How to improve your fiction writing by reading poetry

By Dennis Mellersh

One of the best ways you can learn how to write your book more professionally is to develop the skill of writing concisely and compactly. An excellent way to do this is to read and study the techniques of recognized, published poets.

Good poetry has the ability to express a wide number of elements such as character, emotion, storyline, ideas, and concepts – and do so with an economy of words.
 

By reading quality poetry carefully, you will be able to see how good poets use the technique of compression in their writing to convey their ideas.
 

Let’s look at the poem Ozymandias, written by the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley as an example.
 

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear --

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.'

Within the discipline of just 14 short lines this poem:

• Tells a story
• Invokes scenes, or mental pictures in our minds
• Conveys a moral or lesson
• Illuminates a variety of emotions
• Conveys the thought that ideas last but material things do not
• Illustrates the folly of pride and vanity

It’s also worth noting that, as with all good writing, that there is an absence of “flowery” or what new writers sometimes construe as “literary” language in this poem.

Using plain, everyday language in your writing will convey your ideas and thoughts better than constantly reaching for the thesaurus for “fancy” words.
 

“Literary” writing often means writing with excess ornamentation.
 

Every writer has their own style, and you are developing yours. But whatever the style, saying what you want to say in as few words as is necessary will keep your book moving along, and maintain your readers interest.
 

Your readers are interested in your ideas, not in the wide breadth of your vocabulary.
 

Sometimes words can get in the way.