Musings on Poetics

As a result of certain events conspiring against me, I wrote a poem on Monday. I had a plot. I had a title. I was intended to write a short story, but when I sat down, a poem is what came out.

I'm still not sure how it happened, but I'm rather pleased with the result. I took multiple poetry workshops in college, but I've always considered myself first and foremost a writer of prose. Poetry has confounded me in the past. I've felt like someone entering a foreign land, a place where words fit together in ways I didn't understand. Three years ago, I was very good at drabbling words onto the page in interesting combinations--lines that rolled enticingly off the tongue, but at the end of the day failed to cohere into a meaningful whole.

Somewhere in the last three years (years when I was emphatically NOT writing poetry), that changed. You're going to laugh when you read this, but this week is the first time that I really felt like writing poetry and writing prose can be complementary activities. Not that I hadn't realized this before, in theory--rather, this week was the first time I really felt its effects. (Maybe this has something to do with graduate school. Or with three years of writing prose. Or three years of just hanging out.) On Monday I wrote my drabbly first draft, sat back, and really thought about the story I was trying to tell. Really thought about the form I wanted it to take. Poetry became not just WORDS! but rather, another avenue of storytelling that requires just as much thought as writing a short story or novel.

Similarly, writing poetry makes me more aware of word choice and phrasing in my prose. One of the things I like most about poetry are the constraints--in meter, in rhythm, in rhyme, in form. They force you to choose your words carefully, and re-choose them, and shuffle them, until they come together in precisely the right way. Almost-right is not right enough. From poetry I learned to concentrate on the internal rhythm of my sentences, to pay careful attention to the endings of things--paragraphs, chapters, novels.

Maybe the biggest reminder I took away from my impromptu poetry session is that poetry, as much as prose, is a process. One of my poetry professors in college used to said something along the lines of, "Poetry is never finished, only abandoned." One can tinker endlessly, adding a word here, dropping a word there, all in search of perfection. Maybe perfection is unachievable. But for someone who used to scribble a first draft and despair, it's heartening to be reminded that poetry is meant to be written and rewritten and refined and re-refined--slowly spiraling in from "well, what I mean to say" toward "This I say."

Music Monday: "Sometimes" (Walk Off the Earth)

Seems weird to do back-to-back WOTE Music Mondays, but I justify this because last time the song was a cover, and because today, "Sometimes" is just my jam.

WOTE doesn't have an official video for "Sometimes" as far as I can tell, so I've included a live performance from their current tour. I'm in a rush, so I'll just say this: I kind of adore this song.

NaCreSoMo #16: ARGH

Just finished redrafting a chapter of NEEDS A BETTER CODE NAME (maybe I should just shorten it to CODE NAME?) for my class workshop.

This is one of those days when revising (and writing in general) feels like pulling teeth. I'm in one of those spots in the draft where everything is lagging and I am so uninterested in what's going on and I just want to get to the exciting bits already! (Too bad I need another two chapters to get to the super duper exciting bits...)

Most posts you read will say that this is a bad sign. That it means you as the writer need to work harder on making the pertinent section more interesting--because if you're bored, the reader will be bored. There's something to that, probably... But I'm not going to go back and fix it right now. I'll let my excellent workshop class tell me all the ways in which it could be more exciting. (Good critique groups are awesome, by the way. That's the moral of this story.)

Line of the day: "I trust that thief cities farther than I trust you," I said. "He stays."

NaCreSoMo #15: Feeling Good About Procrastination

What a difference a good night's sleep makes. Different frame of mind, different brain activity, different...levels of procrastination?

Yes, I said it. I am a master at procrastination. My skills at procrastination are only equaled by my skills at pretending that I didn't procrastinate in the first place. Why no, I definitely wasn't up until 4:00am this morning doing this project that I had three weeks to work on...

Right now I'm procrastinating on completing the picture book project I mentioned a few weeks ago. I've drafted ten papers. Now I need to write fifteen more...and polish everything up...

The funny thing is that the more things I get done, the worse a procrastinator I become. Tonight my goal was to draft five papers (yeah, totally not happening). What actually happened was that I had a solid idea for one paper, and once I figured out what I was going to write about, my academic brain went on vacation. Because having the idea in the first place is totally credit-worthy, right? Right?

Anyway, ever since I had that idea, I've been fooling around with other stuff that I have to do, but are not quite as high on the priority list. (What a sad, sad world it is that my methods of procrastination have turned into actually DOING WORK, just not the work I'm supposed to be doing...) But that's not the point. The point is that I'm actually excited about how I'm procrastinating right now (that I shouldn't be working on right now...):

1. NEEDS A BETTER CODE NAME: I feel like I have no time to work on this whatsoever. This does not bode well for my goal of having a complete draft done by the end of March, but whatever. What's life for if not impossible goals? I spend so much time emphatically not writing that when the SPARK arrives, it's amazing and wonderful and life suddenly becomes full of possibilities and sunshine and puppies. Such is the current life of NEEDS A BETTER CODE NAME. My writing would be going so well--if I had the time to actually, well, write. In any case, I squeezed in enough seconds today to finish revising two chapters. (Yay? Yay!)

2. Completely brand-new (to NaCreSoMo) project: Something else that needs a better code name, or even a code name to begin with. Let's call this one... HYPOTHETICAL MERPIRE. Those of you who know me in actual life may know that I spent two long years slogging through HYPOTHETICAL MERPIRE. I finally completed/shelved (depending on your perspective) this novel last August, happy to let it lie, gathering dust. But recently I've been thinking about it more and more. The characters. The world. The polar bears. And there's something in my head that's been nagging at me, telling me that it's time to return.

If I were going to go back to HYPOTHETICAL MERPIRE, this would be no mere revision. This would be going in and completely gutting the story. I wouldn't even look at the old draft--I'd open up a completely new document and spill out...a very different story. It's been on my mind so much recently that I've come up with new plot twists, new characters, completely new character motivation... The (hypothetical new) HYPOTHETICAL MERPIRE would bear only a passing resemblance to the current project, and I am really, really excited about the prospect of digging into it again.

But that's all for another day. Right now, it's probably time I stopped procrastinating. How about you? What are you procrastinating on (and with)?

Line of the day: "Not much about me gave any hint that I'd ever been anything but a vagrant. But this was something real, even if its touch was as faint as a ghost."

NaCreSoMo #14: Tapped Out

Ugh. I feel like I've been trying to write this whole week, and things keep getting in the way. So there's not much in the way of writing to share in the way of my creation right now.

Instead, I'm going to direct you to posts written by few writers I follow, people who speak intelligently about both craft and the real world (and, sometimes, the intersection of the two). These are the sorts of writers I pay attention to.

- Kate Elliott (Cold Magic): "The Omniscient Breasts"

- N. K. Jemisin (The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms): "Fantastic Profanity"

- Foz Meadows (Solace and Grief): "PSA: Your Default Narrative Settings Are Not Apolitical"

Of course there's far, far more stuff out there, written by many, many authors. These are just a few essays recently that have inspired me, informed me, and challenged me to write (and read) better.

How about you? Who are the authors/artists/creative-types who expand your worldview, or challenge you to make your art in the best possible way?