cross-posted on... you guess it.... my Myspace.
A lot of kids write poetry, but they don't do it for the sake of other people reading it, and even if they do show it to others, it's because they want someone else to either a) acknowledge the "feelings" they "expressed" in their poem, or b) want their ego stroked. I personally can't stand the "ego-stroking" plea, although I'll dish it out if someone shows me their shit and doesn't want any constructive criticism, although in that situation I'd probably just rather not read it.
Anyhoo, although I know there are very few people on my friends list who write at all, and far fewer who write seriously, here are some tips for young writers. This is less for other people to follow (since there isn't anyone who's really going to be interested) and more for me to post something I really believe in, so read it if you want to a) write pieces other people can enjoy reading besides your buddies, b) ever have a hope of publishing something, c) believe in poetry as in art form rather than just a means of venting or "self-expression", or d) are bored. These are guidelines that anyone who wants to write well should follow. And by "wants to write well" I mean "cares more about improving their writing than getting a pat on the head".
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Okay, first we've got 16 tips for young writers, but unfortunately people of all ages seem to need these. I got them from this entry in the livejournal community the_inkslingers, posted and written by user seamusd.
SIXTEEN SUGGESTIONS FOR YOUNG POETS
1) Avoid abstractions (love, soul, heart, pain, etc.) and instead use concrete language. A teacher once told me, "You have to earn your abstractions," and you should believe him: he's published 7 books and has won many prestigious awards.
2) Think small. You can't adequately describe the world in a poem. You can't even describe your city, or your neighborhood, or your house or even your room in just one poem. Instead, try to describe the brick in the top right corner of the west wall.
3) Write what you know. Until you have more experience, it's probably best to stick to topics you know best. Trying to rewrite literary history will only make you look a little foolish.
4) Think of poetry as storytelling. Nearly everyone has experienced the emotions you're going through. Readers want details that appeal to their senses (concrete images) not what appeals to their emotions (abstractions, see rule #1).
5) A poem is like any other piece of writing: it needs to be revised and refined. You have to work on your poems and be willing to make changes for the sake of the poem. Don't feel you have to stick to your original insight or original beginning, middle or end. Many professional writers, poets included, will tell you that writing is revision. (Christel's note: Seriously, please listen to this and REVISE! Every professional writer does it and every famous writer does/did it. Emily Dickinson was notorious for crazy amounts of revision, so it's not like it's new or impractical. Rereading and rewriting your poem can help you refine details and clear up things that you maybe didn't say clearly enough the first time; you will always find new things to fix or expand upon or clarify when you go back over a poem, and there is always room for improvement.)
6) Making poems is more than just writing when you feel inspired. If you're serious about it, you should strive to make writing you lifestyle. This is a lesson that might take a lifetime to learn. But keep trying. Set aside a regular writing schedule and write even when you don't feel like writing.
7) Read poetry, and not just the classics. If you're serious about writing poems, you need to read contemporary poets. In fact, reading is probably much more important to your development as a writer at this stage than writing a lot of poems. Camp out in your local bookstore, get a good anthology of contemporary poets. Find a few favorite contemporary poets and imitate their style. There's no shame in imitation; in fact, there's a long tradition of imitation.
8) Read your poems out loud. If a poem doesn't sound natural every time you read it, there's probably something wrong and you need to revise it. A poem should sound like natural speech.
9) Be humble. Realize that you aren't the only person who writes poems, and that many people know more about it than you. Determine to be a serious student of poetry and learn to take criticism of your work objectively, even if you strongly disagree with it. Realize also that your poems are not you, and if someone doesn't like your poems, it's not necessarily an attack on you. (Christel's note: This is also very important, something few people realize. Most people get caught up in writing about themselves and drone on and on without doing it in an interesting way, and when someone calls them on it they get offended because their "feelings" [i.e. their poems] were just insulted.)
10) Writing in rhyme and meter is difficult. Some people will tell you that learning to write with traditional metrics and rhyme schemes is the best way to go; others will disagree and insist that you learn free verse first. Whichever path you choose (and they aren't necessarily mutually exclusive), find contemporary models to learn from. Don't settle for easy rhymes, and don't mutilate your syntax for the sake of keeping to your rhythm. (Christel's note: Personally, I do try to write in a specific rhyme scheme once in a while because I personally think it helps me to develop control and keeps me really aware of everything I'm writing, with the added challenge of trying to make it not sound like crap despite the limitations. It's a good way to challenge yourself, and it's like exercising in the way that it's difficult but the harder you try the more you improve and shape up. I'm particularly fond of attempting Shakespearean sonnets.)
