7 ways poetry can make your writing better

Before we get started...

In the Army, a saying I frequently heard was, "this is a way, not the way." Essentially, there are a lot of methods and approaches to pretty much any problem, and you never want to get so deep into the idea that there's only one way to get there that you fail to be adaptable.

In this case, I mainly want to make it clear that all of this is nothing more or better than a collection of opinions. As they are my opinions, I think they are quite excellent, just as I have little doubt my cat is superior to any other in every way.

Still, if you write or want to write, regardless of the format that writing takes on, from long-form fiction to journalism, there are few ways of improving that I recommend more than making yourself write poetry.

And I very much mean make yourself write poetry. The poems that come easy or in moments of sudden inspiration are fine and often quite fun. However, the poems that will improve your writing are work, even something of a workout.

What does he mean by poetry?

Sure, it seems obvious enough to define what poetry is, but as is the case with any form of art, what makes something poetry is open to fairly wide interpretation and debate – the former being useful and the latter being largely pointless – so I want to be clear that what I personally try to do, and encourage others to do, is to explore poetry writing that is challenging.

1. Write challenging poetry

Making your poetry writing challenging can mean forcing yourself to stick to a restrictive format, such as haikus, or simply making yourself use a rhyme scheme or meter that doesn't come naturally to you.

The key to using poetry as a way to improve your writing – and even your vocabulary – is for it to be something that you frequently find yourself spending several minutes just getting a single line to "feel right." It's the kind of poetry that you keep having to go back over in order to remind yourself of the meter.

One of the things I like to do, and this will sound goofy, is to take something such as the limerick form, and then try to write a poem that is serious, and actually still sounds good. It's difficult and feels wrong, similar to typing up a formal letter in comic sans.

In all honesty, with that particular approach, I've only managed to achieve the desired effect a single time to any degree I found satisfactory. But, I still try, because it forces me to exercise mental muscles I wouldn't otherwise use.

You may be surprised – I often have been – at the unusual or creative ways you will find for expressing an idea because you first forced yourself to exercise a different way of using language.

2. Make similes into metaphors

This comes down to the old concept of "show, don't tell." I know it's probably the most obvious – and least controversial – of the concepts I'll espouse. Yet, it's also an area that people tend to be awful with both within poetry and outside of poetry.

The overall goal here is to make everything you write more poetic, because doing so will reach your audience on a fundamental level. It's the difference between shoving someone's head in a lake to make them drink, and describing thirst so perfectly that they have a sudden desire to quench their own.

And by "poetic," I don't mean flowery. In fact, if you tend to write flowery poetry, I would encourage you to force yourself to work on poems with short lines and minimal words. If the opposite is your forte, then work at being more descriptive and verbose. Do what doesn't come naturally.

But – coming back to similes and metaphors – don't simply explain to readers how something very closely resembles another thing. The result is to writing what a costume made at the last minute out of grocery bags is to Halloween.

Receiving news that a loved one has died isn't "like" taking a step you expect to land on solid ground, but instead finding you have stepped off of a cliff.

A loved one's death is the unexpected cliff, and you shouldn't have to explain how the sensations of falling resemble those of grief. You should be describing the fall in such a way that the reader's mind jumps to grief without any prompting.

If you are writing about death, try writing a poem that perfectly describes the experience of grief without ever once explicitly stating anything about death or grief. And, to be clear, I'm not saying this is a rule for all of your poetry. That would be obnoxiously restrictive. This is exercise and practice, and is meant to make parts of your brain do work that you don't normally force to get up off the couch.

Also, every time you ever find yourself using the word "like" when you aren't describing a positive preference for a thing, do something equally painful to yourself as what you almost put your readers through, and you might just get yourself out of the habit.

Here are some alternatives for "like" to get you started:

• such as (probably the most common replacement for overuse of "like")
• as
• similar to
• approximately
• just consider rewording the phrase in a way that eschews the use of "like"

3. Go ahead and rhyme

I remember a poetry professor back in college who forbid (forbade? forbidded?) us from writing rhyming poetry. His view was that it takes a rare talent to write a poem that is any good and also rhymes.

Personally, as you can see if you read any of my poems, I like rhymes, and often pretty simple ones, and any talent I have is anything but rare. To be frank, I think there's nothing wrong with very accessible poetry that isn't overbearing to the reader.

But when you rhyme, challenge yourself. Intentionally end lines with words that are hard to rhyme. And when you paint yourself into a corner with "orange" or some similar word, go ahead and use a rhyming dictionary such as Rhyme Zone. Explore using rhymes such as "be literal" and "collateral." Or "shortage" and "torrent."

If you're a better writer than I am – and there's a fair statistical chance you are – you can probably come up with plenty better examples of words that may not seem to be obvious rhymes, but with the right pacing and wording, the flow is pretty much sublime.

Most of all, though, this will help you to develop an innate tendency for wording that has a kind of music to it.

