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Writing Poetic Prose | Guest Post by Lyra



I want to own a cathedral made of my own bones.

Architecture soaring.

Maybe they’d believe God lived in me then.

From Letters to my Therapist


People often say they hate purple prose, or overly affectatious writing in books. However, in my opinion, the plainest of sentences can be the most poetic. The Queen of Attolia by Meagan Whalen Turner ends with the sentence “And she believed him.” Everything in the book builds towards the theme of whether someone is worthy of trust, and whether the other person is willing to trust them.


Writing poetic prose, or poetry, is less about finding beautiful words, but rather finding words that tell the reader more than what they immediately say. Intentional or not, Homer’s “wine-dark sea,” conjures a feeling of wildness, of depth and weightlessness, of being drunk on adventure the way that humans become drunk on wine.

To show you what I mean, I’d like to revise a passage with you.


Emma felt depressed. Each day was harder than the last. She didn’t want to do it anymore.


Authors are told to show rather than tell their audience, so we might think that’s the problem. However, some things are meant to be right on the surface. Saying at the end of the week rather than exhaustively writing out what happened every day is sometimes the best thing to do. Rather, we need to select what to emphasize and subtextualize for impact.


If you want to make the impact that the main character has been injured right away, you might make the scene dramatic and keep us in the main character’s head. Or you might have the focus on getting people to safety, on what future plans are, and then the main character staggers, or another character notices the blood soaking through their shirt, and both the characters and the reader deal with the surprise. It depends on what you want.


If the reader is supposed to empathize with Emma’s emotions and Emma’s depression is an important story-beat, we should give it more emphasis.


Emma felt depressed.


Yes, but how does that feel?


The entire world got heavier.


That is the feeling.


Sometimes, Emma wondered if she needed to see a doctor, because nothing tasted the same.


We expand to show how this is affecting Emma.


Laurel called at 4 o’clock, crying about how Emma was supposed to call yesterday, but yesterday—what had Emma done yesterday? She’d been—asleep? Tired. Stupid. When was the last time she cleaned her room?


We introduce how it impacts other characters.


It was midnight and Emma still hadn’t eaten. She had been sitting on the couch for 4 hours, and she still couldn’t stop crying. Nothing tasted right.

It was late, but Emma went to bed empty.

She would wake up empty, whether she ate or not.


Emma’s depression has a feeling of inevitability.

We achieve this by introducing metaphor, waking up empty referring to sorrow and feeling like life isn’t worth living, by introducing personification, the world felt heavy to show that the character doesn’t feel like she can change this, because the whole word feels this way, and detail, it was midnight to make a general idea feel more specific and therefore more important. We take tools of language from poetry and prose and use them to make a picture that is deeper and more detailed.

First draft advice: identify how you want something to feel, and write it.

Second draft advice: choose words that have a connotation or feeling that will create the image you want. Include details to show what is important. Vary sentences to make the passage interesting to read. Use metaphorical language sparingly. Try to make the passages that are more poetic in your book flow with the rest of your story. Not everything has to be poetic.

Poetic language has many uses. It can be used to help readers feel emotions, to write sentence-long characterization, or to hint at something the reader doesn’t know about yet. We have chiefly talked about the first, so we’ll briefly look at the second. We could tell the reader about how Laurel is sensitive and delicate, or we could make them feel it: Laurel was bright and breakable, like a Christmas tree in a snow globe. As well as foreshadowing, we can write a conclusion with poetic language. The primary point, though, is to convey a message. If our poetic language is only there to be esoteric and pretty, it probably will not help us tell our story.

Perhaps the most important advice I can offer for writers who want to write more graceful prose is to write what feels natural for them. Don’t write the way I write: write the way you write. Explore. This is your time to try new things and see what you like. Try the thousand different things that don’t work but find the twenty-five that do. You may end up writing the same thing over and over again in different ways. That happens! You may end up writing a gruff but affectionate mentor figure in every book—but the good news is that the rest of us love gruff but affectionate mentors.

Focus more on writing your story than on writing a beautiful story. It will grow into being beautiful, but it has to be your story first.


 

Thanks for reading this post! If you enjoyed it and would like to hear more from Lyra you can find her on Tumblr: @starsaroundsaturn

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