11) "Free verse" doesn't mean that "anything goes." All poems have forms. The free verse writer must be just as consistent as the formal verse writer. There should be a logical reason for every choice you make in a poem.
12) Get a good book about literary terms and forms. Don't try any form unless you have a good understanding of it. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics is a great reference, but there are many others.
13) Understanding the rules of standard English is very important. You should have a logical and compelling reason to break the rules of grammar. "Poetic license" is bullshit! Most professional poets make interesting sentences and still follow the rules of standard English.
14) Also look for other books about creative writing. I found Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town to be a very inspirational guide when I was 18 or 19. But there are many others, including The Portable Poetry Workshop by Jack Myers.
15) Avoid gimmicks such as centered text, fancy fonts, all italics, overuse of brackets and symbols, colored text, illustrations. Poetry is only about the language, not the presentation.
16) Always title your poems. Titles make the first impression on readers and often give important clues. Using titles such as "Untitled" or "Poem" or "#547" has not only been done to death and is totally unoriginal, but is pretentious as well. Look at it this way, would you go through all the trouble of having a baby and NOT name it? Name your children!
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This is all some very good advice, and I agree with all of it 100%. And now for some tips from livejournal user claudelemonde, posted in the livejournal community poetryslamming (a great place to apply and get some critique, as long as you're thick-skinned and eager to get better).
1. Treat your notebooks and journals the way a painter treats his sketchbooks, napkin scribbles, and doodles: as items to be kept for reference or playing fields for inspiration but never for the love of god ever to be paraded around publicly until one becomes a Picasso whose lunchtime scrawls are of interest to the art-collecting world (perhaps mostly because he is dead).
2. Even reality shows are edited. One can write on personal topics so long as they are either universally appealing/sympathetic (i.e., portray a situation that would resonate with other readers) or are of intense narrative interest/tell a good story (i.e., would interest a reader for story merit alone). Reading notebooks is like when someone tells you about a dream he had, and he was in a big house, and someone was there, and it was his mom, but not his mom? I mean it didn't look like his mom, but he knew it was his mom, and she was walking in a circle? And.... blahblahblah nobody other than the dreamer gives a shit. Make the reader give a shit.
2b. My duckling, I know you are feeling a lot of painfully painful painy pain-pain, but... okay, try this. Think about a friend of yours who's in a bad relationship, but s/he won't leave his/her partner. Think about how many times you have listened to your friend bitch and moan about how unhappy s/he is, how s/he doesn't know how s/he'll make it through the day. You know how, by bitch session #423, you are SO COMPLETELY BORED WITH IT that you're about to slam your hand in a toaster oven just to make it more interesting? Well, I hate to break it to you, but when you write about your pain like it's a crap song and you're just saying how you don't want to breathe again or whatever without any sort of universal sympathy or new twist or interesting image or exceptional reason why, then you become that friend to me. Only we're not friends, and I hate you. (Christel's note: PLEASE read this one, over and over and over and over again, and don't ever let your "painfully painful painy pain-pain" see the light of day in poetry form unless it's to your friends to tell them about your feelings. This kind of shit doesn't make it in the real writing world.)
3. When you get an idea, write it down. Then look at it, and think, "can I think of anyone else who has already used this idea?" If the answer is YES, then don't use it. For reference, consult the epic Bryan Adams jam "heaven", which, tunal epicness notwithstanding, is merely a string of hideous cliches. Strive to avoid such a fate.
Thank you dearly, Claudelemonde. If only every other writer hung as attentively to your every word like I do, then maybe everyone would be better.
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And some wise words about how to or how NOT to incorporate "feelings" into your poetry, from "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" by Adam Smith.
"As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. Neither can that faculty help us to this any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case. It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy. By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and becomes in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his senstaions, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not althogether unlike them. His agonies, when they are thus brought home to ourselves, when we have thus adopted and made them our own, begin at last to affect us, and we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels. For as to be in pain or distress of any kind excites the most excessive sorrow, so to concieve or to imagine that we are in it, excites some degree of the same emotion, in proportion to the vivacity or dulness of the conception."
