Many of the most original fiction writers – from Margaret Atwood to Grace Paley to Chicago’s own Stuart Dybek, Sandra Cisneros, and Luis Urrea – have also been poets and draw much of their power from a poetic approach to fiction writing.
In this class, we’ll explore the intersection of poetry and fiction, highlighting the poetic techniques that can help us as fiction writers. What can we learn about economy from poets, who weigh and sweat every line and word so intensely? What can we learn from works that rely for their movement and integrity on image or metaphor rather than plot or character? What structural lessons can we draw from poetry and poetic forms such as the sonnet and villanelle?
The biggest question we’ll explore is how thinking about language like a poet can aid in writing fiction. Writing a great story or novel begins with writing a great sentence, and this is where the poets can help us most. Learning to trust our ears as fiction writers – prioritizing rhythm and word choice, using alliteration, assonance, repetition, rhyme, etc. – doesn’t just result in more vibrant language. Focusing intensely on sentence-making leads to larger discoveries about story and character. It is generative and not, as fiction writers sometimes believe, mere medium or icing.
We will read illustrative examples from both poetry and fiction in class and do several short, painless exercises. Our focus is not on prose poems, though we’ll read some, but on using poetic techniques in longer fictional forms.
