How Poetry Can Improve your Copywriting Ability

 

Advertising copywriters are often told that they need to get to grips with poetry. After all, the ability to express complex images and emotions in just a few lines is what makes a copywriter great.

Actually, poetry can help writers of all breeds, be they novelists or nonfiction writers, to improve their craft. The ability to play music to the reader through words or conjure some unforgettable images is something all writers aspire to achieve.

Read lots of poems

Of course, the best place to start improving your writing craft is by reading poems, and lots of them. Poetry has the advantage of being short, which allows you to experiment with many different styles. Try to read a few and see what kind of feelings and images they inspire in you. If they leave an imprint on you, ask yourself why, what was it about this poem that affected you so?

For a start, try reading “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe, “The Diameter of the Bomb” by Yehuda Amichai, and “Hope is the Thing of Feathers” by Emily Dickinson.

Learn to stimulate the senses

The poet paints pictures with words, but that picture is not limited to images; the poet should stimulate our sense of sight, smell, sound, touch, and taste just as a picture can do. The poet becomes a kind of camera that produces striking, fresh images that remain fixed in the mind’s eye. This line, for example, offers a strong image: “Sunlight varnishes oak trees crimson.”

Try to play around with images in your own writing, or practice writing a poem or two. See what kind of images you can conjure, and try to understand why imagery works well at stimulating the senses.

Learn to use concrete words

Poetry also teaches us that it’s better to use a concrete word in place of an abstract one. An example of a concrete word is “warm.” It’s concrete because you can experience warmth with your senses—it’s a real thing. An abstract term might be “freedom” or “happiness” because you can’t see or touch them.

Using abstract words in poetry bypasses the reader’s senses, meaning they don’t experience your idea to the fullest. For example: “she feels happy,” isn’t as powerful as “her tomato cheeks radiated warmth.” The image of a tomato, strange as it may seem, will last longer in the reader’s memory because it’s concrete.

Learn to convert clichés

Any writing style that relies on clichés loses its impact. Overused phrases are a bit like stale bread—no one wants to eat it. He may be blind as a bat, or busy as a bee, but these clichés are tattered and worn and have lost all their power.

Instead, you can convert your clichés. For example, try listing all the words you associate with being busy and create a new phrase. For example: “Busy as an old lady knitting.” Finding original phrases will inspire your writing with new life.

Learn to subvert the ordinary

The strength of poetry lies in the poet’s ability to see ordinary objects, places, or ideas in a completely new way. You might see a young child standing in line with his mother, but a poet will imagine the boy painting the walls with nail polish and the mother struggling not to be angry. Just try looking at something ordinary and attempt to see it in a completely new way, and your writing will love you for it.

Learn to think about themes

Poets love themes, and your own writing should include them too. Yet many novice writers find it hard to get to grips with themes. A theme isn’t just an idea. You can’t say that your book covers the theme of war because that’s a topic, not a theme. You can define themes as an idea with an opinion attached. Thus, your theme might be: “even though we claim to be peace-loving people, war is a natural aspect of the human race.” This is the poet’s opinion.

Of course, there’s far more to poetry than this. The best advice is to read a poem at least once a day and internalize the images, the rhythm, and feelings. Study things like metaphor, simile, and other literary devices employed by poets. Once you’ve got to grips with poetry, your writing craft is sure to have improved.

Culled from iuniverse.com

Top 10 Tips for Being a Successful Poet

 

Sir Andrew Motion is an English poet and novelist who was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1999 to 2009.

He has been awarded several poetry awards, including the Arvon Prize, the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize. He was knighted for his services to literature in 2009.

Here are his top 10 tips for being a successful poet.

1. Let your subject find you

My parents were not writers and they didn’t really read very much either. My Dad once told me he had only read half a book in his life. I had a wonderful English teacher called Peter Way. He walked straight into my head, turned all the lights on and he gave me my life really.

When I was 17, quite soon after I started tinkering around with poems, my mother had a very bad accident, which eventually killed her. So I found myself wanting to express my feelings about that in ways that were relieving to me.

It sounds a slightly self-aggrandising thing to say, but I’ve always thought that death was my subject. You don’t find your subject, it finds you. Writing poems for me is not simply a matter of grieving, though very often it is that, it’s wanting to resurrect or preserve or do things that pull against the fact of our mortality.

2. Tap into your own feelings

I never quite believe it when poets say that they’re not writing out of their own feelings, and when that is the case, I tend not to be terribly interested in what they’re doing.