If you're a lazy fuck who didn't understand a word of that (in which case you should be learning to read before you try to write a poem and show it to other people), basically it's much, much more effective to describe a situation and flesh out events that cause a certain feeling rather than to just say you WHAT you are feeling. Don't describe anything about your thoughts or feelings, but describe the situation, the place, the people, the physical sensations, the events, in detail. That way, instead of the reader going, "well I guess the author is sad/happy/angry/etc" they're going to feel like they've experienced it themselves, and therefore understand and experience those feelings for themselves, which will make them much less indifferent to your position.
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And here are some much-appreciated tips from Elsewhere.org.
* Learn to spell.
Nobody is going to take you seriously as a writer if you can’t spell. You might think that your art transcends trivial matters such as spelling and grammar, but trust me - it doesn’t.
* If you don’t know what a word means, look it up before you use it.
There are plenty of online dictionaries. Use them.
* Read your work out loud.
Wait a few days to do this, because if you’ve just written something, you’re not going to be thinking critically about it. Read it out loud. Listen to the words. Do they make sense? Do they sound good, or do they sound like a kid who has learned a few big words and is trying to impress some adults by using them in sentences?
* Grammar is important.
Seriously, I can’t stress this enough. Grammar is important. If you want to be a writer, words are your tools. If you saw a carpenter using a hammer and screwdriver to cut through a board, would you take him seriously? Learn how your language works, and use it correctly. (Christel's note: Please, God, please. There is nothing that interrupts the flow and the meaning of a poem like the distraction of an incorrect usage of the English language.)
* Avoid narcissism.
How many times in your poem does the word “I” appear? How many of your poems are about you, or something that happened to you, or some emotion that you experienced? While a little self-absorption is ok, too much is just boring. If every single poem is about you, then in the long run the only person who will read your poetry is you.
* Read some real poets’ work.
By “real poets”, I mean poets whose work has been published in a respected publication. Vanity presses don’t count. If a self-published poet is any good, eventually she will be picked up by a real magazine or journal. Reading real poets’ work is a good way to get a feeling for what real poets sound like. Read their poems aloud. See how they use words. If you’ve never read good poetry, how will you know if yours is good? Your friends aren’t going to tell you that you suck, so you can’t count on them. Poetry.com will publish anybody, so getting a poem in one of their anthologies doesn’t mean anything. You will only acquire a critical ear yourself by reading a lot of poetry by other people.
* Beware vanity presses.
It’s ok to submit poems to poetry contests, but be careful about contests where the prize is being published. Was there an entry fee? Chances are, everybody who enters the “contest” is a winner, and gets “published”. The only people who buy the books published like this are the prize-winning authors themselves. If you do fall into this trap, don’t mention it when submitting your work to a real poetry journal. The readers (people who decide whether to pass an unsolicited manuscript up the chain to an editor) for respectable poetry publications know all about the vanity presses and contest-winning scams, and will not take you seriously if your evidence of previous publication is one of them. Hint: Poetry.com claims to have published over 3.1 million poets. If you’re one of them, how special do you think that makes you? (Christel's note: Fuck you, Poetry.com. I thought you were awesome when I was twelve, but you deceived me.)
* Revision is a good thing.
You may think that the goddess is inspiring you, and the words you’re putting on the page are the best possible, but that’s extremely rare. When you’ve finished a poem, put it down and don’t read it for a few days. Come back to it later and see if maybe there aren’t a few things you could make better. First drafts are hardly ever as good as they could be.
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All right, and finally, some of MY OWN tips, however reiterating they are!
1) REVISE. Everyone else has already explained why you should do it, so I won't, but I still feel like it needs to be said! It's part of writing a lot of people totally ignore; an unrevised poem is like a baby -- it has a lot of growing up to do!
2) READ. Seriously, you're ignorant if you're trying to pass off your poetry as good if you don't know anything about poetry in the first place. Not reading enough or any poetry at all but thinking that you know what "good poetry" means is the same as passing judgement upon someone when you only know their first name! And if you don't know what "good poetry" means, how will you be able to write it?
3) Feelings? What about them? It's already been said over and over again why simply stating vague things like "my heart is broken" and "I was so angry" are ineffectual; a person who reads those phrases/sentences do not understand why, do not feel it with you, and cannot connect with it. That's why imagery and description are so important! If a person sees the situation you are in, and can imagine being in it themselves (which is much easier to do properly if said situation is described and pictured well), then they will feel and understand what you did. If you want to write about your feelings without putting effort into making them relateable, and you just want to get it off your chest somehow, that's perfectly fine, but put it in a desk drawer and don't go showing it to other people or fish for compliments about it.
