the craft. poetry is my editor.
Poetry challenges me in my own writing process. When I’m writing an initial draft of a manuscript, I’m mostly attempting to get the story out of my head onto paper. It’s not necessarily going to be this beautiful language that convinces you that I have any ability to write at all. But it’s those later drafts where things really start to come alive, and often, I’ve read some poetry in between.
I was asking a wonderful poet Victoria Ford about her process when I was a part of the Torch Literary Arts retreat last year, and she gave me such great insight into this idea of being able to describe things. I asked, how do poets come up with this stuff? And outside of their God given talent, she simply talked about taking your time. Sitting with the thing. Diving deeper. Asking questions. Victoria read a beautiful piece about her mother that tied in the story of Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes. This idea that everyone was in an uproar about her burning down the home of her then boyfriend Andre Rison, but no one asked about the scars on her face in the mugshot. She studied that picture and then proceeded to write all the things that came to her, eventually incorporating components into the moving poetry she shared at our reading, there was not a dry eye after, by the way.
I always feel like I’m rushing in my writing. Maybe it’s a little bit of that attention deficit I’m pretty sure I’m battling but it was like Victoria was giving me the permission to take my time. Writing well, takes time. Knowing how to describe something, an emotion, takes time. It’s all strange to think about but sometimes, you just need the time to think. How does this make me feel? What is this story saying to me? Where is my curiosity taking me? That’s what I feel like Victoria was explaining to me in that conversation.
When I can’t really conjure those things up on my own, that deep meaning, I go to poetry. Take Saeed Jones’ poetry collection, Alive at the End of the World. In it, he writes:
“The sky burns itself bright then bruises black. Things fall from the sky and those things might be water but could just as well be boys or bombs or billionaires or birds. Honestly, between your death and me, it doesn’t matter or I don’t know or I wasn’t looking or I couldn’t see because I’ve made a home out of how much I miss you and there’s no one here to tell me I should leave.”
///Saeed, How Dare You Make Your Mother Into a Prelude
It’s the personification. Boy, does that go a long way in writing. When we ascribe certain characteristics to inanimate objects, I personally feel like it automatically ups the ante. “The sky burns itself bright then bruises black.” Well the sky doesn’t bruise, but we know what that indicates. A darkening.
When I’m able to read lines like this, “I couldn’t see because I’ve made a home out of how much I miss you …” whew, it’s like something clicks in my brain of how to go deeper. How to make much more of the words that I’m trying to string together in my own work. After reading poetry, I feel like I’m able to sink my teeth in a bit more, like for instance this small excerpt from a current work in progress:
Instead of saying, something to the effect of “they talked about their troubled past,” poetry would have me say:
“They grinned until their cheeks hurt dancing around the sharp edges of their past enough to keep their flesh intact.”
I can’t tell you exactly what happens when I take a moment to read a piece of poetry and then dive back into my own work, but I digest the language and then something else is born when I go back in to add the sauce to words already written. These are different mediums and my job as a novelist is different from the job of the poets. But the best books I’ve read, the books that have made me say, I want to be a better writer, have most often had these moments of poetry within them.
I will constantly sing from the mountaintops of the beauty of revision, and this is exactly it. How do we take what’s there and make it sing? And sure, you have an editor and they will challenge you even more but I believe in bringing the work as far as I can on my own, so that their feedback will get me even closer to the idea of being great. Many times that involves keeping some poetry in the margins of my work.
Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize is accepting submissions. This $25,000 award recognizes the most outstanding book of poetry published in the United States in the previous calendar year. The prize includes a ten-day residency at Glen Hollow in Naples, New York, and distribution of the winning book to hundreds of Academy of American Poets members. (Deadline: May 15).
Writing Workshops Tuscany, accepting submissions for their upcoming workshops. Tuscany Writing Workshops gather an intimate group of fiction and nonfiction writers for an intensive week of creativity, craft seminars, one-on-one conferences, and in-depth discussions on the craft and business of writing.(Tuition: $3,895.00, Deadline: April 30).
Rebind is searching for an experienced Managing Editor to oversee our company’s publishing department. The Managing Editor will combine the creativity of a writer with the leadership ability of an operations manager. ($130-150k).
The Guardian US is now looking for an experienced breaking news reporter to bolster our reporting team and support story-led daily coverage of national and international news stories. ($68-77k, NYC preferred).
Paramount Writers Mentoring Program is accepting submissions through May 1st. Each participant will be teamed with an executive mentor from Paramount Global. Under the supervision of their mentors, participants will write a new writing sample. Once a week, for 16 weeks, participants will be invited to attend a small workshop-style meeting with various showrunners and other industry professionals.
