The Poetry Rule

I am not a poet. Not by a long shot. I’ve written poetry, I’ve read poetry, and I’ve studied poetry. It’s not my thing. You’ll never see my poetry published or shared because that would be horribly embarrassing and no one would publish it. Seriously. But that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate it or learn from it.

I love what many people would consider “flowery prose.” Description, beautiful word choice, imagery, long sentences. Basically, slow and lovely reading. The type you usually get from people who write poetry. However, these kinds of sentences don’t work in many genres and there are a lot of readers who lack the patience for them.

Dark urban fantasy, which is the genre I’m tackling now, has no space for flowery prose. I can squeeze one or two in here and there, but more than that and I start to lose my audience. That doesn’t mean that I can’t apply the tenets of good poetry to my writing.

The main tenet I want to talk about today is The Poetry Rule, something I was recently reminded about at the Faith Hunter workshop I attended. The Poetry Rule applies to concepts of word choice; it’s a simple rule that goes as such: every word must do something and every word must count.

Yes, every word in your 40k, or 80k, or 100k manuscript. Every. Word.

Before you cringe or cry, I’m not saying you have to put every noun, verb, and article under the microscope. You’re not going to act like a poet and spend an entire day deliberating over one word in a ten line poem. No books would ever get finished. You are going to have to read each sentence and think about what it’s doing. Your genre, your scene, your narrator, your characters, and your motivations are going to dictate a lot about your sentences, so really, what you’re honing is your ability to be cognisant.

As writers, we all know stories don’t write themselves. That’s a flight of fancy we tell ourselves in desperate hours. Writers deliberately structure and tell. We’re conscious of all the choices we make, even when we follow our guts.

Plus, lazy writing is boring writing. Mixing up descriptors and sentence structure keeps readers engaged. And I think we’ve all experienced that moment of satisfaction when we describe something just right.

I want to emphasise here that The Poetry Rule applies to editing. Do not stifle your creative process by worrying about word choice during your first draft. You’ll frustrate the heck out of yourself.

Happy writing! And editing.

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