4) On that note, the definition of poetry is "literature in metric form". Do you know how many different genres of literature there are? There's fiction and non-fiction, but even more specifically there are comedy, drama, romance, sci-fi, biographies, fantasy, horror, mystery -- all that good stuff! Do you know how many different books there are in the world? Billions! There are too many to count! There are books on pretty much every conceiveable subject, every kind of story you could imagine, with every kind of person you could think of. Do you know what that means? That means that this potential lies in poetry as well, and should be exercised. Your poems DO NOT have to be about you, your feelings, your philosophies, etc, to be interesting or good. They can be about your relatives, your friends, a fictional character, an object, ANYTHING, and if you write about it properly, it can be interesting. A good writer could make a poem about drying paint interesting!
5) Stop using generalizations. When you use loaded and overused words like love, pain, life, imagination, joy, freedom, sorrow, etc, that's not something a reader will relate to or feel. Sure, everyone has witnessed and experienced love and pain and all that good stuff, but everyone experiences it differently and many times throughout their lives. Is everyone's experiences with love the same? Is one person's multiple experiences with it the same? Not in the slightest. That means that to a reader, "love" can mean many, many things, and no one wants to play a guessing game to figure out what exactly YOU mean by it. It doesn't have any meaning to someone if it's that inspecific -- it's like giving someone directions to the store, and you're saying something like "well you take a street, go by a landmark, and take some kind of turn somewhere". Doesn't give you a very clear idea, does it?
6a) Don't write about what other people have written about before. If we've heard it before, we don't care. Nothing will ever be 100% original, of course, but the best way to ensure that your poem is interesting is to be specific. If you write about a specific situation and you're very detailed about it, there's less of a chance that someone else will have written the very same thing. Don't write about how "the world is full of hated", because topics like hatred can't fit inside one poem. It would take a lifetime to flesh out the basic role of hatred in society and in our lives, and longer to say everything there is to say about hatred. You leave a lot unsaid if you use the word hatred, because there is no way you're even skimming the surface about this subject, and that leaves a lot that the reader doesn't know. If the reader cannot have a good grasp on the idea you're trying to convey, it's going to be confusing and vague and tedious to sit through.
6b) Another excellent reason not to write about subjects that have been written about before is that people have already heard them before. Not only have people heard them before, they've written about them before, and there's a 99.9999999% chance that a handful of people have done it much, much better. Think of this way: think of your favorite movie. What if someone else made another movie with a different title, but they used similar characters and similar events and basically copied the other movie, but it was done really poorly and was really hard to relate to or get into. It's like ripping off something else, and not even doing it any justice. Who wants to read that? No one. It's tired, it's not interesting, and it's just lame. It's like watching the same episode of Law and Order 142 times.
7) Remember, poetry is an ART FORM, just like literature, painting, film, or music. That means you can't automatically pick it up and be good at it right away -- you can probably do it in a way where it would TECHNICALLY pass as poetry, but it's not going to any good unless you PRACTICE. You have to like writing, not just like what you're writing ABOUT. The difference between a poet and someone who writes poetry is this: a poet is dedicated to writing, and a person who writes poems is dedicated to getting their feelings out in a creative way. Think of it this way; Monet wasn't born being able to paint beautiful pictures. He practiced and slaved and learned and studied and practiced and practiced and practiced his entire life, and I can guarantee you he didn't do it for the sake of painting a picture of some flowers. He did it for the sake of painting, because he loved the act of painting, and he loved creating. You have to care more about creating and the creation process and the creation itself more than what your creation is about. That means if you write about a break-up, you care more about conveying this break-up to other people in a way that will strike them and you care more about the act of writing about it more than you care about the actual event and your feelings about it. That's why you shouldn't write about something that is touchy or emotionally heavy for you unless you can separate your feelings from it from your writing about it. You cannot get better at poetry unless you focus on doing it repeatedly, learning from your mistakes, and understanding great poetry and why it is considered great. If you don't have the kind of dedication to study it and work hard at it for years, then real poetry's not for you. There's nothing wrong with writing purely for yourself, but you've got to keep it to yourself.
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If I think of any more, I'll add them, but really, this kind of advice is easy to find if you look for it. I'd love to hear that someone learned something from this post, but alas, I won't get my hopes up. A lot of people are determined to do it their way, even if it means they're writing trite crap their entire lives just because they want to shout and stomp their feet and, well... express themselves. It's not about expressing yourself; it's about creation, telling a story, etc. There's nothing wrong with expressing yourself, but "expression" doesn't fly in the big leagues.
