Portals to story
Writing my novel feels different this week.
As I mentioned before, my torrid affair with poetry is ON. I have books of poems stashed all over the house: on the breakfast table, on the nightstand, in a stack at the side of my desk.
With so many close to hand, I pick them up constantly for a sip of words. A poem or three over coffee in the morning, a few more at my desk before I start a scene. This is becoming a habit.
Having read a few poems, my spider sense of language prickles to life. I feel the words rising to the surface. I am more present in my space, but also my mind wakes up to the story I’m trying to tell.
The matches light the way to scenes.
Sometimes, when I read a poem, it illuminates an aspect of my novel. A line captures tension between two of the characters, or the light a poet describes is just as my characters see it in my imagination.
In these moments, I can feel the scene viscerally, and when I write just after the poem lit the way, the scene feels different. The images I’ve read in the poem never appear in the book, but what I write feels sharper, more clearly defined.
This morning, I wrote less than 300 words of a scene, but the words felt truer and more grounded than they usually do in a first draft, thanks to the flash of light poetry provided.
Reading as fuel, refined.
I have always seen reading as a necessary part of writing. When I don’t enjoy what I’m reading, my writing suffers, so I never feel guilty when setting a book aside. Often it’s just a mismatch of time — I return to the same book a few months or years later and it’s just right. When I put a book down, I always tell it I’ll be back later.
Most often, I read long-form writing — novels, nonfiction books or memoirs. Less often, I read collections of short stories, mostly because I don’t find as many. There are more being published now, which is wonderful, as they often condense an entire story arc into a tidy morsel I can finish in less than an hour. These juice me up and linger in my mind for ages.
But now poetry has arrived, and the fuel is even denser. As if all the life and concentration of the poet has rendered the poem as solid as a block of peat, able to warm my writing self with new intensity. But perhaps they are also like sparklers, because I read one, and then write a little, and then want to return and read more.
Poetry has always felt like the most elevated form of writing to me. I felt unworthy of it, and as I spoke about before, I was even afraid to tell anyone that I wanted to read it when I started sniffing around the poetry section in bookshops, feeling the magic in those pages.
How form can feed form.
Given that I am writing fiction, the form changes by necessity when I write after reading poetry. I don’t worry about line breaks in the same way. I don’t count syllables or use meter or rhyme. But my words feel different. The images feel less snared by cliche. Sometimes an image emerges that surprises me.
It is like going fishing and pulling out a message in a bottle rather than a fish.
I’ve begun asking myself how this cross-pollination might inform my novel:1
What if I thought of scenes as verses?
What if chapters were stanzas?
How does the way I end a scene feel like the way a poet concludes a poem?
What is the rhyme and meter of fiction?
These questions bubble up when I bounce back and forth between poems and drafting. Progress is slower, in terms of word count, but as I’ve shared before, I don’t track success with word count. I now wonder if there is a new metric I can try with writing.
What if I measured how delicious a writing session felt, rather than whether I reached a certain unit of measurement?
I’m curious to follow this thread. I’ve trusted this impulse, because I feel more satisfied. Yes, I wrote fewer words today than I normally do, but this felt more like the book I’ve wanted to write.
Perhaps that is the best way to determine if I’m on the right track?
How do you know when you’re onto something with your writing? Please share with us below.
For further exploration of my experiments while writing my novel, check out Murder Diaries, my weekly podcast on my mystery-writing process, available to all paid subscribers.
I'm familiar with using reading as a stimulus for writing, but I never thought of writing poetry as a way of informing my novel writing. I'm going to have to try it.
This feels like such a life-giving practice - poetry feeding your fiction. 🧡