Part 2: Prose Versus Poetry

Some writers are blessed with two special abilities─writing prose and writing poetry. Many well established authors testify that it’s impossible to excel in both categories at the same time. My guess is that most writers start out as “poets” during their teens, while dreaming of the great American novel they hope to write someday, not realizing a short poem can be as great as a long novel. Brevity or the lack of it, is not a judge of quality. Only a genius could write such a great poem in his teens, and perhaps in any decade that follows. Indeed, the world’s greatest authors are considered geniuses, with Shakespeare at the very top. So far as we know, he wrote only poetry. The experts' opinions on the prose bits in the plays are that other writers wrote those.

So, after the teen years, the fledging writer meets college assignments calling for prose, polished prose. And he may get an F on his first paper, after A’s on his high school writing. (This is not a fault with the college, by the way, but with the high school, and perhaps every grade below that. I’ve seen this happen too many times.) At this point the freshman must accept, consciously or otherwise, that he’s not the great writer he thought he was, and it’s time to buckle down for the real stuff. We’ll come back to poetry in some of these blogs, but now we are still working with fiction. So, how do you start to write a story of fiction? There are two approaches to it, and here is one of the biggest disagreements in the writing world.

Some experts say you should have the basic story in mind, including the ending, and then write it out as fast as you can, before you forget it, paying no attention to your misspellings and other errors, for you’ll catch those in the revision. That is, revisions, plural. You’ve heard revising the story is more work than writing the first draft. That must be because this is the method they swear by. But why write two books? If you are a real writer, you’ll certainly change the fast-written story in revising it.

The other approach is to turn over the reins to the characters right at the beginning, and you watch them and listen to them, see what they see, hear what they hear, etc. Only that. You describe that on paper. That’s my way. I never give characters names, for example, for when I meet them, they already have names, family histories, habits, jobs, dreams, whatever. As I walked down the hall to my study and toward my computer to begin my first novel—with no note cards, no notebook, no charts on the wall—I saw the house to be in the story, and the name “Melanie” came with it. I recognized her as my protagonist, but at that point I did not know her last name. Although I have a niece with the name “Melanie’ and I like her just fine (never see her; she’s in a foreign country somewhere in the States), I didn’t like the name. As I began to type, I changed her name to something else and the story did not begin to get off the ground. I switched to “Melanie” and the story took off. Eventually I learned she was Melanie Withers. I would never have chosen such a name for her. But that stuck too. Recently I noticed under my name on the Net (Who puts all that junk on the Internet?) the name Melanie Withers, and I clicked on it, to find about fourteen ladies with that name, all in England, I think. (I gave this only about two seconds.) Once I started to type the story, I loved my protagonist’s name.

Anyway, to write with this second approach to fiction, that imagination has to be on tap, doesn’t it? But the pleasure is, writing the story once, slowly if you like, but in detail, so that the reader sees, hears, smells, touches, and tastes it all. Of course, you will go back and add an idea, when you learn it, for the character didn’t tell you everything the first time, or it was there and you just didn’t notice it. This method is fun.

♥