On writing an epic fantasy poem

[larryhammer]

Or verse fantasy novel, or fantasy book-length poem -- whatever you want to call it. The promised solemn specious nonsense. Notes to myself, really, but should anyone with ambitions to uselessness find it useful, here they are. Consider this a partial manifesto of the Well-Versed Skiffy movement.

My qualifications are slim -- which is to say, I haven't written one yet. My experience is a half-dozen verse short stories, a couple proof-of-concept pieces, half a chapter of an abandoned verse novel, and three chapters of another in progress. OTOH, I feel like I learn more from failures than successes. All of which is my way of suggesting add salt to taste.

Scope - A verse novel contains about as much story as a prose novella. Yes, this sounds paradoxical, given the compression of verse, where more is said with fewer words, each one counting. One way of looking at it is that all those line breaks take up more space.

As evidence, consider some recent successful book-length poems: The Golden Gate, Omeros, Time's Fool, Byrne, Genesis, and The New World. Of these, only Genesis is close to having a novel-sized story, and Byrne is more a long short story. (Of these, only one is fantasy, and in a contemporary/near future setting at that; of the others, two are science fiction, and rest contemporary -- the epic fantasy epic is a hole begging to be filled. The most fantastic recent long poem I can think of is The Voyage of the Arctic Tern, and that's a) a ghost yarn, and b) ultimately not entirely successful.)

Story - There are some things poetry is efficient at, relative to prose -- where the compression of heightened language adds to the story. There are some things the form makes harder. For example, dialog: verse conversations are difficult to write -- the artificiality of verse works against natural speech. And if you have many short speeches, the lack of paragraphs makes it hard to keep a change in speaker clear. You probably don't want a story with detailed drawing-room conversations or back-room plotting. Blow-by-blow fight-scenes have similar problems. OTOH, general, even large-scale, actions and their emotional implications do very well indeed. Think epic.

Setting - In my experience, setting descriptions -- especially the type used for worldbuilding -- take more space in verse than prose. Or to put it another way, there's no easy way to compress it (and all those line breaks spread it out) unless you use shorthands. Thus, my current recommendation is use a template setting, one your readers can recognize from small details, or even just mentions, and fill out from prior knowledge. Fantasyland. Camelot. Troy. Even a historical setting with magic may be difficult, because that "with magic" already changes it from the known. But it may be worth trying.

Form - Write in a form you are comfortable in, not one you think an epic ought to have. (It's surprising how many would-be poets confuse form and genre, and how many poetry manuals.) Master that form -- write shorter pieces, practicing it, until you no longer have to think about fitting it, but what you are saying within it, and with it. All of which is simply good poetry advice.

I'm personally biased against free verse and larger stanzas for long narratives, for oddly similar reasons. It is easy for me to digress, slowing down the story, and in general it's too easy in poetry to get caught up in words for their own sake. So I look to forms to help keep the story moving forward. Free verse, with its formal emphasis on the line, tends to be inward-focused on that line. With regular stanzas, narration naturally takes on a rhythm, with a beat per stanza; longer stanzas mean a longer beat -- usually not by adding more to the beat, but by padding it out. But these, as I said, are biases; there are successful long poems in those forms (Out of the Dust, which won a Newbery Award, is free verse; significantly, its scope is a long short story), but it would be a bad idea for me to try.

Texture - In general, a verse narrative requires a lighter texture of language (soundplay, wordplay, images) than a lyric poem. Requiring your readers tease out the implications of vocal echoes when the story's asking them to move along is not a good idea. Playful is okay, even good, but intense is problematic. The smoother fluidity of narrative verse may be why it has a poor reputation today, in the poetry world, compared to the meditative lyric. But that is speculation.

To that end, draw out your images and metaphors, instead of tossing off one or two a line. Image clusters work well in stanzas, with what's in effect an extended metaphor per. Why, yes, I'm arguing with Keats; why do you ask?

Models - In addition to modern works cited above, read the great verse narratives of the past, and learn from them all you can about story structure in verse. My required list includes Metamorphoses, Troilus and Criseyde, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Orlando Furioso, Don Juan, Eugene Onegin, The Ring and the Book. Note especially the rhetorical tricks and tactics that keep the story moving (or, sometimes, not moving). The absence of actual epics is deliberate -- they are a different genre. That I exclude The Canterbury Tales as a collection of stories yet include the Ovid is, however, merely willful. The Browning is dubious: already by the Victorians, long narratives frequently broke into fragments shored against the story's ... well, not ruin -- partition.

Markets - No clue. If you publish one, let me know.

ObFluffy: Ignore this as just silly. Except for the warning -- that's spot on.

---L.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I'm way impressed. When poetic ability was being handed out, I was over in the Clueless line for a fourth helping.

So I'm going to watch in delight and admiration, but sure as hell am not sticking my oar in.

[larryhammer]

Yes, but you know story, and when it is or isn't there. And when the telling of it is getting in the way. That's half the struggle, there.

---L.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I feel I know story, and when the telling is getting in the way when it's prose, but poetry is such an integral party of its mode of storytelling I feel helpless and hapless at the roadside, watching the ponies dance by, and I don't even know how to hold a halter.

[larryhammer]

Consider this a more forceful manifesto of the Well-Versed Skiffy movement: If the poetry is getting in the way of the story, this is just as much of a problem as prose doing the same.

---L.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

...but poetry seems to be part of the story mode, when it works right. That's what works, at least for me, in Byron's narrative poems, and Browning's, etc.

I wish I could articulate it better...poetic storytelling seems to rely on the image, the cadence, the word choices of poetry in a different weight, say, than prose: like image and transition between image in anime weights differently than written-image and transition in a short story.

Blegh, I feel like I have too many fingers when I try to express this, and they are jumbling together like spaghetti.

[larryhammer]

Oh, yes -- if the poetry doesn't contribute to the story, it should be in prose in the first place. But it should also not detract from it, either.

---L.

[janni.livejournal.com]

Much of poetic ability is learned, just like writing or music or math.

Maybe not the genius level stuff. But the workaday stuff.