Don't Lose the Message
Our first priority is the message. There is a reason we take the time to write. There is a message we want to convey, whatever that message may be. We need to get this message to our audience. If our reader never finishes reading what we have written, we have failed to deliver our message. We need to give them enough to keep them interested but not enough to overwhelm or bore them. We need to keep them reading until the end. And, we need to have them understand what we say. Failure anywhere along the way and we may as well not have bothered to write in the first place.
We want to do more than say "the room is red." We just don't need to spend three pages on it. By then, our reader no longer cares that the room is red. He won't even care why he needs to know that the room is red. In poetry, especially, we don't have the luxury of wasting needless words on equally needless descriptions. While "the room is red" is a little too Dick and Jane even for me, "the room was the color of hell and being in it warmed me uncomfortably" is sufficient. This example is far more interesting than the "room is red" but doesn't go overboard.
Several principles we've discussed previously come to mind:
KISS - Keep It Simple, Sweetheart. Don't bury the message in unnecessary information. The room is red is much less important than the character is blind. Give the proper weight to the details.
Have a Plan - have a pretty good idea of what you're going to write before you start. The plan can and will change as we go along, but we must have an idea of the direction in which we are heading.
Who, What, How - understand the message and the audience. The hardest part is keeping the audience interested long enough to get the message.
Poetry in generally is shorter. It is succinct. We want to choose our words very carefully. If succinct isn't working for us, perhaps an essay would be a better fit. Always, though, keep the message, plan, and audience in mind. If we lose sight of any of these, we've lost everything.
When writing poetry, one possible objective is to make the reader think. However, any images presented should come easily. They should fit within the context of the rest of the poem and not be overwhelming. The same for descriptive phrases. Part of the wonder of poetry is being able to describe something without using a whole bunch of extraneous words. If it gets overwhelming, you'll lose the reader.
That's the last thing we want to do.
We want to do more than say "the room is red." We just don't need to spend three pages on it. By then, our reader no longer cares that the room is red. He won't even care why he needs to know that the room is red. In poetry, especially, we don't have the luxury of wasting needless words on equally needless descriptions. While "the room is red" is a little too Dick and Jane even for me, "the room was the color of hell and being in it warmed me uncomfortably" is sufficient. This example is far more interesting than the "room is red" but doesn't go overboard.
Several principles we've discussed previously come to mind:
KISS - Keep It Simple, Sweetheart. Don't bury the message in unnecessary information. The room is red is much less important than the character is blind. Give the proper weight to the details.
Have a Plan - have a pretty good idea of what you're going to write before you start. The plan can and will change as we go along, but we must have an idea of the direction in which we are heading.
Who, What, How - understand the message and the audience. The hardest part is keeping the audience interested long enough to get the message.
Poetry in generally is shorter. It is succinct. We want to choose our words very carefully. If succinct isn't working for us, perhaps an essay would be a better fit. Always, though, keep the message, plan, and audience in mind. If we lose sight of any of these, we've lost everything.
When writing poetry, one possible objective is to make the reader think. However, any images presented should come easily. They should fit within the context of the rest of the poem and not be overwhelming. The same for descriptive phrases. Part of the wonder of poetry is being able to describe something without using a whole bunch of extraneous words. If it gets overwhelming, you'll lose the reader.
That's the last thing we want to do.
posted by Vickie at 10:48 PM
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