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Re: Versify: Novels in Verse
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From: Rosanne Parry <rosanneparry_at_comcast.net>
Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2012 21:55:35 -0700
"There is a telescoping that occurs in a novel in verse, a sense of urgency and purposefulness, a let's-get-to-the-heart-of-things mentality."
I've been a traditional poetry fan all my life, so I read novels-in-verse with interest when they came to my attention about a dozen years ago.
My upcoming novel was, in one of many revisions, a novel-in-verse. The gift of that stretch of ten years when I was writing but had nothing under contract was that I had time to experiment widely with genres and formats without the pressure of a deadline or a publishers expectations. I experimented with tense and narrative distance and still wasn't satisfied with the result, so I gave blank verse a try, not really knowing what to expect. What I found, as Maggie eloquently pointed out, was that reducing the word count by 60-70% really does force you to pick the most powerful scenes and the most compactly evocative language. Because it was such good practice I did a second full draft in blank verse in first person. By paring the story down to it's core ideas, the story became much stronger than anything I'd written up to that point and it became the story that got me an offer of representation.
In the end I wasn't satisfied with the verse version of the novel. It took the voice of the character too far away from the more formal and wordy storytelling style of her tribe. So I went back and rewrote it in prose. But that prose version was vastly improved by having tried blank verse. I don't know if I'll ever write a novel-in-verse again, but I do know that it is far more complicated an endeavor than the lean word count would suggest.
Rosanne Parry WRITTEN IN STONE, 2013 SECOND FIDDLE, 2011 HEART OF A SHEPHERD, 2009 www.rosanneparry.com
On Apr 4, 2012, at 3:59 PM, maggie_bo_at_comcast.net wrote:
There is a telescoping that occurs in a novel in verse, a sense of urgency and purposefulness, a let's-get-to-the-heart-of-things mentality.
Received on Wed 04 Apr 2012 09:55:35 PM CDT
Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2012 21:55:35 -0700
"There is a telescoping that occurs in a novel in verse, a sense of urgency and purposefulness, a let's-get-to-the-heart-of-things mentality."
I've been a traditional poetry fan all my life, so I read novels-in-verse with interest when they came to my attention about a dozen years ago.
My upcoming novel was, in one of many revisions, a novel-in-verse. The gift of that stretch of ten years when I was writing but had nothing under contract was that I had time to experiment widely with genres and formats without the pressure of a deadline or a publishers expectations. I experimented with tense and narrative distance and still wasn't satisfied with the result, so I gave blank verse a try, not really knowing what to expect. What I found, as Maggie eloquently pointed out, was that reducing the word count by 60-70% really does force you to pick the most powerful scenes and the most compactly evocative language. Because it was such good practice I did a second full draft in blank verse in first person. By paring the story down to it's core ideas, the story became much stronger than anything I'd written up to that point and it became the story that got me an offer of representation.
In the end I wasn't satisfied with the verse version of the novel. It took the voice of the character too far away from the more formal and wordy storytelling style of her tribe. So I went back and rewrote it in prose. But that prose version was vastly improved by having tried blank verse. I don't know if I'll ever write a novel-in-verse again, but I do know that it is far more complicated an endeavor than the lean word count would suggest.
Rosanne Parry WRITTEN IN STONE, 2013 SECOND FIDDLE, 2011 HEART OF A SHEPHERD, 2009 www.rosanneparry.com
On Apr 4, 2012, at 3:59 PM, maggie_bo_at_comcast.net wrote:
There is a telescoping that occurs in a novel in verse, a sense of urgency and purposefulness, a let's-get-to-the-heart-of-things mentality.
Received on Wed 04 Apr 2012 09:55:35 PM CDT
