in defense of limitations

why writing needs rules to abide by

First, don’t hate me, but for honesty’s sake I feel like I should tell you right off that poetry isn’t really my thing.¹ I read it when I come across it, and we have many volumes on our shelves, but I don’t pursue it in my personal reading. My husband knows not to write me poetry; he once gave me a romantic letter handwritten in cursive but I was so unimpressed that he’s never heard the end of it.²

I do, however, have a high school student right now who just switched to the poetry section in our creative writing course³, and the assignments are so fun: Write a poem that makes sense with only one word per line. Write an acrostic poem using the the letters in the alphabet as your outline. We go back and forth helping each other write the lines, and some of the poems are good, while others are hilarious.

The cool thing about poetry is the rules.

I know, that’s not normally the cool thing about anything.

But with (good) poetry, there are rules set forth in the beginning: Stipulations about rhythm, rhyme, shape, metaphor, syllables, or a combination of similar elements.

What makes this a poem? What is it trying to do that you can’t do in prose? Because it ought to be something.

I mean,

you

could make

a sentence look

like this,

…but that’s not poetry. Anyone with the IQ of a toaster can scatter words like that on paper or screen and it’s not impressive. And maybe, probably, it’s the abuse of similar tactics that make people like me decide that poetry just isn’t really our thing.

But writing poetry (or anything else with particular rules, like stringent word counts) is sort of like algebra, pushing us to think in different terms and ponder new possibilities.

Or, maybe it’s more like teaching us to count by fives in our writing. Don’t use the first or second or third or fourth thing that just comes to mind. Don’t go with the easy, immediate solutions. Jump a little farther, and reach for the solution that feels just beyond your grasp…that’s the one. Perfect.

The stag at eve had drunk his fill,
Where danced the moon on Monan's rill…

— Sir Walter Scott, “The Lady of the Lake”

Thinking inside these parameters forces us to think outside the box. It stretches us, and it’s good for us. It’s good for our writing, too.

I told my student that the limits in poetry are a gift that helps us to focus. For example, if you were stuck in an empty room for a day with only two books and nothing else to do, you would probably read those two books. But if you were in a room full of a hundred books plus a tv and a piano and four different craft projects, you’d probably putter around here and there, dabbling in everything.

Limits (or rules) force us to focus, and we realize we can do things in our writing that we didn't think we could do otherwise.

---

Here’s a personal limit I set for myself — and if I ever edit your work, I’ll set it for you, too. (*looks sideways at husband*)

avoid unnecessary repetition

Blarghhh, let me show you⁴. Here’s a quote from a book I just finished⁵:

As a medieval historian who specializes in English sermons, the debate over gender-inclusive translations amuses me. It amuses me because…

Okay, stop. This isn’t conversational, it’s annoying. No one wants to hear us repeat ourselves. Maybe this works in TED talks, but it’s a bad writing move and it doesn’t serve our readers; it tries their patience. Much better to just combine the sentences, get rid of the duplicate words, and say “…amuses me because…”

But wait, it struck again in the very next paragraph:

I’ll admit that the debate also scares me. It scares me because…

WHAT IN THE WORLD. Why would anyone do this?! I’ve only seen similar sentence-bloating in high school papers where the student was trying to meet a word count on a subject they clearly had not studied, and were trying to smokescreen their lack of understanding with a lot of useless nonsense.

So, rules are good. Let’s keep them and use them. But also…

know how to break the rules

…but it has to be worth it. Like here, where Robert Frost shows us a glorious use of repetition, and he doesn’t overuse or abuse it. It’s a light touch, just enough for impact.

from Abide: Rest in the Running

Repeating the last line has deep meaning and purpose. And really, each of our sentences ought to have, at the very least, a purpose. (Not necessarily a deep one, but we do what we can.) Sentences and words without purpose are just taking up space and wasting the reader’s time.

And we can’t have that. There are too many books to read already.

---

P.S If you’re not into poetry but you still want to practice writing with rules to see how creative you (or your kids) are, this book is full of fun exercises I use with my homeschoolers:

Unjournaling by Dawn DiPrince and Cheryl Miller Thurston has 200 writing assignments in it, like “Write a sentence with every single word beginning with either a or t,” and “Shoot the moon. Write a story that has 20 ‘oo’ words.” It also has longer, slightly more complicated assignments that I didn’t want to copy. :)

1. Except for Emily Dickinson. I LOOOOVE her stuff.

2. Sorry babe. xo

3. I use The Creative Writer series by Boris Fishman with all my students — my own high schoolers, and those I’ve taught or tutored. It’s a 4-book series, super great.

4. Using three Hs in blarghhh is not unnecessary repetition, and here’s why: One H doesn’t sound nearly as frustrated as I feel, two Hs look suspiciously like a typo, but three Hs are just right. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

5. These quotes are taken from pages 132-133 of The Making of Biblical Womanhood by Beth Alison Barr. I sort of recommend this book but not really. If you’re interested, my review is here, and a much better resource for this topic is here.