Introduction to Fiction and Poetry

Writing the Setting Fiction Sketch

2010-03-03T15:57:00.001-05:00

This post draws on "In the Cemetery where Al Jolson Is Buried" by Amy Hempel and "Constant Pain in Tuscaloosa" by Barry Hannah. If you'd like, you can also visit my article "Setting to Illustrate Conflict and Character" from March 2008. It goes a little more in-depth regarding the subtle effects for which setting is well-suited.

Setting. It's the easiest aspect of fiction to identify. The author describes a landscape or an object, and it's setting. Deciding the importance of that setting to the story is somewhat more complicated, but it's an important consideration as you write your own fiction.

The first area of importance is the use of setting to establish place. And this choice of place should reflect the themes and nature of your story. A story about a New York City Girl becoming a "fish out of water" would probably be best set in a rural setting, away from the big city. Amy Hempel's story about watching a friend die takes place mostly in a hospital, with short forays to the beach and the restaurant nearby - it wouldn't make much sense to have them experiencing death at Disney World, or going on a cruise. At least not during these final days, when the friend is basically leashed to the IV drip. Likewise, Barry Hannah's story wouldn't make much sense if "the genuine Elsworth" lived in a condo off Broadway - instead, we see his poverty and hopelessness through the stacks of beer in the fridge and the hubcap grill, through the way he sticks his foot through the porch. These tragic details emphasize his loneliness, revealing why he would clean the house and prepare a barbecue for people who might not even come.

The age of the characters often determines the scope of your setting. Stories about young children will often take place across their home, their neighbor's homes, and the park. Teens tend to get out more - they have school, they Burger King, they have that haunted graveyard after curfew. College provides a special realm of its own - an entire life can take place on a single campus, and that campus can provide lonely dorm rooms, crowded classrooms, imposing faculty offices, and raucous (or is it righteous?) parties. For these pre-adult-life stories, a wide variety of conflicts are available, but the conflicts must almost always be resolved in places accessible to the main character. For example, if it's a story about lost love - the really cute neighbor boy moves Indonesia with his parents - then the story can't simply have the girl moving to Indonesia to be with him. Say she's 14 - she's old enough to have that desire to move, but she'd have no experience purchasing a house or finding a job overseas. (though she can filch her mom's credit card and book herself a flight and get lost at Jakarta International...)

There are of course special considerations for science fiction, fantasy, supernatural, and international espionage stories (to name a few). In stories like this - ones that go outside the realm of everyday realism - an unusual setting must be described in order to provide a believable place. Adults, of course, have more "freedom of setting" than younger characters, but they are chained in their own ways to homes, jobs, and families, and the setting should reflect this.

After place, the next most important aspect of setting is tone. This, perhaps, is hardest part to master. It's largely a matter of diction - a train station can be "spacious, sleek, and efficient," or "cavernous, bare, and too quick."

Part of mastering the tone involves the use of specific details which relate directly to the plot at hand. Let's say we wanted to really reveal a train station - it would be better to zoom in one one small corner and really explain it than to give a blanket description of the whole place:

Bill sat on the bench near the ticket counter. His sole companion was a plastic ficus with dusty leaves. On the floor, someone had spilled a milkshake. The milkshake has been smeared across the tiles by a half-dozen footprints. Earlier, a janitor had come by to throw out the trampled Cold Stone cup, but he left the real mess behind.

Note that these specific details have all been related back to Bill through proximity - all of these are things that he sees himself. The dusty ficus is in fact "his sole companion." There are tinges of loneliness with the irrepressible sense that this world simply doesn't care that Bill exists. Now let's use this same setting to cast Bill in a very different light:

Bill sat on the edge of the bench near the ticket counter. Someone brushed against the ficus, and he batted the dusty leaf out of his face. Some idiot had spilled a milkshake across the floor - Bill shifted further down the bench to keep his wingtips out of the sticky mess. He'd seen a janitor come by earlier to toss the crumpled Cold Stone cup, but the man had been too lazy to get a mop to clean the mess.

As you write, provide these specific setting elements and then have your characters respond react to them. Zero in on where exactly your character is and what exactly he sees or experiences.

