I spent a few hours this morning on admin.

And seeing as the admin was fixing my hymn website…

…and filing hymns in my commonplace…

…I thought it was time to talk

(And why you need to write it.)

Because poetry is key to great writing…

…even if you never write a lick of poetry in your life.

In fact, I go so far as saying that my stunning success on social media in the early days was almost entirely because I’d spent years writing poetry in the form of hymns and children’s books…

When I started on Twitter all those years ago I "got" tweet writing instantly and intuitively.

Meanwhile other good writers took months of iterating to get the hang of it.

Tbh, most authors never get the hang of Twitter. Especially in those days when the snappy line was the form du jour.

But if you've written poetry then you've learned one of the most important skills of social media which is condensing something to its barest essence.

Now that's the only real overlap, Twitter is pure content so it's on the other end of the writing spectrum from poetry.

Content is all about getting it out there, maximal ROI.

(For more on this and how to do it without compromising quality and the craftsman mindset we apply to everything we write, see my Craftsman Content Class)

But poetry is the opposite.

It's dense.

It's slow.

It's hard work.

But it's far more rewarding, and it’s worth the effort.

Poetic language is all about creating emotion within constraints.

The best poetry follows strict rules and set forms. Don’t you dare sully the Write Way with bullshido about free verse. It’s sonnets or sayonara here.

Then within those strict boundaries, the poet creates beauty and emotional impact.

So why write it if you’re not a poet?

After all, all I told you is that it’s hard work.

Writing poetry will make you a better writer. And not just in the field of poetry, it’s one of those rare forms of writing where getting better at it…

…makes you better at everything else.

The reason is that poetry hones three key areas of good writing.

Writing that’s good whatever end you’re putting it to.

Poetry hones your cadence and music, it concentrates your meaning, and helps you with concrete language and metaphors.

A few weekend readings ago I recommended Hilary Layne’s video on how and why schools are deliberately creating writers that suck and the last section of that is relevant.

In there she talks about prosody, and how lack of phonics is killing kids’ ability to feel the rhythm of prose.

Well if you want to hone your prosody beyond the basics, the best way is to practice poetry.

This point should be so obvious that I don’t need to argue it. If you write poetry, which is prose with music embedded into it (see Stephen Sonderbergh’s Finishing the Hat for more on that), it will make all your writing more musical.

You train good cadence and rhythm into your writing instincts by writing with deliberate cadence and rhythm.

This is not a complicated idea.

But more than that, poetry

In these here newsletters I give myself around a thousand or so words before I break for the next week and carry on. In a paragraph of prose you get a hundred or so words.

In a poem, you might have a hundred in the whole piece.

When I write a hymn, I maybe get twenty-four lines at an average of seven syllables per line. That’s a total of one-hundred and sixty-eighty syllables to complete the whole piece.

Just to show you how little that is, I’ll highlight the next one-hundred and sixty-eight syllables I write.

It’s less than you think and that constraint forces more careful writing.

Constraints always do that. They force you to tighten every single line, and choose every word with extreme care.

Which, by the way, is a bonus benefit:

When you’re forced to think about every word, instead of just throwing whatever word you want (100), you have to choose them wisely. If you’re using strict forms, meter and rhyme will mean you can’t use some words (try fitting sanctification in a song) and you have to switch out others for ones that rhyme.

It expands your vocabulary as a result, and makes you better with word choice in all forms of writing.

We touched on this in WWN63 : 18th Century Genius teaches writing trick three ways .

But more than cadence and music, concentrated meaning, and constraining your maverick tendences…

We talked about this too, way back in WWN22 : Pouring Concrete. Powerful writing relies on things you can see and touch and taste. It’s all about the real world.

It’s not about the abstract.

My love is not a beautiful thing, it is a red red rose.

Names are not unimportant compared to the substance of a thing, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

Poetry is the king of the concept made tangible, the ideal meeting the real.

Which is why you ought to read a lot of it, and write some of it too.

But all of these cold mercenary reasons pale compared to this simple truth:

You ought to write poetry because it’s good for you.

Poetry speaks to the soul. It allows you to dig deep, it forces you to dig deep.

Poetry is hard. It's a challenge.

I can write an email in ten minutes, and never feel a thing. But to write a poem I need to have some depth to my understanding. I need to dig deep into the topic, think about all the angles, all the tricks of language that could create the emotion that I need to create.

You'll come out of it with a better appreciation of language, a deeper understanding of your topic and probably a headache too.

Did I mention it's hard?

This is the million-dollar question.

And we’re already stretching my self-appointed word limit, so it’s a question we’ll answer next week…

In the meantime, go read some poetry and try your hand at it too.

You might surprise yourself.

Oh, before I go. Proof of work...

My first children's book is a work of poetry, you can get it ​by clicking here​. Or you can check out my hymns on the newly fixed website ​by tapping here​.

After all, if they're rubbish, why are you listening to me talk about poetry?

Meanwhile, may your pipe inspire many a poem,

James Carran, Craftsman Writer

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