I don’t mean to say that they are writing bad poems, but those aren’t the poems that I like most. The poems I most like are where the engine is a very emotional one, where the warmth of strong feeling is very powerfully present in the thing that is being given to us. I think poetry is a rather emotional form and when it isn’t that, I’m not very interested in it.

3. Write about subjects that matter to you

I didn’t always cope with being commissioned very happily as Poet Laureate to tell the truth. The best poems get written, not by going in the front door of the subject, but round the back or down the chimney or through the window.

‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant,’ said Emily Dickinson and that’s always been a very important remark for me. It can be quite difficult to do that if you’re standing in a very public place.

People who live in public, as I very suddenly found myself doing, can get very bruised in the process if they’re not used to it. I found all that public stuff extremely difficult to deal with. I never wanted to cut myself off, but wish I had devised better ways of protecting myself.

4. Celebrate the ordinary and be choosy

Honour the miraculousness of the ordinary. What we very badly need to remember is that the things right under our noses are extraordinary, fascinating, irreplaceable, profound and just kind of marvellous.

Look at the things in the foreground and relish stuff that can lose its glow by being familiar. In fact, re-estranging ourselves to familiar things seems to be a very important part of what poetry can do.

If you can, be choosy about what you do, so that the things you do write are the things that you do best.

5. Use everything in your toolbox

I haven’t written a rhyming poem now for many years, I seem to have lost my appetite for it but I haven’t lost my pleasure in reading them. I think anybody that insists on the presence of rhyme is really not thinking hard enough about what poetry is or can be.

Having said that, it is important to bear in mind that as poets we have a kind of toolbox, in which there are all kinds of different pieces of equipment, not available to any other kind of writer and rhyme is very importantly one of those.

So never to use rhyme in your poetry would be a bit like buying a car and never getting out of second gear. Use everything in your toolbox.

6. If you get stuck, go for a walk or wash your hair

Wordsworth once said that the act of walking was closely related to the creative process. I do love walking and if I get stuck I go for a walk or if I don’t have much time, I wash my hair – it seems to wake my brain up!

Even when I’m on a hair washing day, rather than a walking day, I walk up and down my study, just to get myself going.

Poems are so crucially to do with the movement of words through a line or a series of lines, and that is just as important as their shape and the way that we understand them I think.

7. Let your work be open to interpretation

People will interpret your poetry in different ways, but provided the interpretation that is brought to the poem isn’t plainly bonkers, I actually enjoy that, I rather hope for it.

Your poem can be a world in which your readers can go and live themselves and seek out things which resonate for them. And it would be completely bonkers of me to try to restrict their reaction.

In Auden’s beautiful eulogy for Yeats, he said, ‘He became his admirers,’ and I think that’s kind of what he had in mind actually. You give your work over to your readers and provided they’re not crazy, it’s absolutely open to them what they find in it.

8. Read your poetry out loud

Reading your poetry out loud is crucial and absolutely indispensable because wherever we reckon the meaning of a poem might lie, we want to admit that it’s got as much to do with the noise it makes when we hear it aloud, as it has to do with what the words mean when we see them written down on the page.

In a really fundamental way, I think poetry is an acoustic form and we’ve slightly forgotten that in the last thousand years. Since the invention of the book, the aliveness of poetry has been perhaps slightly pushed to the edge of things.

9. Find the right time to write

Find your own writing time. Everybody will have a slightly different time of day, I have yet to meet the person who thinks the early afternoon is good, but I expect there is someone out there who thinks that that’s a good idea.

For me it’s very early in the morning, partly because the house is quiet and partly because I feel I’m stealing a march on things and that makes me feel good.

I think there might be some kind of hook up between what happens in our minds when we’re asleep and writing imaginative material. I think good poems get written, as no doubt good paintings get painted, as a result of these two things coming together in an appropriate way.

10..Read a lot, revise and persevere

Read lots, write lots of course too, but assume that your first thoughts are not your best thoughts, so revise, revise, revise and don’t expect every poem to work, because it won’t.

Don’t go live in an ivory tower. Read the newspapers and involve yourself in the world – where do you think subjects come from if not the world?

Persevere. I think right at the beginning of your writing life you really have to accept that within a few years, or possibly even a few months, you are going to be able to wallpaper quite a large room with rejection slips. But don’t let that put you off – if you’ve got it, you’ve got it!