Finally, in your setting piece, strive to go a step further by turning the story into a multi-sensory experience. Touch, taste, smell, and feel are often overlooked in stories, but these experiences provide the most intimate details for the human experience:

The ridged metal bench was cold and rough under Bill's butt. Every time someone walked past the ficus, dust from the leaves made his eyes water with the need to sneeze. Otherwise he couldn't smell it - the plant was as plastic and sterile as the the ticket counter. But everything, now, stunk of sour milk. Someone had dropped a Cold Stone shake across the floor - there was a squeak every time someone tried to step over the sludge only to slip instead. And it made Bill's ears hurt, listening to this place - the feet clomping across the floor, the whistle of trains arriving and departing, the flick-flick-flick of the arrival schedule every few minutes. And the janitor who came by to pick up the Cold Stone cup had been too lazy to clean up the sludge, so Bill had to smell the sickening-sweet artificial strawberry scent as he waited. And, worst of all, he couldn't even smoke in here. His mouth was already dry with the need for nicotine. He could almost taste the smoke, he needed a cigarette so badly.

So there it is: set your place, set your tone, and use specific details which your characters can respond to. If I can answer any questions, please let me know.

Ryan

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Writing Tone

2010-03-02T12:50:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine e-mailed today asking about how to teach tone to her students. And this is a very important question for any writer. In your stories, physical descriptions, actions, and character details will carry the reader only so far. Besides understanding and "seeing" the story, the reader needs to feel the story. This is where tone comes in.

I usually explain tone as being a product of setting and diction. It really boils down to the feel of the piece - do the lines feel happy? Sad? Do they provide the feeling of tension as opposed to just the intellectual knowledge that something bad is about to happen?

One way to illustrate this is to take a sentence that says one thing and then change the words so that the tone doesn't match. For example:

"The yippy-yappy dog ran up to me with his tongue lolling out and then jumped up and nibbled a hole through my rib cage. My heart rate was quite elevated until he took a healthy bite out of my left ventricle, and then I was lying down the ground. I felt really light-headed as I passed away in a soft puddle of red wetness."

Naturally, for a description like this we need words like "growling" and "sharp tongue" and "tore through my chest with half-inch canines." (and I'm sorry it's a bit gory - the more extreme the difference between tone and action, the easier it is to show). Also, sentence length is a critical component of tone and pace. Longer sentences tend to be more relaxed, languid, and intellectual - shorter sentences convey more urgency and tension.

On revision:
"The doberman charged me, teeth bared. He lunged for my chest and dug into my rib cage. My pulse raced. I had to get him off. Then he took a chunk out of my heart. I staggered back. The world spun. Then I was on the ground. I felt the blood pooling under my back as I died."

Note that the revised lines here still don't convey the real urgency of having one's still-beating heart ripped out by a doberman. It's clear the narrator has somehow gotten over this moment, and is maybe telling this story from the afterlife. That, too, can be a subtle trick of tone. But here it was largely an accident. I couldn't find a way to tell the narrator's "moment of death" with that kind of urgency. So I cheated and detached the voice a bit. But that's all right - you can't do much with a story after the narrator is really (and completely) dead.

And with that cheerful thought...Happy Writing!

Ryan

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Writing the Voice Sketch

2010-02-23T18:18:00.000-05:00

Today's topic addresses the approach we use for writing voice in fiction, and is a continuation of "What Is a Voice Poem." The pieces we cover in particular for this topic include Bobbie Ann Mason's "Shiloh" and Bernard Malamud's "Angel Levine." The IFP Voice Sketch is a minimum of two pages double-spaced.

In my experience, one of the most difficult parts of writing a voice piece is finding a way to capture a unique voice without exaggerating that voice to the point of disbelief. And the two pieces we read for class cut a very fine line here, managing to capture some of the extremes of local dialects without inflicting a cliche. "Angel Levine," in particular, captures a wide of voices, from Manischevitz's colloquial "My dear God, sweatheart, did I deserve that this should happen to me?" to the very intellectual diction and tone of Levine's early speech: "It was given to me to understand that both your wife and you require assistance of a salubrious nature?" Later in the story, in the synagogue in Harlem, Malumud exposes us to still more variations of dialect, from "Let's git on wid de commentary" to "On de face of de water moved de speerit. An' dat was good. It say so in de Book. From de speerit ariz de man."