So, I hope at least someone got something out of this, because it's a great sort of guide to follow for anyone who is really serious about writing. I'm at least satisfied to have finally put these ideas in a concrete place and to have them out there.
Anyhoo, although I know there are very few people on my friends list who write at all, and far fewer who write seriously, here are some tips for young writers. This is less for other people to follow (since there isn't anyone who's really going to be interested) and more for me to post something I really believe in, so read it if you want to a) write pieces other people can enjoy reading besides your buddies, b) ever have a hope of publishing something, c) believe in poetry as in art form rather than just a means of venting or "self-expression", or d) are bored. These are guidelines that anyone who wants to write well should follow. And by "wants to write well" I mean "cares more about improving their writing than getting a pat on the head".
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Okay, first we've got 16 tips for young writers, but unfortunately people of all ages seem to need these. I got them from this entry in the livejournal community the_inkslingers, posted and written by user seamusd.
SIXTEEN SUGGESTIONS FOR YOUNG POETS
1) Avoid abstractions (love, soul, heart, pain, etc.) and instead use concrete language. A teacher once told me, "You have to earn your abstractions," and you should believe him: he's published 7 books and has won many prestigious awards.
2) Think small. You can't adequately describe the world in a poem. You can't even describe your city, or your neighborhood, or your house or even your room in just one poem. Instead, try to describe the brick in the top right corner of the west wall.
3) Write what you know. Until you have more experience, it's probably best to stick to topics you know best. Trying to rewrite literary history will only make you look a little foolish.
4) Think of poetry as storytelling. Nearly everyone has experienced the emotions you're going through. Readers want details that appeal to their senses (concrete images) not what appeals to their emotions (abstractions, see rule #1).
5) A poem is like any other piece of writing: it needs to be revised and refined. You have to work on your poems and be willing to make changes for the sake of the poem. Don't feel you have to stick to your original insight or original beginning, middle or end. Many professional writers, poets included, will tell you that writing is revision. (Christel's note: Seriously, please listen to this and REVISE! Every professional writer does it and every famous writer does/did it. Emily Dickinson was notorious for crazy amounts of revision, so it's not like it's new or impractical. Rereading and rewriting your poem can help you refine details and clear up things that you maybe didn't say clearly enough the first time; you will always find new things to fix or expand upon or clarify when you go back over a poem, and there is always room for improvement.)
6) Making poems is more than just writing when you feel inspired. If you're serious about it, you should strive to make writing you lifestyle. This is a lesson that might take a lifetime to learn. But keep trying. Set aside a regular writing schedule and write even when you don't feel like writing.
7) Read poetry, and not just the classics. If you're serious about writing poems, you need to read contemporary poets. In fact, reading is probably much more important to your development as a writer at this stage than writing a lot of poems. Camp out in your local bookstore, get a good anthology of contemporary poets. Find a few favorite contemporary poets and imitate their style. There's no shame in imitation; in fact, there's a long tradition of imitation.
8) Read your poems out loud. If a poem doesn't sound natural every time you read it, there's probably something wrong and you need to revise it. A poem should sound like natural speech.
9) Be humble. Realize that you aren't the only person who writes poems, and that many people know more about it than you. Determine to be a serious student of poetry and learn to take criticism of your work objectively, even if you strongly disagree with it. Realize also that your poems are not you, and if someone doesn't like your poems, it's not necessarily an attack on you. (Christel's note: This is also very important, something few people realize. Most people get caught up in writing about themselves and drone on and on without doing it in an interesting way, and when someone calls them on it they get offended because their "feelings" [i.e. their poems] were just insulted.)
10) Writing in rhyme and meter is difficult. Some people will tell you that learning to write with traditional metrics and rhyme schemes is the best way to go; others will disagree and insist that you learn free verse first. Whichever path you choose (and they aren't necessarily mutually exclusive), find contemporary models to learn from. Don't settle for easy rhymes, and don't mutilate your syntax for the sake of keeping to your rhythm. (Christel's note: Personally, I do try to write in a specific rhyme scheme once in a while because I personally think it helps me to develop control and keeps me really aware of everything I'm writing, with the added challenge of trying to make it not sound like crap despite the limitations. It's a good way to challenge yourself, and it's like exercising in the way that it's difficult but the harder you try the more you improve and shape up. I'm particularly fond of attempting Shakespearean sonnets.)
