You Can Be a Winning Writer. Joan Gelfand
is common knowledge that many poets have become novelists of extraordinary success.
Michael Ondaatje and Alice Walker are just two examples. Because poetry is a kind of shorthand, an unforgiving and compact form (no wasteful words, no unsubstantiated arguments or theses), writers who start as poets quickly learn the beauty of the economy of words. Other writers who wrote poetry and fiction were Jorge Luis Borges, Agatha Christie, and Kingsley Amis.
About writer Reed Farrel Coleman: “Poetry was RFC’s first calling, and it also brought him to crime fiction: ‘I heard the poetry in the language of Chandler and Hammett, listened to the meter behind their words, and thought that I wanted to try my hand at it,’ he writes on his website. ‘The truth is, I knew I could do it. I realized, at last, that all those poetry writing classes and the classes I’d taken in Renaissance, Romantic, Victorian, and modern poetry had been more than fascinating wastes of my time.’ ”1
“A book has to smell. You have to hold it in your hand and breathe it in.”
—Ray Bradbury
So how long should your book be? Two hundred pages? Three hundred? Seven hundred? How much is enough, and how much is too much? On the importance of the economy of language, novelist Ethan Canin taught: “Could you write in three words what you just wrote in ten?”
This teaching could not be of more importance now. Now that we receive a virtual tidal wave of information, readers read quickly; they want to get the point, and get it fast.
Oh, and what we also taught children? Don’t be afraid of humor!
And, always let your imagination run loose. Have fun. (Remember Dr. Seuss? Whimsical, nonsensical, and so beloved!)
Poet Stephen Kopel, San Francisco writer, radio host, and organizer of the Word Dancer literary series, sees himself as a thorough craftsperson in shaping stacks of words into something beautiful, thoughtful, comical and pleasurable to both readers and listeners.
Kopel begins with concept. “My journey into the world of language…is fraught with possibilities…thank goodness. My principal interest is having as much fun in both concept and composition as I can muster toward that end. I first start with a composition of lines in which associative values, a dose of punnery, and the breaking apart of multisyllabic nouns can be expanded into two or more words.”
For the reader’s continued pleasure, here is an example of two lines from “Prankster” by Stephen Kopel:
“the
Wind”
please put on a summer show, a carnival of shrieks,
skinny sounds or fat.
Adam Gopnik, above, spoke of a story as existing “at different levels and different spatial depths.”
Poet Mary Mackey, author of fourteen novels and seven volumes of poetry, and the winner of the Josephine Miles award from PEN, taught creative writing at Sacramento State University for over thirty years. She calls it “layering,” but it is the same concept. By using language creatively, you can take a reader from one level of experience to another in just a few words.
“Purity”
By Billy Collins
My favorite time to write is in the late afternoon,
weekdays, particularly Wednesdays.
This is how I get about it:
I take a fresh pot of tea into my study and close the door.
Then I remove my clothes and leave them in a pile
as if I had melted to death and my legacy consisted of only
a white shirt, a pair of pants and a pot of cold tea.
Then I remove my flesh and hang it over a chair.
I slide it off my bones like a silken garment.
I do this so that what I write will be pure,
completely rinsed of the carnal,
uncontaminated by the preoccupations of the body.
Finally I remove each of my organs and arrange them
on a small table near the window.
I do not want to hear their ancient rhythms
when I am trying to tap out my own drumbeat.
Now I sit down at the desk, ready to begin.
I am entirely pure: nothing but a skeleton at a typewriter.
Take the line “as if I had melted to death and my legacy consisted only/of a white shirt, a pair of pants and a pot of cold tea.”
The words “melted to death” bring us from the world of a poet sitting at his desk, to an imaginary world, a world of fantasy and dream.
“I remove my flesh and hang it over a chair.” Now we are in the place of poetry. We are in that multidimensional space where the poet has left his physical surroundings to enter the world of creativity.
This poem is an excellent example of the use of imagination, metaphor and imagery that makes this beloved poem memorable.
From poet and author Mary Mackey:
“A great poem expands beyond the obvious, transcending logic and time, reaching into the lyrical, metaphorical depths of language and binding together the conscious and unconscious. It doesn’t just state an idea. It exists in multilayered realms, unique, ever expanding in the mind of the reader. To create these layers, you need to write a first draft and then enrich it by making sure each line moves in a seamless rhythm and each word has powerful associations. Don’t settle for the first thing that comes out of your head. Revise. Revise. There are probably twenty better words for ‘walk,’ not all of them synonyms. Don’t have your ‘rough beast, its hour come around at last,’ walk towards Bethlehem. Have it ‘slouch.’”
“Writing is not just words on a page,” Tom Parker, Pulitzer Prize nominee for the novel Anna, Ann, Annie and author of Small Business, advises. Parker echoes Gopnik: “Writing is not just assembling a heap of facts.”
At the same time, for many of us, our first drafts are just that. Words on a page. A heap of facts. It is an important part of your writing process and one which we will discuss later in this chapter under the heading “You Wrote It. Now, Revise.”
Writing that important first draft without prejudging, without the “critical voice,” is how we get started. I can say with confidence that not one author ever published a first draft. I’ll bet even Adam Gopnik drafted his stellar piece on writing at least several times as well.
Mary Hayes, author of nine novels—including the Time and Life bestseller Amethyst, her latest novel What She Had to Do, and two political thrillers co-authored with Senator Barbara Boxer—says: “We write to discover who we are.”
I became a writer because there seemed nothing else I could do.
I’d supported myself, since age seventeen, with a string of unrelated jobs (librarian, fashion model, medical tech) in various countries, knowing a little about a lot but expert in nothing, with no degree or qualification. By thirty-three, as a mother of two young children, I decided to get serious and find a career I could be passionate about. By process of elimination, the professions and sciences seemed closed to me (such long, expensive training to be a doctor, lawyer, or astrophysicist, and could I be passionate enough?), and I was too old to launch myself into the arts—except, perhaps, as a writer.
I’d grown up in a bohemian British family of writers and artists, so it was in my genes. I’d always enjoyed telling stories. Writing was cheap; all I needed was paper and a typewriter. So, for three mornings a week, during the two hours when my three-year old was at nursery school and the baby took a nap, I’d ruthlessly churn out at least 2,500 words, butt glued to my seat, no interruptions allowed. I told all my friends about my book so they’d ask how it was going and I’d be forced to finish it out of pride.
It wasn’t