My Latest Project:

A Middle Grade Novel in Verse

set in Belfast Ireland in 1919

Why write a book in verse? Why indeed.

Here’s my 2 ½ cents worth:

Prose is a perfectly fine form of storytelling, and I love it.

Verse is another mode of expression for telling a story. Love that too.

I’m sometimes uncertain that I’m using this form correctly, but I find myself doing it anyway. If I’m writing a story or novel in prose and try to write an outline, or work out a scene, more likely than not, that outline or scene comes out in the form of poems. So, I wanted to figure out for myself what a poem is, how it functions as a storytelling mode, and maybe to express that so it might be of some benefit to others in reading a novel in verse. And, since that’s where my mind is these days, it came out in verse.

A poem is a honing
To get to the heart of a story,
its essence,
its pulse, its rhythm.

A story is a door opening,
A poem is a window, a glimpse
of a moment, a scene,
perhaps in that greater story,
but complete on its own.

Each word chosen has importance,
Perhaps for rhyming or rhythm,
but also, for clarity and flow.
Even the words that are absent are felt or intuited. 

Each stanza holds a story within a story.
Each line is important,
Each line break, a point of emphasis 
to guide us to the next thought, and the next,
to the end.	

And here’s a fun fact:

On Aer Lingus, the national airlines of Ireland, lines of poetry and Irish poets’ names are woven into the fabric of the seat covers. Unfortunately, because of the timeframe, I won’t be able to use that in my story. 😉