11) "Free verse" doesn't mean that "anything goes." All poems have forms. The free verse writer must be just as consistent as the formal verse writer. There should be a logical reason for every choice you make in a poem.
12) Get a good book about literary terms and forms. Don't try any form unless you have a good understanding of it. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics is a great reference, but there are many others.
13) Understanding the rules of standard English is very important. You should have a logical and compelling reason to break the rules of grammar. "Poetic license" is bullshit! Most professional poets make interesting sentences and still follow the rules of standard English.
14) Also look for other books about creative writing. I found Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town to be a very inspirational guide when I was 18 or 19. But there are many others, including The Portable Poetry Workshop by Jack Myers.
15) Avoid gimmicks such as centered text, fancy fonts, all italics, overuse of brackets and symbols, colored text, illustrations. Poetry is only about the language, not the presentation.
16) Always title your poems. Titles make the first impression on readers and often give important clues. Using titles such as "Untitled" or "Poem" or "#547" has not only been done to death and is totally unoriginal, but is pretentious as well. Look at it this way, would you go through all the trouble of having a baby and NOT name it? Name your children!
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This is all some very good advice, and I agree with all of it 100%. And now for some tips from livejournal user claudelemonde, posted in the livejournal community poetryslamming (a great place to apply and get some critique, as long as you're thick-skinned and eager to get better).
1. Treat your notebooks and journals the way a painter treats his sketchbooks, napkin scribbles, and doodles: as items to be kept for reference or playing fields for inspiration but never for the love of god ever to be paraded around publicly until one becomes a Picasso whose lunchtime scrawls are of interest to the art-collecting world (perhaps mostly because he is dead).
2. Even reality shows are edited. One can write on personal topics so long as they are either universally appealing/sympathetic (i.e., portray a situation that would resonate with other readers) or are of intense narrative interest/tell a good story (i.e., would interest a reader for story merit alone). Reading notebooks is like when someone tells you about a dream he had, and he was in a big house, and someone was there, and it was his mom, but not his mom? I mean it didn't look like his mom, but he knew it was his mom, and she was walking in a circle? And.... blahblahblah nobody other than the dreamer gives a shit. Make the reader give a shit.
2b. My duckling, I know you are feeling a lot of painfully painful painy pain-pain, but... okay, try this. Think about a friend of yours who's in a bad relationship, but s/he won't leave his/her partner. Think about how many times you have listened to your friend bitch and moan about how unhappy s/he is, how s/he doesn't know how s/he'll make it through the day. You know how, by bitch session #423, you are SO COMPLETELY BORED WITH IT that you're about to slam your hand in a toaster oven just to make it more interesting? Well, I hate to break it to you, but when you write about your pain like it's a crap song and you're just saying how you don't want to breathe again or whatever without any sort of universal sympathy or new twist or interesting image or exceptional reason why, then you become that friend to me. Only we're not friends, and I hate you. (Christel's note: PLEASE read this one, over and over and over and over again, and don't ever let your "painfully painful painy pain-pain" see the light of day in poetry form unless it's to your friends to tell them about your feelings. This kind of shit doesn't make it in the real writing world.)
3. When you get an idea, write it down. Then look at it, and think, "can I think of anyone else who has already used this idea?" If the answer is YES, then don't use it. For reference, consult the epic Bryan Adams jam "heaven", which, tunal epicness notwithstanding, is merely a string of hideous cliches. Strive to avoid such a fate.
Thank you dearly, Claudelemonde. If only every other writer hung as attentively to your every word like I do, then maybe everyone would be better.
--
And some wise words about how to or how NOT to incorporate "feelings" into your poetry, from "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" by Adam Smith.
"As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. Neither can that faculty help us to this any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case. It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy. By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and becomes in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his senstaions, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not althogether unlike them. His agonies, when they are thus brought home to ourselves, when we have thus adopted and made them our own, begin at last to affect us, and we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels. For as to be in pain or distress of any kind excites the most excessive sorrow, so to concieve or to imagine that we are in it, excites some degree of the same emotion, in proportion to the vivacity or dulness of the conception."
If you're a lazy fuck who didn't understand a word of that (in which case you should be learning to read before you try to write a poem and show it to other people), basically it's much, much more effective to describe a situation and flesh out events that cause a certain feeling rather than to just say you WHAT you are feeling. Don't describe anything about your thoughts or feelings, but describe the situation, the place, the people, the physical sensations, the events, in detail. That way, instead of the reader going, "well I guess the author is sad/happy/angry/etc" they're going to feel like they've experienced it themselves, and therefore understand and experience those feelings for themselves, which will make them much less indifferent to your position.
