Short Forms: No Stepping Stone

DIY MFA Team — Tue, 13 Nov 2018 13:30:42 +0000

I have done my beloved short forms an injustice. And I’ve led you, my readers, to believe that poems, short stories, and novellas are simply stops on the way to the writing world’s holy grail: novels.

This column, Writing Small, is an exploration into this near-mystical thing called writing. My aim is to plumb others’ short form work for keys to create our own. Always with an eye on expanding our writing range. But I fear I’ve stumbled into a well-known briar patch of literature: the idea that all short forms (should) lead to a novel.

Short forms are no strangers to “shoulds”—literary or popular. Brandon Taylor, associate editor of Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, tackles a popular short forms “should” myth in his LitHub article, Against the Attention Economy: Short Stories are Not Quick Literary Fixes: In Praise of Slow Reading.

While Taylor’s article revolves around the (false) idea that short stories and short attention spans go together, he also touches on the take of the novel as the top literary goal:

“Short stories can hold tones that would be unsustainable in a novel. Short stories can hover in the extremes of life, revealing by virtue of the intensities that lurk there, strange and curious truths. A story is not a novel in miniature, but a different form altogether, with its own range of interests and concerns.”

Taylor’s piece made me pause and rethink how I, a lover of short forms, viewed them. Did I think of them only in comparison to longer forms? And in comparison to longer forms, do I find them lacking?

I look at my own writing practice. I explore different forms through reading. I imitate others writing styles. I try on form after form to find which allows me to tell my story in my own voice. I joyfully discover the freedom shorter forms give to convey nuances, intensities and strange, curious truths.

Form Follows Function

Freedom within form seems vaguely zen. But there is an aptness to it. Like certain forms lend themselves to better expressing a specific effect or emotion, short forms embody the principle that form follows function. Poetry vocalizes emotion and wonder. Flash forms—fiction or nonfiction—work well introducing startlement, mystery, or profundity to a reader. Plays excel in distilling and rendering human interaction for better scrutiny. Essay literally means to weigh or test; essays are tools for self-explication and acquiring knowledge. Short stories allow for the creation of a world or a person through the lens of a single aspect. Each of these allows the writer and reader to see a world in a grain of sand.

But I don’t mean to straight-jacket short forms with the above examples. Think of it all as merely a starting point into their expansive world.

Writing Versatility

Another iteration of their form/function specificity is their versatility. Short forms work so well with each other; making hybridization a given. This ability to marry different short forms makes possible choreopoems, verse novels, epics, verse biographies, and the like. If those forms sound foreign to you, maybe the following titles will be more familiar:

For Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf, by Ntozake Shange (choreopoem) [I think of this as a verse play.]
Carver: A Life in Poems, by Marilyn Nelson (verse biography)
Aeneid, by Virgil, translated by Seamus Heaney (epic)
Brown Girl Dreaming, by Jacqueline Woodson (verse novel)

Enough of extolling the virtues of short forms, I urge you to dive right into them. Try out new ways to express yourself. November is the perfect time to rebel and dive into something short and something new.

Focusing on short forms during National Novel Writing Month!? Yes. November and NaNoWriMo are flexible enough to make way for your short forms writing rebellion. NaNoWriMo welcomes the idea and calls it being a NaNo Rebel.

If you’re not quite brave enough to be that visible nationally, try a smaller venue. Local writing groups offer an easy way to meet other writers and learn about new techniques. However, there’s no shame in being hesitant to join a formal writing group. You can always create your own community or go it alone for awhile. After all, creating the writing curriculum that works for you is DIY MFA’s founding principle. Whatever short form(s) or writing path you choose will make you the writer you want to be.

Finally, consider this article a partial retraction of the sentiment in my article, How to Use Small Forms as Steps to a Novel. Small or short forms are so much more than a path to writing novels. They are literature’s mild-mannered superheroes. Brandon Taylor said it best—with a little help from me:

“But see, a [short form] works its way inside of you. You don’t walk out of it. You don’t get to leave. You carry it inside you. It’s beating there all the time like a second heart. A [short form] isn’t quick. It takes time.”

Brenda Joyce Patterson is a poet, writer, librarian, and lover of short writing forms. Her poetry and flash fiction have been published in Vayavya, Gravel Magazine, and Melancholy Hyperbole. Along with works by Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Alice Walker, her travel essay “The Kindness of Strangers” appeared in Go Girl: The Black Woman’s Guide to Travel and Adventure.

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What is a Verse Novel?

Gabriela — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 19:38:49 +0000

What makes something a verse novel? Simply speaking, a verse novel (or novel in verse) is exactly what the name implies: a novel that is told in verse rather than prose.

It’s a bit more complicated than that, though. Why aren’t works like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid called epic poems and not verse novels? After all, they are novel-length stories told in verse but epic poems and verse novels are not one and the same. Epic poems are poems on a grand scale, but they are still poems nonetheless. Verse novels, on the other hand–whether they are written as one long poem or a collection of shorter poems–must combine poetry with story. Perhaps the best definition I’ve found comes from Michael Symmons Roberts, who says:

A verse novel can only be written in conscious awareness of the novel as a form.

To write a true verse novel, you have to be aware both of the musicality of the poetry and how the narrative structure works. This means that an an epic poem is still a poem, not a verse novel. Nor does “prose-with-line-breaks” count as verse novel material. Virginia Euwer Wolff (author of the Lemonade Trilogy) said in an interview with The Horn Book (2001):

Writing my prose in funny-shaped lines does not render it poetry. And there’s nobody more aware of that than I.

Which is ironic because Wolff insists her own trilogy (one that reads like poetry) is actually prose-with-line-breaks and the books cannot be called verse novels. As she says, poetry is more than just prose rearranged with line breaks in funny places. In fact, poetry has an element of surprise and a musicality that differs from prose. In my mind, prose emphasizes character and story before language whereas poetry puts imagery and language first. The line breaks in poetry serve as parallels to breath and rhythm, whereas prose with line breaks must focus first on telling the story.

Which leads me to an important question: who decides if a something is a verse novel? The author? The reader? Some poetic authority from above? I’m not sure. What is more, if an author does not consider his/her work as verse, can we the readers appropriate it as such?

Again, I’m not sure. If an author says his/her work is prose then I feel that I must read and accept it as prose, even if it looks like verse. But what if the author set out to write prose and somehow it morphed into verse, with all the musicality and imagery that goes with it? Is it possible for an author to misplace their work as prose when really it’s poetry?

Some argue that poetry and prose exist on a spectrum, that while certain books may clearly reside at one extreme or the other verse novels live somewhere in between. After reading several verse novels, however, I’ve come to the conclusion that for something to fit that category, it must be both verse and novel. Verse novels are not watered-down versions of each genre shoved together into one book. The verse novel must, in fact, do double-duty, having all the elements of of both genres. This means a verse novel must have the music and imagery that we find in poetry and at the same time character development and story structure of a novel. Verse novelists must write good poetry and a good story, and they must combine the two seamlessly in order for the verse novel to work.

Interested in checking out some verse novels?

There are several great lists on the web to get you started.