I have the week off and am up in Port Townsend to attend some of the Writer's Conference, and to do some writing. I actually have an idea for a novel and I want to get going on drafting it out. I am really curious how it will go . . .
I was talking with a poet friend about it the other day. She said whenever she takes a break and writes fiction for a while, the poems inevitably come screaming back at the front door, demanding to be let in, as if they were saying "You two-timing bitch, how dare you!" We'll see if I end up writing more poetry than prose . . .
6 comments:
During April and May I did not work on my memoir at all because all I could write were drafts of poems. I wrote maybe two poems from Sept-March, then BAM! Poetry muse would not let me be. And I just went with the flow of things. I trust the muse. I was very sick of writing drafts of poems when I started the memoir, but by April, I was sick of writing prose and wanting poems again.
Peter,
that is what always happens to me when I work on another genre.
Also, if I go for a long period of not writing, poems become the neglected children banging on my door until I spend some time with them.
They are quite persistent little ones.
When I was working on my yet-to-be-published novel, the poetry would not go away and actually got worked into the story. The main character was going to be a journalist, but wound up being a poet. Don't fight the urge to write poetry while writing fictiion...you might get some great ideas for both.
I often seem to get enticing ideas for whatever I'm not working on--it might even be an idea for a new series of poems while I'm still noodling around trying to figure out what the current group needs. So if I want to work on one thing, I try to remind myself to go focus on something else. It might not be function, but sometimes it works.
I'd love to write fiction - and try, from time to time. But it never works out for me. The pieces always shapeshift into prose poems, then ...
I hope it works out for you though. Have a good holiday, Peter.
A novel. Admirable.
How do you make the lines
go all the way
to the end of the page?
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