Trying a Line by Owen Townend

 

In prose, I constantly admire a writer who is able to drop poetic sentences like jewels. Sometimes these aren’t entirely appropriate and may even slow plot momentum but they are no less beautiful for it. It’s the literary equivalent of stopping to smell the roses.

            However I’m not particularly adept at writing such stunning imagery, at least not for longer stories. When it comes to my more plot-focused fiction, each sentence serves to keep things moving. They’re often short, simple and riddled with inoffensive cliché.

            It’s in my character-focused fiction where I find the time to make a moment pretty and quotable. However this doesn’t always work, usually because I’m trying too hard to catch the eye.

            My most egregious offences include drawn-out metaphors that don’t comfortably apply to the matter at hand, and embarrassing misreads of the analogy.

            Example time. Let’s say I’m waxing lyrical about falling in love for the first time. In a fit of utter theatricality, I churn out ‘As he danced across the square, the world was in tune: each polite throat clearing and clink of al fresco crockery joining to become a sweet ballad bearing the name Katya.’ Such a love scene has been written a billion times though the moving parts within this example make it stand out in a twee way. For one thing I certainly haven’t thought how polite throat clearing and crockery clinks can join together into a ballad of all things. Have I actually ever heard a ballad before? Research is required before letting any other eyes see this.

            Another instance. This time I’m writing about guilt at murder. I decide to phrase it ‘The memories stalked her with the pitchforks and torches of her enemies.’ If these so-called enemies used their pitchforks for farm work and torches for lighting the way, then this attempt at a play on words comes across as weak. A dedicated reader may get a feeling of what I’m driving at but, at the same time, there is a definite failure to connect.

            There is a definite art to getting this emotional sentence right. Though I have managed it a couple of times now, I wouldn’t say I’ve mastered it. Perhaps I’ve become too pragmatic to be a true poet. More likely I’m too wrapped up in getting the central idea across in plain English, let alone language that could test the patience of even the most attentive beta readers.

            Every time I do exercise my inner-poet, I refer to it as ‘trying a line’. It’s an innocuous phrase that could be applied to a variety of contexts that have nothing to do with being a show-off writer, but I like it for its simplicity. Maybe that’s precisely the problem.

            I wish I could be the kind of writer who can slow down long enough to tailor a striking turn of phrase, but my storytelling brain is much too flighty. I do have such talent in me but my pun brain generally prefers to muck around in day-to-day life rather than contribute to precise creative moments. On occasion the two rustle up a pleasant surprise but not often enough.

            Edits are better for that. The pressure is off for taking out certain words and slotting others in. In fact, I’d argue that my editing brain is the actual writer of my good poetic lines because it has had time away to think about how everything joins together. While Draft 1 is a crude rush, Draft 2 is an educated pleasure.

            You see? I just tried for a line at the end of the last paragraph. Do you think it worked?