Writing Advice

If you’re a poet, maintaining a poetic sensibility is important whether you have all the time in the world or no time at all. But that can be hard to do when your boss is screaming for the report that was due an hour ago, the kids need to be picked up from soccer practice, and Fido just left you a gift on the living room floor.

Here are some things you can do to stay in a poetic state of mind all day, every day:

• Decorate with poetry. What better way to promote poetic thinking than to surround yourself with poetry? Try using a poetry-themed calendar or even framing and displaying your favorite poems. The more poetry you read and see on a daily basis, the more likely you’ll live in a state of appreciation for poems.
• Activate your senses. It’s hard to write consistently if you keep setting up blockades on the inspiration superhighway. Keep listening, keep seeing, keep smelling, keep tasting, keep feeling!
• Keep paper handy. With your senses engaged, you’ll need to keep track of your thoughts. When you’re already juggling homework assignments, doctor appointments, and shopping lists in your head, how can you remember that clever limerick you thought of on the subway ride to school? And what about that perfect edit to the last line in the second stanza that came to you during your lunch break?

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Writing Advice

Constance Hale writes writing lessons in a way that makes you assess your writing. She starts the first in the series like this:

I like to imagine a sentence as a boat. Each sentence, after all, has a distinct shape, and it comes with something that makes it move forward or stay still — whether a sail, a motor or a pair of oars. There are as many kinds of sentences as there are seaworthy vessels: canoes and sloops, barges and battleships, Mississippi riverboats and dinghies all-too-prone to leaks. And then there are the impostors, flotsam and jetsam — a log heading downstream, say, or a coconut bobbing in the waves without a particular destination.

My analogy seems simple, but it’s not always easy to craft a sentence that makes heads turn with its sleekness and grace. And yet the art of sentences is not really a mystery.

Over the course of several articles, I will give you the tools to become a sentence connoisseur as well as a sentence artisan. Each of my lessons will give you the insight to appreciate fine sentences and the vocabulary to talk about them.

Here, you will find the links to the other articles.