Writing Fiction and Poetry Give and Take

Writing poetry allows you to compactly express emotion telling a story through use of metaphor, the story and the powerful rhythm of the lines on the page. The lines don't have to rhyme but each word must move us easily to the next word and the next until the end of the literary journey.

We can laugh, we can cry, be amazed or surprised- even delighted and soothed -and so much more. That is the universality of the emotional content of the poem. The story can proceed through metaphor (an apple represents the world) or through words selected describing what is in the scene and what is not.

As in dialogue, it is this tension between the words on the page and what is not said that provides us with the give and take in our imaginations. In other words, "she sat so still the room did not know she was there" allows us a visual image and the absence of her taking up little in the room.

We wonder what will happen on the next line "her thin breath rode the back of a horse invisible and, yet, in the race to win". Well. The give and take of the tension is accelerating.

The same thing happens in fiction. We must keep our lines spare and chose each word so it can bump into the next one without word parasites nibbling the life out of surrounding words leeching meaning out of our sentences. This builds interest and tension and, above all, clarity.

Keep writing!