Improve Your Prose with This Poetic Exercise (Sandy Deutscher Green)
The thought process behind writing a novel in verse can help you write tight and interesting prose without losing the storyline, sacrificing character development, or skipping important beats in your narrative. It can weed out tedious detail and infuse your story with emotional and sensory richness.
In verse novels, word placement on the page enhances the theme of the story and mirrors the emotions of the character. Matching the cadence of the scene by crowding or spreading words mimics the emotional range of a character feeling elation, apprehension, trepidation, longing, jealousy, or any of the dozens of emotions our characters are capable of feeling. Words are sparse and choosing the perfect word encourages you to write the way the narrator is conveying the story. Do your characters always think or speak in perfect sentences? We often communicate in fragments or clauses.
Writing free verse is more than dropping articles, punctuation, and not ending a line with a preposition. It’s being conscious of the rhythm the words and stanzas by taking natural breathing breaks in the text.
If you’re not happy with your story written in prose, try this. Identify the theme or purpose of your first chapter and rewrite it using the shorter lines of verse. Take natural line breaks where you would if you were reading it aloud. Read it aloud yourself, use your computer’s read aloud function, or ask a friend to read it to you focusing on the flow of the story.
Inside your stanzas, you might discover alliteration or imbedded rhyme, where rhyming words are scattered throughout the text. If not, you might add them, or not, whatever you feel is appropriate and would lend interest to the story without becoming a distraction. As a bonus, at the end of the chapter, reread the last stanzas. Your chapter title might be there, if you’re inclined to name your chapters (or the title of a poem, if you want to keep your story as a verse novel).
Each poem represents a scene and must fulfill the same requirements as a scene:
Here's an exercise to tighten the words in your story. Try it on one chapter. I’ve used a few lines as an example:
· Write one chapter in prose:
“There are some people who live year-round at the lake,” Ally said. She pointed to a boy, about thirteen years old, playing some sort of video game on a towel. “Like that kid.”
“How come he’s not out here?” I asked. All that bouncing and sliding was way too much fun.
Ally shrugged. “All I know is that he’s not very friendly. He never talks to anybody. I think he might already be a teenager.”
· Rewrite it in free verse, concentrating on emotion and reaction:
she points to a boy on a towel
absorbed in a video game
older than us
wearing cut offs
a leather band wraps his wrist
hair the color of sand
back curved like the moon
blending into the beach
lonely afternoon
living at a lake resort
isn’t a vacation for everyone.
· Switch back to prose from the verse:
The year-round boy scowls at him from behind his game. Older than us, he’s wearing cut offs and a leather band around his wrist. His sandy-colored hair blends into the beach.
An offer to him to join us dies in my throat. Living at the beach isn’t a vacation for everyone.
If you’re having trouble with a scene, this exercise might be just what you need to jumpstart your writing by concentrating on transitions between scenes, senses, foreshadowing, advancing the plot, and whether the scene resolves the conflict.
Ultimately, your story will be one that children will love!
Website: www.sandydgreen.com
Comments
Post a Comment