Poet Tricks for Novelists

Doesn’t orange juice taste good any time of day? Aren’t bouquets welcome without a special occasion? Isn’t poetry’s something every writer should know about? That includes novelists.

Techniques that novelists might borrow from poets:

~ Artlessness.

In “Adam’s Curse” (about life outside Paradise”), Yeats wrote: “A line will take us hours maybe;/Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,/Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.”

Work hard enough to make it sound as if you never worked at all.

~ Big Ideas.

Wallace Stevens observes in “Sunday Morning” (about alternate spiritualities) that “Death is the mother of beauty.”

Emotion and suspense drive novels. Using irony and imagery, you can add beliefs, as well.  Layering gives poetry substance. It never hurt a novel, either.

~ Brevity

“My sky is black with small birds heading south,” notes Edna St. Vincent Millay in a sonnet about love—and its aftermath.

So much emotion in so few words. In such simple language. What Emily Dickinson called, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off…” Couldn’t every writer seek that kind of explosion?

~ Passion.

Dylan Thomas’s villanelle insists, “Do not go gentle into that good night/…Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

In novels, rhyme generally distracts. But characters frenzied over philosophy, morality, love, and, hate—that’s the stuff that fiction’s made of. Because intensity distracts readers from the mundane, unheroic, patternless amorality of everyday life.

~ Propulsion.

Emily Brontë celebrated the heath she loved with “Lightning-bright flashes the deep gloom defying,/Coming as swiftly and fading as soon.” For novelists, rhythm often involves risk. But take no risks, and you might be good. You’ll just never be great.

Tip: Read some poetry. This could be an investment that pays off.

“Hope is the Thing with Feathers”

Emily Dickinson wasn’t the happiest of individuals: she loathed conformity, suffered various physical difficulties, endured unrequited love, and felt every emotion acutely. Yet if one side of her impassioned reactions was “Because I could not stop for Death/He kindly stopped for me,” then the other was belief in how high human consciousness could soar.  For humans, even a plane ride is an act of faith, a belief that we can escape our earthbound nature.

Whether you’re passionate about God and identity, as Dickinson was, or about travel, love, or politics, it’s easy to get darkly bitter about what someone isn’t providing, how it isn’t fair, will never improve, and so on. It takes guts and at least a few feathers to make a song when things look hopeless. Yet is there anything better an artist can give?

Pete Seeger died not long ago, and if ever there lived a person who could fly and make everyone else believe they also could, he was such a man. He was also a man who despised injustice and devoted his life (and income) to defeating it. He grinned and joked and stood tall and sang no matter how much indignation he experienced. You can, too. You should, too.

Pete Seeger’s recipe works well for novels: stand up for justice, tell the truth, maintain your sense of humor, and never lose hope. Since its inception, storytelling has used plot to impart moral lessons, bond tribes, dispense culture, and inspire hope. If, arguably, storytelling makes us human, perhaps storytelling matters because it’s our best hope for hope.

Storytelling promises catharsis. Since Aristotle, we’ve become more flexible about lauding royalty and upholding constraints like the plot completing in one place during one twenty-four hour period. Our emotions, though? Those haven’t changed much.

If we’ve been rooting for someone, whether real or fictional, and this individual fails the ultimate test, yet learns from it, well, we learn too. We only suffer vicariously. But what we learn from the suffering that we experienced on the page—that belongs to us as much as the protagonist. 

How do you make that happen?

~ Afflict your protagonist with a universal dilemma—one everyone can relate to.

~ Root the trouble not in fate but in one individual, one individual’s mistakes.

~ Don’t let the angst or gore overshadow the emotions and their “lessons.”

(That keeps us reading/watching “Game of Thrones.”)

~ Provide hope—like the boy who’ll live to tell the story of Camelot.

Tip: Go ahead and be as dark as you like. But offer at least a small ray of light by the end.

Could Death Really Be the Novelist’s Friend?

First, of course, no, because like everyone else, novelists hate pain, grief, and loss. But on second thought maybe yes. Don’t friends get you in touch with your primal feelings? Those that shape the fears and desires of all people, no matter the time or place?

Death might be foremost among these feelings. It terrifies us, wounds us, deranges us, and, arguably, makes us creative because there isn’t enough time, and knowing that, we yearn to leave some trace of self behind. Primal emotions are the wellspring of story, and death is foremost among those.

Tip: Genuine emotion protects you—and your readers—from sentimentality.

~ Grief is a primal emotion.

It’s universal, which means that you need some new way to transform bitterness into insight and music. Emily Dickinson wrote that “Parting is all we know of heaven/And all we need of hell.” Edna St. Vincent Millay reminds that “Time does not bring relief; you all have lied/Who told me time would ease me of my pain!”

Question.: How would your protagonist describe the emotions following death? How would your antagonist contrast—or compare—with that?

~ Fear of mortality is a primal emotion.

Since the time when humans understood that each of us would die, we’ve developed ways to try and understand, to try and cope. Your characters share this need with everyone else in the world.

Question.: How does each of your characters cope, or fail to cope, with the reality of death?

~ Mortality is a source of energy.

Some writers use time—and its finite nature—as a motivator. No one can know how many tomorrows there’ll be. Why waste today? Are you writing as much as you want to?

Question.: How do your characters view time, mortality, and death? Do these motivate them?

~ Mortality is a source of creativity.

Some believe that the reality of death inspires art—from music to sculpture to novels. Whether or not that’s true, mortality instigates a complex amalgamation of conflicting emotions—everything from betrayal and remorse to memory, gratitude, and forgiveness. Death illuminates. It clarifies. That’s a lot of raw material.

Question.: Are your characters creative? Does mortality affect that? Why or why not?

Awareness of death is part of what makes us human. So much emotion and so many emotional constellations reside there. Perhaps death inspires us to become novelists—and probably drives us to write the best fiction that we possibly can.