If you’re like this editor, you read in a variety of genres and forms, including plays, essays, and poetry. Unfortunately, many writers wouldn’t be caught dead with a book of poems, much less write one. If you’re one of the latter, this one’s for you.
In a post for Lit Hub, Kyle Lucia Wu says novelists can learn a lot from poets. When working on his novel, Wu received a lot of advice about writing schedules, word count, and productivity that left him feeling anxious and creatively stymied. However, when he spoke with his colleagues who wrote poetry, he found a different rhythm and signed up for a poetry class.
“It felt good to not think about the project I’d been working on for years, but instead to think about the unconventional moments I found in poetry: how few words could be used to arrive at something weighty; the distinct imagery, the narrative turns, and the way bright clarity often crashes like a wave at the end, leaving behind something frothing and alive in its wake,” Wu says.
When Wu showed his poems to a friend, she suggested he use them as the basis for a scene. “I repurposed certain kernels and images, and the new scenes unspooled easily once I’d stopped thinking about them,” Wu writes. While novels require an understanding of pace and structure, there should also be room for intuition and innovation. “So my favorite way of moving forward in my novel became to pretend I wasn’t writing it,” Wu concludes. “To pretend I’d left fiction behind and to write poems instead. They became a prism that could refract my writing into something vibrant — something I wanted to watch dance along the walls.”
