Writing Stories in Verse

By Aubra Penner

Welcome to the mysterious world of the story poem. This tutorial covers the fine art (or madness) of taking your creative idea and transforming it into a poem.

The Basics

Whether you wish to write a simple limerick, or a heroic epic that fills three leather-bound volumes and traces the life stories of five generations of characters, the basics are the same:

• Characters
• Plot
• Form
  • Meter
  • Rhyme
  • Vocabulary

Characters

You'll notice that I put characters before plot. That's because, in any sort of fiction, the story is not focused on what happens, but on who happens. Any story, short or long, that lacks a well-developed main character and supporting cast is destined to fall short of its ultimate potential. this is especially true with poetry, where the words spent on a character's description must be carefully spent; there is no time for wasted space as you try to relate an event without using the thoughts of your character, or as you attempt to puzzle out just what your character would think or do in the situation. You must know who your character is, from the very beginning.

In his wonderful book, The Playwright's Guidebook, Stuart Spencer points out that a character is defined, not by what he or she does, but by what he or she wants. Every action of every character is driven by a want: Amy ties her shoelace- she wants her shoe to stay on her foot; Mark eats a hamburger- he wants to stop feeling hungry; Lacy kills her father's murderer- she wants revenge. Everything, and I mean everything your character does is related in some way to what they want.

The correlation between want and action is not always so direct as Lacy's brutal act above: Lacy eats a nutritious breakfast- she wants to feel her best today; Lacy tries to feel her best today- she wants to be in good form to kill her father's murderer. Even when your character does not know what they want, or are resolved to ignore their desires, the want still influences their actions. So, Find out what your Character Wants.

The next part of creating your character is to decide on their more mundane aspects- hair color, age, likes and dislikes. You can have fun with this, especially if you look into some of the strange options you can have, like speech impediments or dialects, a peculiarity like blue hair, an obsession with having their socks be perfectly clean. Everyone has something odd and individual about them, and so does your character; you just have to find out what it is. Know Everything About Your Character.

A few words of caution: While it's easy for me to say that you should know everything about your character, it's not that easy to do it. It's better, and often vital, to leave a few blanks in your character. Sometimes, deep into your story, you will discover what your character really wants, or really knows, or really thinks about while he's washing his socks. Know when to make an exception to the rule.

Exercises:
The only exercise I really ever do with my characters is think about them a lot. I don't mean I list off their stats in my head and call it good- when I like a character, I like them. And put them everywhere. What would my spy character say if she were forced to work at the local burger franchise? (Want some cyanide with that?) What would my terminally shy character do if the guy from the video store made advances? (Burst into tears and flee to the drama section? Run off, movies in hand and unpaid, triggering the theft alarm on the way?) Put your character into a few very unlikely situations. Think it through. Laugh a lot.

However! I am admittedly addicted to play by post roleplaying. In games such as the ones I frequent, you are given a form to fill out before you are allowed to play that character. Here's a typical form:

Now, in these games it is accepted that the more detailed your descriptions, the more likely it is that your character will be allowed in the game and the higher your rank as a player will be. (for more information on play by post roleplaying, as well as more general advice on character development, go to http://www.geocities.com/keitsul/RPtutorial.html) Also, the more detailedly you sketch out your character, the easier it is to reply to unlikely, unexpected circumstances that other characters will present them with. So, inevitably, each player spends quite some time on each character. I don't think I would understand my characters half so well if I hadn't written dozens and dozens of these through the years. Fill out the form with more detail than you will ever need. Spend especial time on the personality section. Invent a character to fill the form out for; invent three. The practice can only help. Give one of them an unfortunate tic. Laugh a lot.

Plot

Now, what's next is just an extension of what went before; your characters are your plot. So, you have your characters, or at least an idea of who your characters might be. Now, you've got to let them do things. You probably already have an idea of what is going to happen. It probably came to you before the characters did. Now that you've fleshed your characters out a little more, has anything changed in your idea of the plot? Have more characters entered the picture? Have some made an ignominious retreat? Do you hate your idea and wish you'd never thought of it in the first place.

If your answer to any of those questions is yes, that's all right.

The first thing to consider after your characters is what is in their way. This is your plot. Your characters have a want, your plot is the obstacles and how your character overcomes them. In The Playwright's Guidebook, the author clearly lays out three outcomes:

• The character gets what they want.
• The character does not get what they want.
• The character's want changes; the character does not get what they originally wished for, but they come away with a deeper understanding, knowledge, or different circumstances than they began with.

Your job, as a writer, is to turn your characters loose like rats in a maze, with obstacles in their way, and get them past the obstacles with combinations of the three basic outcomes. Lacy kills her enemy; Lacy is killed by her enemy; Lacy has a sudden epiphany and has mercy on her enemy.

The fun part comes in when you start creating the obstacles and the solutions. Your setting plays a wonderful role in this- a medieval character might end up the victim of an ill-timed witch hunt; a sci-fi character might end up in a fight with lazer-bearing space octopi. Even if the accused witch and the calamari wrangler are basically the same character, their basic actions will be influenced by their surroundings and their experiences.

So, Your character creates your plot, and your plot in turn influences your character.

There's not really much to say on the subject of plots after that, except 'Go forth and multiply!' So, straight to the

Exercises:
Remember those throwaway characters you made in the first section? Whip out those character sheets. Make sure you didn't forget anything, peruse them for a while. Make a few artistic changes. Then take the first obstacle that comes to mind, no matter how inane, and walk them through it. No need to write it down, or even spend too much time on it. Just think it through a little. You're sitting in traffic. Your character, you decide, is sitting in traffic too. What do they do? (whip out a gun and blaze their way through to their exit? Slowly die of thirst? Pull a u-turn, cut a few doughnuts on the shoulder, and burn rubber back to Kansas?) Do what comes naturally to the character, follow their intuition. You can't go wrong with that. Try this with a few characters. Make more characters. Try more plots. Laugh a lot.

