Lesa Howard's Blog - Posts Tagged "fiction"
Poetry Put My Prose on a Diet
By definition, prose is dull. Look it up. Merriam-Webster defines it as: 1.) ordinary language people use in speaking or writing. 2.) a dull or ordinary style, quality, or condition. On the other hand, poetry is defined as writing that formulates a concentrated, imaginative awareness of experience chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm. Personally, I find this shocking. Fiction, which in my dictionary is defined as my imagination, has always brought about an awareness of experience that elicited an emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm. At least it did in my head. However, I did come to realize that I wasn’t getting that on the paper.
Truthfully, I knew my writing needed something. But what? Turns out it was a diet. My prose was fat with dull, ordinary language, plump with lackluster style, and a blubbery caricature of story that needed a weight loss program. I wish I could say this came to me as an epiphany and I set about to “eat” right and “exercise” my manuscripts into shape. Rather, it came about by accident, a result of teaching poetry—a lot of poetry.
Back in 2008 I started as a teacher of creative writing and arts education with Writers in the Schools (WITS) in Houston. My head in the clouds, I just knew I was going to teach elementary and middle grade children to crank out fabulously entertaining stories. Wrong-o. I soon learned that the 45-minute to one-hour classes once a week were not conducive to teaching story writing, not if I was going to keep it creative. Many of the other writers at WITS were poets who used poetry in their creative classrooms. As I saw the writing generated from these lessons, I came to appreciate the use of poetry in creative writing in a way I hadn’t before. I’d always assumed since I wasn’t a poet there was no need for me to devote myself to it. I was accustomed to outlining stories, use of plot devices, and character development, but there’d been no place for poetry. Fortunately, my fellow-writers were more than willing to help and shared their lessons with me.
So, over the years, ten plus now, I dove more and more into odes, cinquains, and free verse, teaching imagery, anaphora, personification, and the like. This style of creative writing better engaged my young writers and produced amazing results. Digesting smaller segments of verse was easier. It was much more fun to write about your shoes having a conversation with your feet, or how much love one feels for a banana. The one thing I hadn’t counted on was what a steady diet of poetry would do to my own writing.
When I say I went on a poetry diet that doesn’t mean all kale and quinoa. Quite the opposite. I found nuggets of deliciousness hidden in a single line that I would have used a paragraph to express before. Juicy tidbits soon replaced verbose, passive passages. And despite a feast of dainties, I’ve learned how to trim down my prose, to cut out those carb-ladened ing words and do away with empty calorie words like start, going to, and began. They’re pure fat and unnecessary. Like any other meal plan, a diet of poetry takes time and dedication. But I highly recommend finding the indulgence.
Truthfully, I knew my writing needed something. But what? Turns out it was a diet. My prose was fat with dull, ordinary language, plump with lackluster style, and a blubbery caricature of story that needed a weight loss program. I wish I could say this came to me as an epiphany and I set about to “eat” right and “exercise” my manuscripts into shape. Rather, it came about by accident, a result of teaching poetry—a lot of poetry.
Back in 2008 I started as a teacher of creative writing and arts education with Writers in the Schools (WITS) in Houston. My head in the clouds, I just knew I was going to teach elementary and middle grade children to crank out fabulously entertaining stories. Wrong-o. I soon learned that the 45-minute to one-hour classes once a week were not conducive to teaching story writing, not if I was going to keep it creative. Many of the other writers at WITS were poets who used poetry in their creative classrooms. As I saw the writing generated from these lessons, I came to appreciate the use of poetry in creative writing in a way I hadn’t before. I’d always assumed since I wasn’t a poet there was no need for me to devote myself to it. I was accustomed to outlining stories, use of plot devices, and character development, but there’d been no place for poetry. Fortunately, my fellow-writers were more than willing to help and shared their lessons with me.
So, over the years, ten plus now, I dove more and more into odes, cinquains, and free verse, teaching imagery, anaphora, personification, and the like. This style of creative writing better engaged my young writers and produced amazing results. Digesting smaller segments of verse was easier. It was much more fun to write about your shoes having a conversation with your feet, or how much love one feels for a banana. The one thing I hadn’t counted on was what a steady diet of poetry would do to my own writing.