To understand what Malamud has done with voice here, we must consider the purpose of the story: we have a Jewish tailor confronted with a angel who happens to be Black. And in the Harlem synagogue, we see Jewish gentlemen - each one Black - discussing the "immaterial substance" of the soul. And this reveals that, regardless of dialect, an individual can discuss and believe in Manischevitz's Judaism.

The key here is that the diction may come from dialect, but the topics of discussion come from the needs of the characters. And this is crucial. Stories which are considered "cliche" or "overdone" often try to enforce voice at the expense of characterization. As a veteran, I tend to notice this most when I'm reading stories with military personnel. For example, you might read a conversation like this:

They'd been fighting for days. Private Joe was happy to get a few hours when he saw the Master Sergeant walking up with new orders. "Hey, Sarge," the private called. "What's cookin?"

The Master Sergeant whipped out her map. "Our orders," she said, looking every man in the eye, "are to take this hilltop."

I know from experience that few soldiers actually speak like this. (The term "sarge," especially, will earn a private in today's army a whole lot of push-ups...) Another problem with this dialogue is the way it divides the private from "The Master Sergeant." This examples gives the difference in rank between the two men as more of a matter of social class than of age and rank - it sounds almost as if they're from entirely different world's, culturally speaking. Then we have the line of this sergeant "looking every man in the eye." Yes, it sounds very steely-eyed-heroic, but not exactly realistic.

To truly capture the voice of these soldiers, we would need to see them as people first and soldier's second. The best way to do this is to first zero-in on a single point-of-view (POV) character. In the previous example, we have confusion about which character holds the true POV. Private Joe gets the most POV exposure with "he was happy," but we have no idea what he thinks as the Master Sergeant is looking everyone in the eye. If we really take on his point of view, we can get a stronger feel for how he and his buddies are actually feeling.

Joe watched Sims as she pulled out the map. He didn't want to look at the paper again. He didn't even need to, know - they'd fought back-and-forth across those hills for so many days that he could have sketched the ridge in the sand with his eyes closed.

Note that we've dropped most of the "army" jargon - now it's just two people looking over a map. But we can feel the grit of this situation much better - Joe is tired, he's been fighting a lot, and he already knows his job.

Point-of-view established, we can now move on to developing this POV to reveal the voices of other characters:

Sims flicked her eyes up from the map to meet Joe's gaze. She seemed so small, for a moment, hunched forward under the weight of all that Kevlar, but then she straightened. She brought up her carbine and clunked the weapon down over the edge of the map as a paperweight. She cast her eyes over the rest of the men. She looked angry and tired, as usual.

"Our orders," she said, "are to take this hilltop."

The emphasis here is still on the people. Without the weight of ranks and steely-eyed looks, we can see this sergeant as she really is - tired and angry. And it sets up some good tension for later. Why, if she's so unhappy, is she now a Master Sergeant? Does she really want to take this hilltop, or is she literally just following orders?

Note that we've introduced some military jargon here, but it's not the cliche jargon of a John Wayne movie - instead we see some of the equipment that these soldiers would use and carry every day. To them, this stuff is as familiar as air. For minimalist fiction, just mentioning these words might be enough, but I recommend providing enough explanation that all readers would understand what these objects actually represent. Here, it might help to know that Kevlar is the polymer used in military body armor, and hence a common nickname for the armor itself. A carbine is a shorter version of an M-16 - the kind of weapon everyone now recognizes from movies and popular culture. But do we really need to be told these things? Depends on the audience, really. Think about whether this knowledge would have helped you understand the short piece a little better, and then try to keep in mind which of your own references your readers might not know at first.

As always, please feel free to reply or e-mail with any questions or comments.

Happy Writing,
Ryan

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Links to Literary Terms

2010-02-17T23:03:00.002-05:00

I had a very good question today about how to know which terms to identify. Given the snow, we haven't gone over as many of the literary terms and techniques as I would have liked, so I've included a list here of useful websites for literary terms. As the semester progresses, I will focus in on the literary terms which I find the most important, but you may discover that additional terms are needed to describe the works from The Hopkins Review.

Ten Essential Poetic Techniques from a Middle School Lesson Plan

It's likely you're already familiar with these terms, but it's a good idea to review these. Good definitions and examples are provided for Simile, Metaphor, Personification, Hyperbole, Alliteration, Assonance, Consonance, Onomatopoeia, Repetition, and Rhyme (Internal Rhyme and End Rhyme).
"Poetry Techniques and Lyric Lesson" by Kellie Hayden

McGraw-Hill offers some very complete lists literary terms. I recommend reading over the poetry glossary for Friday's essay, and then referring to the other glossaries throughout the course.