Culled from BBC

10 Reasons Storytellers Should Dabble in Poetry

 

There was a time when poetry enjoyed mainstream popularity. People who read poetry weren’t unusual or lurking in some counterculture, hipster coffee house. Ordinary folks read poems, enjoyed poetry, and discussed poetic works.

These days, fiction takes centre stage in the world of language arts. We love movies, TV shows, and video games, comic books, and novels. Fans gather online and at conventions to celebrate their favourite stories and characters. And this other genre seems to have been relegated to the cultural backseat.

In Shakespeare’s time, entire plays were written in verse. Think about that: entire plays written in verse. Keep in mind that in those days, plays were the equivalent of movies and television (live-action entertainment). Imagine if the lines from films like Titanic, Star Wars, or Game of Thrones were delivered in rhyming verse, and you begin to get an idea of just how wide an audience poetry once reached.

Today, poetry is relegated to a precious few; most people who read poetry also write it. The lack of interest in it is confounding. You would think that in a one-click world of instant gratification, poetry would be embraced. You would think that in a world where music propels such widespread fandom, poetry would be appreciated. And you would especially think that in the greater writing community, where words are currency, poetry would be celebrated.

But oddly, many writers dismiss it. Some say they don’t understand it. Others don’t have the patience for it. A few remark that there’s no money in it. The reasons that most writers don’t embrace poetry vary; but the lack of appreciation for the form is omnipresent.

How Poetry Benefits Storytellers

Despite all the competition for our attention by creators of art and entertainment, poetry still manages to find an audience, especially among writers. Storytellers, in particular, reap great benefits from dabbling in poetry, both as readers and creators. Here are ten ways that poetry can inform, inspire, and boost storytelling:

1. Language: Poets learn how to be precise and economical with language in order to produce carefully crafted stanzas that resonate clearly, effectively, and emotionally. Composing poetry forces us to think about language so we can find the best possible way to communicate an idea.
2. Literary Devices: Poetry teaches us literary devices like alliteration and assonance, and we can then apply these concepts to our prose to make it more rhythmic or memorable and to help it flow better. Many poetic devices translate well to other forms of writing, and they can also open the door to the many literary devices that are exclusive to storytelling.
3. Imagery: Most poets strive to paint pictures (or craft videos) with words. We say, “Show, don’t tell.” We learn to choose a poem’s language in such a way that the reader can see the poem in their mind’s eye, clearly and vibrantly. Because storytelling is about crafting scenes, which are visual, this is a priceless skill for storytellers to develop.
4. Emotion: The primary goal of many poems is to evoke some emotion from the reader. Most storytellers share that goal. We want readers to feel for our characters, to become emotionally invested in them and their struggles. Through poetry, we learn how to craft language with emotional resonance.
5. Musicality: Musicality is probably one of the most underserved elements of fiction writing, often ignored in favour of other story elements. But the flow and rhythm of a sentence in a story can have a profound impact on readers, even if they don’t realize it. Because poetry places a lot of emphasis on musicality, this is a useful skill that can carry over into storytelling.
6. Vocabulary: Much of writing comes down to word choice. Writers of all forms want to choose the best possible words for whatever they’re trying to communicate. And while we can certainly tackle word choice in fiction (and non-fiction) writing, poetry, with its laser-sharp focus on language, often does a better job at keeping word choice at the top of a writer’s mind.
7. Form and structure: It’s a lot easier to study structure with a one-page poem than with a 500-page manuscript. Poetry also teaches us how to work within established structures when we learn how to write form poetry such as sonnets or haiku. While these skills might only be loosely related to most forms of storytelling, they’re definitely useful in areas of scriptwriting for television, film, or the stage.
8. Daily writing practice: Regular writing practice is of utmost importance for any writer. What to do when you’re working on the fifth draft of your novel, or when you’re between books and focused on marketing? Poetry is an excellent way to get your daily writing practice in, because poems can be short and quick to draft.
9. Quick reads: As with providing quick-fix writing practice, poetry also provides quick-fix reading. For writers, reading is just as important as (if not more important than) writing. But sometimes life gets busy. We don’t always have time to read the next chapter in the novel that sits on our bedside table. Reading a poem a day is the perfect way to get some daily reading in.
10. A fuller toolbox: All of these things come together to give storytellers a fuller toolbox packed with writing tools and techniques.

 

Are you a storyteller? Have you ever dabbled in poetry? If so, what did you learn from it that carried over into your fiction writing? If you’re a storyteller who has never dabbled in poetry, are you willing to give it a try? Let us know your thoughts in the comment box.

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