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And here are some much-appreciated tips from Elsewhere.org.
* Learn to spell.
Nobody is going to take you seriously as a writer if you can’t spell. You might think that your art transcends trivial matters such as spelling and grammar, but trust me - it doesn’t.
* If you don’t know what a word means, look it up before you use it.
There are plenty of online dictionaries. Use them.
* Read your work out loud.
Wait a few days to do this, because if you’ve just written something, you’re not going to be thinking critically about it. Read it out loud. Listen to the words. Do they make sense? Do they sound good, or do they sound like a kid who has learned a few big words and is trying to impress some adults by using them in sentences?
* Grammar is important.
Seriously, I can’t stress this enough. Grammar is important. If you want to be a writer, words are your tools. If you saw a carpenter using a hammer and screwdriver to cut through a board, would you take him seriously? Learn how your language works, and use it correctly. (Christel's note: Please, God, please. There is nothing that interrupts the flow and the meaning of a poem like the distraction of an incorrect usage of the English language.)
* Avoid narcissism.
How many times in your poem does the word “I” appear? How many of your poems are about you, or something that happened to you, or some emotion that you experienced? While a little self-absorption is ok, too much is just boring. If every single poem is about you, then in the long run the only person who will read your poetry is you.
* Read some real poets’ work.
By “real poets”, I mean poets whose work has been published in a respected publication. Vanity presses don’t count. If a self-published poet is any good, eventually she will be picked up by a real magazine or journal. Reading real poets’ work is a good way to get a feeling for what real poets sound like. Read their poems aloud. See how they use words. If you’ve never read good poetry, how will you know if yours is good? Your friends aren’t going to tell you that you suck, so you can’t count on them. Poetry.com will publish anybody, so getting a poem in one of their anthologies doesn’t mean anything. You will only acquire a critical ear yourself by reading a lot of poetry by other people.
* Beware vanity presses.
It’s ok to submit poems to poetry contests, but be careful about contests where the prize is being published. Was there an entry fee? Chances are, everybody who enters the “contest” is a winner, and gets “published”. The only people who buy the books published like this are the prize-winning authors themselves. If you do fall into this trap, don’t mention it when submitting your work to a real poetry journal. The readers (people who decide whether to pass an unsolicited manuscript up the chain to an editor) for respectable poetry publications know all about the vanity presses and contest-winning scams, and will not take you seriously if your evidence of previous publication is one of them. Hint: Poetry.com claims to have published over 3.1 million poets. If you’re one of them, how special do you think that makes you? (Christel's note: Fuck you, Poetry.com. I thought you were awesome when I was twelve, but you deceived me.)
* Revision is a good thing.
You may think that the goddess is inspiring you, and the words you’re putting on the page are the best possible, but that’s extremely rare. When you’ve finished a poem, put it down and don’t read it for a few days. Come back to it later and see if maybe there aren’t a few things you could make better. First drafts are hardly ever as good as they could be.
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All right, and finally, some of MY OWN tips, however reiterating they are!
1) REVISE. Everyone else has already explained why you should do it, so I won't, but I still feel like it needs to be said! It's part of writing a lot of people totally ignore; an unrevised poem is like a baby -- it has a lot of growing up to do!
2) READ. Seriously, you're ignorant if you're trying to pass off your poetry as good if you don't know anything about poetry in the first place. Not reading enough or any poetry at all but thinking that you know what "good poetry" means is the same as passing judgement upon someone when you only know their first name! And if you don't know what "good poetry" means, how will you be able to write it?
3) Feelings? What about them? It's already been said over and over again why simply stating vague things like "my heart is broken" and "I was so angry" are ineffectual; a person who reads those phrases/sentences do not understand why, do not feel it with you, and cannot connect with it. That's why imagery and description are so important! If a person sees the situation you are in, and can imagine being in it themselves (which is much easier to do properly if said situation is described and pictured well), then they will feel and understand what you did. If you want to write about your feelings without putting effort into making them relateable, and you just want to get it off your chest somehow, that's perfectly fine, but put it in a desk drawer and don't go showing it to other people or fish for compliments about it.
