Poetry vs. fiction
Poetry is like “truth forced out through a restricted opening… The poet proves that language is inadequate by throwing herself at the fence of language and being bound by it.”
I had a thought today while reading my daily dose of A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (which I’m nearly finished with — and LOVING). George Saunders writes, about poetry, that it is like:
“truth forced out through a restricted opening… The poet proves that language is inadequate by throwing herself at the fence of language and being bound by it.”
What a metaphor!
And earlier in the book, he writes about revision (specifically fiction),
“We’ll find our voice and ethos and distinguish ourselves from all the other writers in the world without needing to make any big overarching decisions, just by the thousands of small ones we make as we revise.”
These two strands of argument prompted me to think about why and how it is that I’ve never truly sunk my teeth into writing fiction before now. I’ve had a couple failed NaNoWriMo experiences, one weird little short story completed during undergrad, and of course, the many stories started and stalled out over the decades, now lost to time, or more specifically, locked up on several family PCs sitting in some Pennsylvania junkyard.
In my teens and twenties though, poetry became a comfortable form of catharsis because of its restraint. It was a medium in which I could be vulnerable and real, without having to be exhaustive in detail or characterization. I could air my many grievances without naming names, and be satisfied still by the act of getting it out. Revision on the level of the stanza, the line, the word felt like performing surgery — so satisfying and clarifying.
I think when I tried to write fiction in the past, I approached it like writing a poem. I’d write when inspiration struck, and revise mostly by making it “sound better” (or barely revise at all, truth be told). I’d wait for the ideas to flow through me and then just get them down in some semblance of understandable prose. I was basically abdicating all the hard work of plotting, scene mapping, planning, researching, and of course — real revision.
I’m thrilled to realize that writing fiction and writing poetry are actually incredibly different projects, requiring different muscles and skill sets and approaches. (I know — duh.) I’m free to write a bunch of complete CRAP, just to get something down a given day… and then revise it, and revise again, to shape it into something workable. There’s just so much material at your disposal when you know your word count needs to be 90,000 instead of a few hundred.
Now that I’ve sketched out the skeleton for this book in a fair amount of detail, it’s almost like I’m looking at a big old project plan, and I can break each section down into digestible chunks, so I’m only tackling as much as can be handled in a day. This effort feels natural to me; it’s something I coached people on over the years working in high-growth startups. You know when you’re setting out to build something big that you’ve never built before that you’ve got to have a workable plan to get there. And what a feeling to sit down and write a couple thousand words and knock that scene or that chapter off the punch list — knowing it’ll still need a lot of love after this initial draft — and move onto the next one.