Form

Now that you're armed with at least a few basic ideas, you're ready to start making a few notes about your final product. I've divided this section into the three basic elements of verse, meter, rhyme, and vocabulary. Meter is the driving rhythm behind your story, carrying it from plodding to prosaic to unpredictable. It sets the pace. Rhyme, too, is responsible for rhythm, as well as flow. It dictates much of your layout, and how you will pace your story. Vocabulary lends much to the overall impression of your story, and does a lot towards establishing your setting and your time period. Each of them is their own private discipline, and each of them is vital.

Meter

Okay, I'll admit straight off that this is going to require learning a few new words. They're easy, I promise!

First we need to sort out what stress is. Stress is that part of a sentence that gets louder than the rest- we give it more emphasis. Say out loud, 'The ram and the lamb murdered Sam.'

Can you spot which syllables carried the stress? I can take a wild guess for you. I bet you a hundred lire that what you actually said was something like, 'The RAM and the LAMB MURdered SAM.'

Am I right, or am I right? (Even if I'm not, please go along with it for the sake of argument, okay?)

Well, these stresses are the basis of all verse. There's even a notation for them- ta is for unstressed syllables, and tum is for stressed ones. So that sentence could be written as, 'Ta TUM ta ta TUM TUM ta TUM.'

Got that down?

Good. Now you know how to read anything I'm going to throw at you. Time for the vocabulary.

Syllable Patterns

Iambic- an iamb (pronounced 'I-am' and 'I-am-Bik') is a unit of two syllables. They go, 'Ta TUM.' So, three iambs would sound like, 'Ta TUM ta TUM ta TUM.' 'The RED and BLUE and GREEN.'

Trocheic- a trochee (pronounced 'troke-ay' and 'troke-ay-ik') is the opposite of an iamb. 'TUM ta.' Three of them would be, 'TUM ta TUM ta TUM ta.' 'FIRST he SAT and THOUGHT some.'

There are many more patterns, all of them with fancy names. Dactylic and anapestic and so forth. You don't need to know these, really. What you do need to know is how you want your poem to sound. For inspiration, just do a google search for 'iamb trochee dactyl' and you'll find a hundred pages explaining every single pattern you could ever want. For now, just remember tum and ta. We'll get on to the second half of meter, and you can worry your pretty little head over the rest some other time.

Line Patterns

I'm not even going to get deep into names here, since they really have no bearing on what you'll want to do. They're most useful when labeling other people's work (Shakespeare wrote in Iambic Pentameter Blank Verse if that gives you an idea). Pentameter, sextameter, and all those fancy terms just mean how many units of stress you have per line. Iambic pentameter means there were five iambs per line- 'Ta TUM ta TUM ta TUM ta TUM ta TUM.'

Basically, this is how you decide the length of each line. How many of your syllable pattern do you want per line, or do you want a set number? Do you want to do a set number of syllables instead, and let the stress fall where it will? The way I decide this, usually, is to write a stanza of my proposed poem and see what I've done naturally, and if I like it. If not, I might make a few arbitrary decisions and go from there.

Rhyme

There's another type of notation for rhymes. It uses the letters of the alphabet, in order. So, let's look at a simple type of rhyme- a couplet.

The rhyme structure on this we would call, 'AA'

Now let's look at a limerick.

This has an 'AABBA' rhyme scheme. And, if you look at the syllables, you'll see that the pattern is long long short short long, with the tums and tas more or less trochaic. See how it all comes together?

So, as you can see, each new line ending is assigned a letter, and all the ones that sound like it are that letter too. If one line never has to rhyme, you can just label it 'x'. X is the wildcard, it means any sound you want to throw in there. And again, this isn't really necessary for writing your own poems. It can, though, come in very handy.

Exercises:
Put one of your throwaway plots into verse. Get really goofy with your rhymes and rhythms- see if you can get to 'z' in sextameter or something equally silly. See how far you can get in a rhyme scheme ending only in 'a'. Laugh a lot.

Vocabulary

This is our final chapter, as well as our shortest. The selection of vocabulary is a very individual process, and requires mainly a gut reaction. However, there are a few common sense things to think about.

Let's go back to our midieval character and her futuristic, sci-fi mirror. Would she, as she fled her persecutors, mutter, 'Man, this is less cool than a cheap threedee!' And, in her battle against the creatures of the deep, would her lazer-bearing cousin implore of them, 'Prithee! Why accost thou me so?'

I don't think so.

So, in dialogue try to remember that someone is actually saying these lines. Regardless of the rhyme scheme, which few characters would actually keep in their normal speech, they are still communicating through their words, and they'll want to use the words that come naturally.

This also plays a part in your narration. Narration tends to flow better if kept within the range of the characters' experiences. Your narration in a world that has yet to invent the wheel may lose the reader if you start talking about ATV races. Space age stories, on the other hand, might not even give a wheel passing reference. They'll be talking about nullo boots and reverse polarity.

For the most part, the integrity of the story will be best served by narration that could be comfortably read by the contemporaries of the main characters. Lots of prithees for the seventeenth century, 'nark' as common vernacular in the sixties, threedee for the year two thousand eighty. It makes sense, neh?

Exercises:
Take a deep breath. Get out your lucky pen and your kitten stationary. And start that poem. Laugh a lot, and email me when you finish it!

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