Poetry Glossary
Fiction Glossary
Drama Glossary (note that many of these terms are applicable to fiction and poetry)
Complete McGraw-Hill Glossary

Poets.org provides an overview of the different kinds of poems (the large-scale forms which encompass regular patterns of meter, rhyme, and stanza lengths) along with their own glossary of poetic terms.
Poetic Forms
Glossary of Poetic Terms

The University of Richmond Writing Center also provides a list of 32 general terms applicable to both poetry and fiction:
"A List of Important Literary Terms"

If you have any questions about specific literary terms or their applicability to a given work, please let me know.

Have a good day,
Ryan

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Hopkins Review Essay: Evaluating Poetry

2010-02-17T11:37:00.001-05:00

This article provides tips and grading information for IFP Essay 1 - Analyzing a Poem. The poems to be analyzed are from The Hopkins Review - Winter 2010 - New Series 3.1. For more information on publication and subscriptions, please visit the Hopkins University Press.

For Introduction to Fiction and Poetry, most sections assign the two Hopkins Review essays to be turned in at the end of the course as part of the portfolio. For Section 10 (Ryan Edel's Section), the two essays are due earlier in the semester, and you may submit revised essays with the portfolio to improve your grade. The grading rubric provided is one I have developed specifically for my section - please check with your instructor regarding the grading and expectations for your section.

The Hopkins Review essays mark an important departure in the course from our regular focus on writing creatively. Although the essays may require more research than the poems you've submitted thus far and a bit of a closer analysis than our in-class readings, they should be something to worry you. I grade the essays on a relatively simple rubric - by following the rubric and the simple tips, you will be able to write a quality essay which reveals important aspects of both the work evaluated and poetry in general.

I have divided the essay grading into five components for a total of thirteen points:

2pts - Summary of Details
2pts - Identification of Literary Techniques
3pts - Analysis of the Literary Techniques
3pts - Evaluation of their Effectiveness
3pts - Discussion of the Poem's Role in Literature

Based on how well you fulfill each of these areas of the assignment, grades are given as follows:

13 - A+
12 - A
11 - A- (and so on - each point corresponds to a third of a letter grade)

Something I would like each of you to keep in mind is that the best essays will integrate the five key areas together throughout the essay. First, start with a good introductory paragraph or two. Let us know what the poem is about in a sentence or two (Summary), Identify the key techniques in the poem, and then very briefly tell us what your essay will show (think of this as an abstract for the Analysis, Evaluation, and Discussion).

After the introduction, I'd like to see each paragraph Identify a literary technique, provide a Summary of details showing where this technique occurs, and then Analysis of how this technique functions within the poem. Then, either in that same paragraph or the next one following, Evaluate how well the technique works. Did the author write an effective metaphor, or was the imagery overbearing? It is important that you support your assertions with good quotes (Summary) and Analysis.

As you write, maintain a balance throughout the essay. I have read essays where there is so much Summary that we have no room for real Analysis or Evaluation, and other essays where a very strong Evaluation (either exceptionally negative or completely positive) is unsupported by details from the poem itself. What I'd like to see is a coherent whole - I want to know that you've read the poem, you considered what the poem is trying to do, and you've told us how well the poem does it.

At the end of your essay, I'd like to see a conclusion which briefly mentions what you've shown about the poem. Then Evaluate the poem as a whole. Is it a good poem, or does it need a lot of work? Is the author's intent clear? Do we feel satisfied after reading it? Then, Discuss the poem's role in the canon of literature. Is it a narrative poem? Then tell us how it either supports or changes our views of narrative. Does this poem reveal a greater truth about life? What is that truth. Is it something that we can easily understand? Is it something that people often experience and rarely talk about, or is it something so banal that you would have preferred not to see a poem written for this topic? Typically, a conclusion may require a whole paragraph for Evaluation, or perhaps a whole paragraph for Discussion. Do keep in mind that the bulk of your Discussion points will come from this area of the essay, so it's better to go a little long if you need the space to develop your point.

