentences (ten words or fewer). In the second, use long, flowing sentences with multiple clauses. Read both aloud and notice how the rhythm changes the emotional experience. Then write a third version that mixes both approaches.