Getting Outside Your Comfort Zone: Get poetic

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. If you’ve been hanging out with us this month, then you know this month we’ve been talking about those comfort zones, and ways to get ourselves out of them. Why? Because it’s important for us to grow in our writing abilities, and we can’t do that if we stay forever cooped up in these little boxes we’ve set up for ourselves. We all know that, even if we don’t like to admit it.

If you haven’t read the rest of the series yet, I honestly encourage you to go back and check out the other posts! I’ve learned a lot about myself and my own writing, by working on these exercises—and I really believe you’ll get a lot out of them as well, if you’ll put them to the test.

For today, I want to talk about something I know one of my dear friends will adore.

Getting Outside Your Comfort Zone: Get poetic

Yeah, there it is. I said it. Most of us here are novelists and short story writers, and because of that, I made poetry its own separate topic. Why? Because poetry tends to be the dreaded literary form, for those of us who only write stories. And because of that, I believe it’s also one of the better exercises for us to do, at the very least from time to time.

Now, I’m not saying that you need to write something with a perfect iambic pentameter. Nor am I saying that you must write a beautifully rhymed and metered poem. I’m saying that you should sit down and write a poem. Write a poem in whatever style you see fit, whatever style you think suits you best. Whatever style you like to read.

Why do I think you should do this? Because poetry, in some ways, is the opposite of writing a novel. Instead of having hundreds of pages in which to tell your story, in which to get to know a protagonist and see the world through their eyes, poetry forces you to tell a story in a short number of lines, often restricted to a single page of print space.

Yeah, I’ll be honest: I’m not even sure how to do that. But I do try, from time to time. In fact, this is one of the exercises that I’ve done almost since I started writing, because I know how important poetry can be, to writers.

See, poetry is all about word choice. Poetry is specific, it’s designed to evoke emotion and imagery through a small number of very choice words. Which means that in order to write amazing poetry, you need to have a good handle on your words. You need to know what you’re trying to say, and have a few handfuls of uncommon or fluid words, to help you say it. Knowing those words will come in handy, when you come back to doing the thing you love to do. When next you sit down to write a scene in your novel, or to work on your latest short story, you now have a handful of extra wordy words, to sprinkle throughout your writing. To make your readers think. To help them imagine the exact thing you’re picturing in your head, while you’re writing this story.

That’s the good poetry does for us. And that’s why we should always look to it, when we feel as though we’re stuck in a rut.

And don’t worry—no one ever has to know you dabble in poetry. You don’t ever have to tell anyone. You can encrypt your files if you want to, so no one will ever see them but you. It’ll all be okay, I promise.

But sharing it, eventually, can also be a really fun way to show readers your writing process, later on down the line. Not that I've ever done that. But I've heard it's a good thing to do, eventually. Eventually.

[love]

{Rani Divine}

P.S. If you wondered, I have lots of poetry. And it’s all encrypted. And no, I probably won’t be letting you read it, anytime soon.