About the the Essay Length and Deadlines:

The minimum essay length is three pages, double-spaced, maximum 1.25" margins on the sides and 1" margins top-and-bottom. Regardless of essay length, use 12-pt font. For my section, you may submit more than three pages. It is certainly possible to submit an A-paper in three pages, and I encourage everyone to aim for this. However, if you find that there is simply too much to write about, feel free to submit up to five and six pages. If you think you might go past six pages, please notify me in advance so we can discuss the focus of your essay. And please note: I cannot give extra credit for a longer essay, but I may take off points for a late essay. It's better to turn in a rough draft on-time and then ask for an extension than it is to turn in a perfect essay after the deadline.

As always, I welcome comments and questions, and this is particularly true for the literary essays. If you'd like more on how I view literary essays in the creative writing classroom, please see my article "Teaching the Literary Essay."

Happy Essay Writing,
Ryan

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What is a Setting Poem?

2010-02-10T11:20:00.002-05:00

Today's discussion will focus on Philip Larkin's "Church Going" and Yusef Komunyakaa's "Sunday Afternoons" (Magic City version).

Before I discuss the specifics of setting poems, I'd like to introduce a major concept in poetry which is often overlooked when trying to categorize poems. Essentially, any poem has elements of every poem. For example, in Bishop's "In the Waiting Room," it's a narrative poem, but we have the elements of a child-like voice and the setting details surrounding her narrative. In Larkin's "Church Going," we have a similar effect, but it's a setting poem because the narrative is somewhat less important, but we still have some elements of narrative along with the voice of a man who's detached from religion and church in general.

Komunyakaa's "Sunday Afternoons" takes this a step further. In "Sunday Afternoons," we have a strong narrative movement - the poem starts with the children being sent out to the yard, it reflects back on the family events surrounding this, and then comes back in the end to that last view of the house: "If I held my right hand above my eyes..." The events are generalized to reveal the pattern of Sundays rather than just a single Sunday, but there is a story being told. The voice, too, is exceptionally strong. Phrases like "we were drunk & brave" and "Where did we learn to be unkind...?" reveal the narrator's older perspective looking back on a younger time.

"Sunday Afternoons" is considered a setting poem not due to a lack of narrative or voice, but because the setting is the dominant element in this poem of setting, narrative, and voice. From the first line, "They'd latch the screendoors / & pull venetian blinds," the narrative in this poem is driven by these setting details. The sense of formless anger is revealed through "Speckled eggs, blue as rage," and "...gospel on the radio, / Loud as shattered glass." The voice, too - the character's sense of realization - comes out through metaphors drawn from the setting: "The backyard trees breathed / Like a man running from himself."

As you write your own setting poems, I'd like you to bear in mind this idea of combined forms. Often, the temptation in writing a poem like this would be to start and end with the setting. For example, I could write a poem about my childhood room that would go something like this:

Desk so cluttered
there was no desk.
The lamp was a spindled island
of aluminum
and light.

It's a nice image, yes, but this short poem goes little farther than that. The idea of an "island of aluminum and light" seems to imply something, but it's impossible to say what. Is this a commentary on childhood? Or maybe regret due a lack of clerical organization? Let's expand this to see if we can't develop something further:

They told me
to clean my desk.
Out my stuff would go:
the papers, the cheap sci fi pulps,
that beanie green turtle thing from Shelley at Christmas.
The black bag waited,
plastic and Hefty,
thirty-gallon maw
of hunger.

"You need space to work,"
they said,
pointing to the lamp,
that spindled island
of aluminum
and light.

Right away, this poem develops a great deal more tension (granted it has more lines to work with - this helps). We have "they" in that first line - a very malevolent presence in this poem. The Hefty bag represents a "thirty gallon maw / of hunger." There's a kind of narrative tension here - the narrator versus "them" and "their Hefty bag," but we don't know from where exactly this tension arises. The setting has established the situation, and it's given us elements of voice in the line of "Out my stuff would go." There's a sense of resignation here, with the possibility of resistance, but it's uncertain. If we wanted to pick it apart, we could say that "would" implies an older voice looking back, whereas using "will" could have given the sense of a child facing the Hefty bag here-and-now.