When I say I went on a poetry diet that doesn’t mean all kale and quinoa. Quite the opposite. I found nuggets of deliciousness hidden in a single line that I would have used a paragraph to express before. Juicy tidbits soon replaced verbose, passive passages. And despite a feast of dainties, I’ve learned how to trim down my prose, to cut out those carb-ladened ing words and do away with empty calorie words like start, going to, and began. They’re pure fat and unnecessary. Like any other meal plan, a diet of poetry takes time and dedication. But I highly recommend finding the indulgence.
More of My Poetry Diet
In my last post, I wrote about using poetry in my creative writing classrooms, and how that changed my fiction writing. In this article, I will share an example of a poem that can be used for tightening up one’s prose, developing a character or setting, or simply for having fun. It’s called a cinquain. Cinquains are five-line poems, there are several styles to choose from. Some use rhymes, some require a certain number of syllables, and others use specific parts of speech in a particular pattern. The latter is my favorite and the one I’m going to use here. Take a look at the pattern below. It’s easy to follow.
Cinquain Pattern
Line1: A noun
Line2: Two adjectives
Line 3: Three -ing words
Line 4: A phrase
Line 5: Another word for the noun
I usually start out by having my elementary students write their first cinquain about an animal. What kid doesn’t like animals?
Dog
Furry, intelligent
Licking, barking, jumping
Always there for me
Schnauzer
Easy, huh? Slap a title on that puppy (no pun intended) and you have a poem, and a child who feels empowered by his or her writing. If I were in a classroom, we’d move into writing about ourselves.
Lesa
Imaginative, daydreamer
Scribbling, reading, outlining
Bringing life to the page
Writer
With older kids, we experiment with cinquains as advertising copy. It’s a kind of eye-opener for them when they see it expressed this way. It’s also a great conversation starter about how we don’t always notice the role writing plays in our everyday lives—the back of cereal boxes, video game instructions, a recipe, and so on.
Sneakers
Stylish, cool
Walking, running, sprinting
Gives me happy feet
Nike
Are you seeing the connection to prose? Can you tell how this simple five-line poem could be used as inspiration for creating a character? What about world developing? What would it look like to describe an underwater city using a cinquain? How about the weapon the murderer used on that dark and stormy night? This kind of tight writing will force a writer to zero in on words that carry the most impact. If you can only have 2 adjectives, you’re going to choose the ones that will elicit an image or sensory reaction from your reader. But be careful. Cinquains are addictive.
Here’s one last cinquain. This one is for a character in a YA manuscript sitting on my Dropbox cyber-shelf. I plan to take it off the shelf one day and blow the dust off of it. Maybe this poem will motivate me to do that sooner rather than later.
Girl
Lonely, rejected
Hiding, cloaking disguising
Ready to leave town
Holly
Cinquain Pattern
Line1: A noun
Line2: Two adjectives
Line 3: Three -ing words
Line 4: A phrase
Line 5: Another word for the noun
I usually start out by having my elementary students write their first cinquain about an animal. What kid doesn’t like animals?
Dog
Furry, intelligent
Licking, barking, jumping
Always there for me
Schnauzer
Easy, huh? Slap a title on that puppy (no pun intended) and you have a poem, and a child who feels empowered by his or her writing. If I were in a classroom, we’d move into writing about ourselves.
Lesa
Imaginative, daydreamer
Scribbling, reading, outlining
Bringing life to the page
Writer
With older kids, we experiment with cinquains as advertising copy. It’s a kind of eye-opener for them when they see it expressed this way. It’s also a great conversation starter about how we don’t always notice the role writing plays in our everyday lives—the back of cereal boxes, video game instructions, a recipe, and so on.
Sneakers
Stylish, cool
Walking, running, sprinting
Gives me happy feet
Nike
Are you seeing the connection to prose? Can you tell how this simple five-line poem could be used as inspiration for creating a character? What about world developing? What would it look like to describe an underwater city using a cinquain? How about the weapon the murderer used on that dark and stormy night? This kind of tight writing will force a writer to zero in on words that carry the most impact. If you can only have 2 adjectives, you’re going to choose the ones that will elicit an image or sensory reaction from your reader. But be careful. Cinquains are addictive.
Here’s one last cinquain. This one is for a character in a YA manuscript sitting on my Dropbox cyber-shelf. I plan to take it off the shelf one day and blow the dust off of it. Maybe this poem will motivate me to do that sooner rather than later.
Girl
Lonely, rejected
Hiding, cloaking disguising
Ready to leave town
Holly