4) On that note, the definition of poetry is "literature in metric form". Do you know how many different genres of literature there are? There's fiction and non-fiction, but even more specifically there are comedy, drama, romance, sci-fi, biographies, fantasy, horror, mystery -- all that good stuff! Do you know how many different books there are in the world? Billions! There are too many to count! There are books on pretty much every conceiveable subject, every kind of story you could imagine, with every kind of person you could think of. Do you know what that means? That means that this potential lies in poetry as well, and should be exercised. Your poems DO NOT have to be about you, your feelings, your philosophies, etc, to be interesting or good. They can be about your relatives, your friends, a fictional character, an object, ANYTHING, and if you write about it properly, it can be interesting. A good writer could make a poem about drying paint interesting!
5) Stop using generalizations. When you use loaded and overused words like love, pain, life, imagination, joy, freedom, sorrow, etc, that's not something a reader will relate to or feel. Sure, everyone has witnessed and experienced love and pain and all that good stuff, but everyone experiences it differently and many times throughout their lives. Is everyone's experiences with love the same? Is one person's multiple experiences with it the same? Not in the slightest. That means that to a reader, "love" can mean many, many things, and no one wants to play a guessing game to figure out what exactly YOU mean by it. It doesn't have any meaning to someone if it's that inspecific -- it's like giving someone directions to the store, and you're saying something like "well you take a street, go by a landmark, and take some kind of turn somewhere". Doesn't give you a very clear idea, does it?
6a) Don't write about what other people have written about before. If we've heard it before, we don't care. Nothing will ever be 100% original, of course, but the best way to ensure that your poem is interesting is to be specific. If you write about a specific situation and you're very detailed about it, there's less of a chance that someone else will have written the very same thing. Don't write about how "the world is full of hated", because topics like hatred can't fit inside one poem. It would take a lifetime to flesh out the basic role of hatred in society and in our lives, and longer to say everything there is to say about hatred. You leave a lot unsaid if you use the word hatred, because there is no way you're even skimming the surface about this subject, and that leaves a lot that the reader doesn't know. If the reader cannot have a good grasp on the idea you're trying to convey, it's going to be confusing and vague and tedious to sit through.
6b) Another excellent reason not to write about subjects that have been written about before is that people have already heard them before. Not only have people heard them before, they've written about them before, and there's a 99.9999999% chance that a handful of people have done it much, much better. Think of this way: think of your favorite movie. What if someone else made another movie with a different title, but they used similar characters and similar events and basically copied the other movie, but it was done really poorly and was really hard to relate to or get into. It's like ripping off something else, and not even doing it any justice. Who wants to read that? No one. It's tired, it's not interesting, and it's just lame. It's like watching the same episode of Law and Order 142 times.
7) Remember, poetry is an ART FORM, just like literature, painting, film, or music. That means you can't automatically pick it up and be good at it right away -- you can probably do it in a way where it would TECHNICALLY pass as poetry, but it's not going to any good unless you PRACTICE. You have to like writing, not just like what you're writing ABOUT. The difference between a poet and someone who writes poetry is this: a poet is dedicated to writing, and a person who writes poems is dedicated to getting their feelings out in a creative way. Think of it this way; Monet wasn't born being able to paint beautiful pictures. He practiced and slaved and learned and studied and practiced and practiced and practiced his entire life, and I can guarantee you he didn't do it for the sake of painting a picture of some flowers. He did it for the sake of painting, because he loved the act of painting, and he loved creating. You have to care more about creating and the creation process and the creation itself more than what your creation is about. That means if you write about a break-up, you care more about conveying this break-up to other people in a way that will strike them and you care more about the act of writing about it more than you care about the actual event and your feelings about it. That's why you shouldn't write about something that is touchy or emotionally heavy for you unless you can separate your feelings from it from your writing about it. You cannot get better at poetry unless you focus on doing it repeatedly, learning from your mistakes, and understanding great poetry and why it is considered great. If you don't have the kind of dedication to study it and work hard at it for years, then real poetry's not for you. There's nothing wrong with writing purely for yourself, but you've got to keep it to yourself.
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If I think of any more, I'll add them, but really, this kind of advice is easy to find if you look for it. I'd love to hear that someone learned something from this post, but alas, I won't get my hopes up. A lot of people are determined to do it their way, even if it means they're writing trite crap their entire lives just because they want to shout and stomp their feet and, well... express themselves. It's not about expressing yourself; it's about creation, telling a story, etc. There's nothing wrong with expressing yourself, but "expression" doesn't fly in the big leagues.
So, I hope at least someone got something out of this, because it's a great sort of guide to follow for anyone who is really serious about writing. I'm at least satisfied to have finally put these ideas in a concrete place and to have them out there.