But let's not go that far today. Instead, I'd like you to focus on what it is you'll write about. The real problem with setting poems is that they are very rarely about the setting. "Church Going" uses churches and their decay to reveal a larger truth about human society. "Sunday Afternoons" uses the house and the yard to reveal a complicated family situation. For your setting poems, I'd like you to do something similar. Find a story or a truth from life that you'd like to explore (and it doesn't need to be from your own life by any means). Think about a place to reveal this truth (if it's a story, just consider where it happened). Write a list of the setting details from this place. Consider how each one reveals the tension of the story/situation. And from there, write your setting images to reveal the narrative and the voice together.

Please feel free to post questions below or send me an e-mail.

Happy Writing,
Ryan

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What is a Voice Poem?

2010-02-03T11:55:00.003-05:00

At its heart, a voice poem is about this nebulous term we know as "voice." The easiest way I've found to think of this is to imagine the voices of people I've met and picking apart the interesting differences that come out. Unfortunately, this can be harder than it sounds - most of the people we know and hang out with speak the same way we do. They are interested in the same topics, and they often hold the same views and opinions. And this is somewhat natural. Just think about chemistry: we're kinda the lipids in olive oil doing our best to avoid the wrong-headed vinegar peeps in our lives.

When I think of voice, I have to picture the people I've met who wouldn't have normally become close friends of mine. And I've been fortunate - in the military, I met Americans from all walks of life, including many who were born overseas and then decided to enlist. Yet their voices were distinctly different from the people I've met while traveling in Germany, and they are vastly different from the voice of my girlfriend, who grew up in Thailand and has only lived in the U.S. for a short time.

To a large degree, the different "voices" I hear in reference these friends are usually a product of accent. But we need to go deeper than mere accent - deeper even than common phrases. For example, while on R&R from Afghanistan (in 2005), I went to Germany. One conversation I had was with a student visiting the Cologne Cathedral. We talked for a bit about me being an American tourist, about the upcoming visit of Pope Benedict, and a bit about her thoughts on World Youth Day. But then she asked what I did for a living - I told her I was "a soldier in the most popular army in the world" (and I said this in German). And that killed the conversation.

As you can imagine, the American Army was not very popular in Europe at the height of the Iraq War. And the way the girl fell silent would be an essential element of her voice if we were to write a poem from her perspective regarding the war. It might go something like this:

I met a soldier
American.
He seemed nice,
but he would, wouldn't he?
All Americans do.

There's just a touch of sarcasm, and a large degree of disinterest. It wouldn't be that this voice hates Americans or even the war - this voice doesn't really care to think much about them. They only "seem" nice.

Compare to if we were to switch voices to the American perspective - same situation, same event, different voice:

I met a girl today,
German.
Cute,
long hair,
pretty.

Never should have said
who I am.

You see right away that the speaker here has very different intentions - he's hoping for something. But then it changes - there's this loneliness at the end, something we don't expect from someone hitting on a girl, especially not from this image we might have of "the soldier on leave."

Something important to note is the way a voice poem can be nuanced. In the second poem, I pointed out the two differing feelings affecting the narrator. We have some of this in the first poem as well, but it isn't as strong. The female narrator is not exploring her own feelings much, and that, too, is a product of voice. To this narrator, this isn't a scene isn't worth evaluating - she met someone not worth meeting. It won't change her life. If we wanted a poem where this meeting would change her life, we'd have to change the voice somewhat:

I have heard
that the Americans
want only oil.

Why, then, do they smile?
Say "Hello"
like they mean it?

Should I worry?

Again - same situation. Friendly, smiling American meets a German girl who doesn't want to talk with him. But now we have a different take, and the voice is different. This female narrator isn't dismissive - she's concerned. Wary. It changes the tone a great deal.

Now that we have these three examples, I'd like you to notice that the language is relatively unchanged from poem-to-poem. They are written in a very flat, colloquial English. But this makes sense - each one is written in my own personal style, with little variation between them. The language is not the critical component of voice in a voice poem. If anything, a flatter style can allow the voice to come through more clearly. Let's turn back to our happy American - what if wrote in an "Army" style?

So I met this chick
out on leave.

Real nice girl.

Shoulda never told her
what I do.

In this poem, there's no hint of loneliness - this narrator only wants something, and he's disappointed that he didn't get it. Lonely, though? Doesn't sound like it. The way he talks about the girl - "this chick" and "real nice girl" - shows that he's pretty much dismissed her intellectually. And this is important - it reveals his voice. It's the same poem as before, but the changing language has radically altered the meaning.

