Being new to twitter, I just discovered the poetry prompts there. While most of them lead to love poems, I’ve been trying to let them spark a fantasy type poem. Something like this:

Prompt: deep inside

Light a tiny flicker of flame                                                                                                          Breathe O2 and feed                                                                                                                               a growing blaze                                                                                                                                deep inside                                                                                                                                            and burn the town                                                                                                                              the dragon sees.

I’ve argued before that poetry is a good place to practice building powerful metaphors and watching the tempo of the story. And in twitter length work, that takes attention.

We story-tellers need to learn to work as hard as poets. Too often, we put the structure of the tale—the need for a red herring in a mystery or a glitch in the new technology in sci-fi—right there on the surface for all to see. Metaphors are thrown in to liven up a boring scene, and symbols are placed like streetlights where we cannot miss them. The tools of the trade become a gaudy  frame that it is hard to look past.

The best stories, the best chapters in our novels, are the ones where the symbol has become the form, and the twist in the plot is also a metaphor. In the tales that work, dialogue is not just set in place like lines in a play script, but speaks with the voice of the character. These are the stories where the tools become the window we look through to see the world the teller imagined for us.

So those of us who want to write stories, should practice writing poetry. Talk to a poet or three about how they sublimate the tools of their craft into the poem. Read poetry, not just the epic story-telling kind, but the haiku that captures a moment. Write poems to practice attending to rhythm and sound. Then come back to the story and craft each scene, each sentence, each bit of dialogue, like a line of poetry.  True, there is a limit to how much time we have to devote to each chapter of a long novel, but the time we spend will pay off in a story that feels real and  alive, something the reader can almost see.