I have found that practice with using difficult rhymes shows up in my prose as well, in that I am more aware of the way every line sounds, and the underlying tone and emotion my word choice conveys.

4. Let the poem tell you where it's going

There is so much bad or mediocre writing out there, especially poetry, that ultimately comes down to someone shoving a concept into a container that doesn't fit, or rushing through the story to get to their conclusion.

It's why so much patriotic, political or religious poetry ends up being far from memorable, especially the rhyming variety. Lines feel strained, concepts presented early in the poem offer little support to the poem's overall theme, and – with the non-rhyming variety – the end result can be more similar to an angry or self-righteous rant than anything approaching art.

Most often, what you end up with isn't a poem, but rather an advertising jingle for the poet's personal beliefs. Or, worse, you end up with an angry sermon about something thoroughly unsuited to the format of sermonizing.

In my opinion (and it's just my opinion) a key aspect to writing anything original and – most importantly – honest, from a newspaper story to a fiction story (keep your snide comments to yourself) to a poem, is never forcing the conclusion

Even in journalism, I have often sat down to write a story thinking I know what it's about, and by the time I'm done going back over interviews and documents, have found that the real story has nothing to do with my preconceptions.

Letting the rhyme and meter guide where the poem goes will make you a better writer and lend integrity to what you produce. It will keep you honest, and it will make the actual exercise one of discovery, rather than one of beating readers over the head.

I want to write a whole other diatribe about creating dialogue, not because I think mine is amazing – though I believe it is better than average – but because most of the dialogue I read, even by some financially-successful writers, is unbearably contrived and unnatural.

So, I try to write poetry that, when I reach the end, what that end resembles is informed by the lines I wrote on the way to it, rather than what I set out to achieve at the start.

You can always go back and revise if you find the poem went off-course, but it should follow a path that makes sense, not wander it's way aimlessly down a path only to jump off into the bushes at the end.

5. Meter matters

It matters so very, very much (Ha! The newb used "very" as an adverb – twice!)

One of the challenges in any writing is for it to "flow."

Even in writing a news story, pacing and meter can either carry your reader through, or it can –rather rudely and jarringly – throw them out of the story completely.

The more poetry you write that has a clear meter, the better you will get (I pretty much guarantee it, short of monetary obligation) at "sensing" whether your writing flows in a way that suits the information your are trying to convey.

Or, even whether it simply flows easily and in a way that draws the reader on, rather than forcing them to go back and re-read a sentence to try to understand exactly what was happening with the grammar.

6. Throw away the rules... sometimes

Poetry often takes many of the typical rules of how a thing should be said, dices those rules up into tiny little pieces, and makes a pretty little mosaic of the result.

And there is not a damn thing wrong with that, when it accomplishes a purpose.

In fact, wording something in a way that people won't expect can serve a similar purpose to presenting a visual stimulation in a place they won't expect.

Place a homeless person on a street corner in a major city, and it's as likely as not people will take no more notice than they do of a street lamp. In that expected place, a homeless person is, sadly, just a part of the ambience.

But, take that same person and put them in the lobby of a luxury hotel, and people are going to notice and likely react. Granted, those reactions may be either negative or positive. Yet, they will have a reaction, because they had to deal with a thing – in this case the reality of homelessness – that they regularly take for granted in a way that prevented them from taking it for granted.

Do that in your poetry, and you will find yourself with a new set of tools for doing it in all your other writing as well.

7. Play

My favorite part of writing is approaching the English language as if the words were so much sand on a beach.

But, you don't learn to build better sand castles by always going out with the same bucket and spade and setting up the same four towers and same four walls.

Grab some seashells and make them into soldiers in formation. Pick up some random, oddly-shaped container and see what forms you can make out of it.

Constantly be trying to do something different.

In the case of poetry, talk like Yoda (or talk as Yoda would talk, but that's not very conversational in tone, is it? It sounds kind of stuffy and full-of-myself. See "rule" 6 about tossing the rules).

Or, just leave the forms at home and see what you can make of the sand with your bare hands.

Just play, and never stop trying new things.

In conclusion...

Well, that was fun, and I feel a lot better now that I have explained the right ways of doing things.

I hope you found something useful out of all my opinions, and, if nothing else, that you found my presentation at least entertaining.

As with any buffet, I hope you can take what works for you, but not feel the need to load up every last thing onto your plate.

I love poetry and what it does for my writing. I've often encouraged other journalists to write poetry in order to become better journalists, with mixed reactions and results.

And when you are done torturing yourself and making yourself do things you don't like, go back and write a poem that comes easy and rhymes "me" with "fee," or has no discernable meter of which to speak.

Because, ultimately and beyond all else, the purpose of language is to communicate information to a receiver of that information. If you accomplish that, you've used language correctly, and every grammar stickler who doesn't like it can go find their own audience to communicate with.

Thank you for reading

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