I hope this helps clarify what voice poems are and how they work. As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to e-mail or leave a comment below.

Ryan

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How to Start Writing a Narrative Poem

2010-01-27T18:09:00.001-05:00

This discussion continues with our focus on two narrative poems, Elizabeth Bishop's "In the Waiting Room" and Seamus Heaney's "Digging." For more information on the components of narrative poems, please see the previous post.

Often, the hardest part of writing a poem - any poem - is starting. There's always the big question of "What do I write about?" This is then followed by "How do I write about it?"

Narrative poems, by their very nature, are somewhat harder to start than other poems. They have two strikes against them - the need for the story and the need to be poetic. Usually, a fiction writer can start a story and simply see where the narrative goes, and a poet can start a poem and simply see how the images combine together, but a narrative poem requires a coherent story to be told while images weave together in a cohesive manner. It isn't like building a house, and it isn't like painting a Michelangelo - it's like erecting a tent of hardened canvas and then painting the inside to look like the Sistine Chapel. And then selling the tent to a family of four with two overweight gerbils and an annoying little dog.

This said, the unique challenges of the narrative poem allow us special access to starting such a poem. The first is the fact that we often base these poems off of real events - this provides us with a ready setting for our poem. "In the Waiting Room" and "Digging" both have the feel of intimacy largely because the surrounding setting details feel so close and personal - the knees in the waiting room give the impression that the Bishop's narrator is young and small, while the "squelch and slop" of the peat in "Digging" lets us feel as if we are there to hear and feel the damp peat as it splats against the dirt. If you are writing a poem from personal experience, then you'll want to identify the details like this which made the scene so memorable for you. Was it grandma's absurdly obese gerbil perched on an overturned coffee mug so it could poke its head up over the sweat potato casserole for a lick of marshmallows at Thanksgiving? Then work that into your poem. I recommend starting your writing with one of these concrete images for two reasons. The first is, naturally, that it will give your reader an anchor for understanding the poem. The second - and even more important reason - is that it will provide you a line to your own memories of the event. By fixing your mind of something tangible, something that you can personally see in your mind, you will find it easier to reach over to the other memories associated with your story.

The next avenue for approach we have is the manipulation of chronology. "In the Waiting Room" and "Digging" provide very different chronologies, and this reveals how much leeway we have when it comes to shifting the emotions and images. For any poem, an excellent starting place is the emotional timbre of the work. Consider which emotion best sums up the experience, and then adjust the chronology to reveal the development of this emotion.

For example, say you wanted to write an elegiac narrative poem about the the death of grandma's gerbil - there might be an overwhelming feeling of sadness mixed with the joyful memories of having known such an irascible fur ball. The poem might open with tears and a shoebox in the back garden, but then flash back to that scene with the sweet potato pie and Great Uncle Delmer going after the thing with a steak knife. The volta might bring us around to a climax of joy and humor and Thanksgiving sacrifice. And somehow, this may bring us back to the present - a life after the two-inch tombstone embedded in the dirt by the begonias. The narrator may be reflecting that life is sorrowful, but also fun. And he might be at the pet store buying a new gerbil. Or two. And an annoying little dog, too. Because his parents are going to make him live in the Sistine Tent from now until the end of his natural life, a.k.a "departure for college." (Note to self and readers - be sure to cut off the narrative poem once the narrative has passed the middle and reached the end. Or, better still, continue with Chapter Two of "The Short, Happy Life of Sam the Gerbil and Other Stories.")

I hope this provides some helpful advice on how to start your writing. If you have any questions, please feel free to e-mail me or simply leave a comment below.

Happy Writing,
Ryan

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What is a Narrative Poem?

2010-01-27T10:16:00.004-05:00

Today's discussion focuses on two poems, Elizabeth Bishop's "In the Waiting Room" and Seamus Heaney's "Digging."

In fiction, we often use this term "narrative" to describe the way a story is told. In poetry, we use this term to differentiate poems which have a narrative arc from those that don't. Unlike a Setting Poem, which may simply express the beauty of a place and a moment, a narrative poem tells a story, often with a beginning, a middle, and an end (as in fiction). The ultimate narrative poem would be the epic poem, such as The Odyssey or The Illiad.

