Poetry can elevate the quality of your writing.

If you've read the works of Vladimir Nabokov, Margaret Atwood, Ray Bradbury, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, you would feel like there's a beat to their words and that the visuals not only make sense but are cohesive it was beautiful, That's because their works were called poetic prose.

Any novelist or fiction writer should read and analyze good poetry if they want to improve their writing. In a nutshell, poetic prose is a step higher than prosaic form, the latter being what's currently flooding the market. Poetic prose has all the tools that make a great poem put into a longer string of words.

Readers noticing melody and rhythm in your work is always a delightful surprise, like an easter egg from their favorite franchise cross-over event. Melody and rhythm were used heavily in, and highly characteristic of, poetry. Once used in prose, it can be like the brushstrokes that make up an oil painting. It's delightful to look at when you observe closer as if the writer was telling you to come and look for more, like a scavenger hunt. It's barely there but impossible to miss. Although this skill is hard to execute without practical experience in poetry, poets who dabble in prose often make this their signature. I recommend getting a good grasp of poetry first before this can be executed well and prevent it from falling flat.

Poetic prose might just as well be your style. I was told that a writer's voice is important. It was more than just a pattern in your writing or your signature, but it was your brand. It's where you can get your type of audience, those who will keep going back to your work because they're expecting you to deliver the same style. It was sort of like a craving for a specific kind of food, only that it was fiction. However, to identify your voice and your style, you need to create a huge body of work experimenting with different styles and inventing your own. From imitation, you iterate, and then you innovate.

It gives you a new perspective. I always thought that any creative block was a result of not taking in new stimuli or experiences. You weren't taking in new creative energy to channel and synthesized as your new art. Whenever you find yourself not knowing what to write, it may be a good idea to try a new medium. Let it be poetry. Creative blocks forces you to get out of your comfort zone and explore the unknown. This practice can be incredibly helpful, especially when everything in fiction is bland and repetitive. Reading and analyzing poetry might just be the catalyst you need to bring that creative spark back.

It improves your description and imagery. Aside from melody and rhythm, this is where I think poetry can greatly help prose. I was told by my poet friends that poetry is artfully describing a scene with multiple layers and limited words. Prose writers, especially those who doesn't have a lot of critiqued work and those who didn't write short or flash stories, would often have a problem with the number of words they use. Prose writers write on endless horizontal lines that they would go on and on about something, usually at the risk of telling everything. Poets write vertically and in layers, using intentional words to create not just one but multiple meanings in a few words, therefore, showing. That's something I think prose writers can learn a thing or two about.

It's tough to analyze poetry, it's even tougher to write one. Creating a poem is not an easy feat – mostly because of the layered meanings and the restrictions of form. If you truly want to level up your writing, working within and mastering your craft with the same limitations should be your goal.

These days, we see novels reach 100K+ words per book in a long series from newly published authors. Despite that, we would see booktok talk about how they don't read long paragraphs. There's a growing problem with the shortening attention span and the growing inability to hold attention to a single thing for a long time. This plagues not only today's youth but us who were born pre-internet as social media continuously alters our brain's wiring through short-form content and infinite scroll. The lack of media literacy, coupled with the rise of anti-intellectualism, and the ever-changing drama in the book community can make it all feel like it's a lot of trouble to get your writing out there. However, I look at it as a calling to carve out a pie from the market and to make it more diverse. We need to tell our stories about our times, our crises, our culture, and our experiences living in this world, in a format that will be most effective for us people. Creativity, if anything, is effective and artful problem-solving.

Poetry can elevate the quality of your writing.

4/8/2025