To understand narrative, we must differentiate between two similar terms - story and plot.

Story: The events of a narrative in chronological order of occurrence. Just imagine the movie Memento told in reverse - instead of seeing the first events at the end, the movie would tell the events in the order they actually happened. Or if you were going to write about your day, starting with breakfast, moving on to lunch, and finishing with dinner and bed.

Plot: The events of a narrative in the order they are told. This is an important distinction - often, authors rearrange events (via flashback, for example) in order to shift the emotional impact of those events. Memento takes the story and tells it in reverse. Your day could be told in a linear fashion, going from breakfast to bed, or you could start by telling us about how your little brother fired a wad of meat roast at your head during dinner. Then the story would go into the events of lunch, explaining the root cause of little brother's evil ways. But then, as the story progresses and the narrator reaches and emotional denouement, we learn that you started it over breakfast when you dumped an entire bowl of milk-sogged Wheaties in little brother's underwear drawer. (Never mind that he had it coming).

Unlike Setting and Idea Poems, Narrative Poems rely on character and conflict to drive the poem forward. This is very similar to fiction - the best stories require good an interesting conflict to hold our attention, and a conflict is only relevant as it affects the life of our plucky protagonist.

Conflict: The bad things that happen to good people. And the badder the better. A good conflict will literally rock our protagonist's world - aliens dropping from the sky, cats and dogs living together in harmony, that cute guy asking the shy girl to prom. For a conflict to be relevant, it must be personal to the character. "In the Waiting Room," for example, uses the conflict of a young girl suddenly discovering that she is related to the other people around her. Seeing the hanging breasts of aborigine women in a National Geographic literally shakes her to the core.

Character: Our protagonist. Narrative poems may include multiple characters, but the character usually only refers to the main character. Unlike novels or epic poems, short narrative poems are only long enough explore the emotional transformation of a single character.

So far, we've covered the aspects of narrative poems which make them very similar to fiction. Yet they remain most certainly poems. For this reason, the key elements of poetry remain essential considerations:

Line: Poems, unlike fiction, are two-dimensional. You could write an entire novel in a single line of text stretching from here to the moon. But this wouldn't work for a poem. The line breaks - and the way these lines appear separated from each other on the page - contribute to the meaning. For example, in Heaney's "Digging" we see how the last stanza uses line breaks to shift the emphasis within the final two sentences:

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.

Note here that periods are still used to mark the start and end of sentences - a line break is often independent from a sentence break. And between the first and second lines, we have an example of enjambment, when a sentence carries over from one line and continues onto the next.

Stanza: Think of this as the paragraph of poetry, a collection of lines with a common theme. Enjambment across stanzas is also something to watch for.

Persona: Also common in fiction, this is where the narrator assumes a certain type of attitude toward the work. The persona is not the author - it may sound like the author, but the persona represents a meta-existential fictional creature unique to the given work. And sometimes these creatures are dark and scary. When they are holding a squat pen, they are.

Transitions: Very important in all narrative work, transitions are those pesky little details which tell us that we're moving from one scene to another. In "Digging," a single two-line stanza carries us from a scene with the narrator's father to a scene with his grandfather:

By god, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

Image: Poems are known for imagery. Basically, we want to see things. Readers like to picture these poetic places in their mind. And Bishop's poem has some great images, from a volcano that's "black, and full of ashes" to "A dead man slung on a pole." These images stick in our minds, giving us something to think about.

Symbol: What's a poem without symbol? Some image must stand for something else. Those women's necks "wound round and round with wire / like the necks of light bulbs" probably stand for something in Bishop's poem. "Those awful hanging breasts" mentioned in the third stanza - there's something deeper that the narrator sees in these images, making them symbols for the larger theme. Also look at the spades versus the pen in Heaney's "Digging."

Metaphor: (Otherwise known as a simile which fails to use "like" or "as."). Similar to symbol, a metaphor uses one object to refer to something else, possibly an idea or a belief or a person. "That man's a beast on the court!" could be used to describe an amazing basketball player. Ted Kennedy was "The Lion of the Senate." Did he have a mane and a tail? No. Compare this with John McCain, "The Maverick of the Senate." McCain isn't using a metaphor here - he's using a literal description.

Coming Soon: How to Write a Narrative Poem.

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