Because verse can accomplish things prose cannot?

Because experimenting with new methods and styles is the best way to stay fresh in the midst of a long career?

Simply for the challenge?

Because, beyond the hard work of it, writing a story in verse is great fun?

For me it was all of the above.

Little Dog, Lost, published by Atheneum last spring, was my first novel in verse. I am currently working on my second, Patches. I made the initial leap for the most mundane of reasons. Writing in verse creates lots of attractive white space on the page.

That alone, all that white space, is a huge asset for developing readers. It makes the page look accessible, thus encouraging them to wade in, and delivers the lines in bite-sized chunks for easier deciphering. For a few years before beginning Little Dog, Lost, I had been writing young novellas, and I had grown tired of the necessary restrictions on sentence length that limited my style. I like writing for younger readers. I like the kinds of stories that work for them. But I longed to go back to writing with the stylistic flow of my older work. I also wanted to create a story that wasn’t age-specific, one that, by being easy to read and offering a captivating story, would appeal to a wide audience.

But simply breaking up prose lines to make them more readable doesn’t make a verse novel. I pulled up a copy of Little Dog, Lost recently and spread the words across the page just to see if making it look like prose would turn it into prose. The effect was … weird. Clearly when I write this way I am doing something different with language and even with my story. By striving toward poetry, I’m writing as I do for a picture book, every word weighed, the rhythm of every line tasted.

Something more is involved, though, and that something is harder to name.

The most important concept to understand in writing picture books is resonance. We are often told that picture book texts should be like an iceberg, ten percent above the surface, ninety percent below. Every word and phrase of a good picture books stands in for more, much more. The text allows us to feel what lies beneath the words. That’s resonance. And that’s exactly what a verse novel must have.

But is it possible to write a novel that way, relying on mostly unspoken meaning?

That is the key question. I used to resist reading novels in verse, let alone writing one. I found most of them thin. They rarely gave me what I most seek when I enter the world of story, a deep connection with a character. If I’m going to inhabit a story—as writer or reader—I want to enter it through a character, to become that character and have the story happen to me.

If a verse novel is written in a first-person stream of consciousness—as is often done in YA verse novels—then the reader can live richly inside the main character’s psyche and experience little loss. (Or the loss, if there is one, is apt to come from losing out on the energy of direct action.) If, however, the story is being told in a more traditional third-person perspective (or through a narrator’s voice, as I’m doing in both of my verse novels) with the presentation being more dramatic than internal, then resonance is the key.

And how is resonance achieved when you’re writing thousands of words instead of the few hundred of a picture book? Through the same painstaking effort a picture book text requires. Each line scanned, again and again, each word examined. Each scene weighed for its emotional impact. Each character encapsulated, presented in as few words as possible, but made as whole as possible in those few words.

And after doing all that, do we get the same results we would get writing a story in prose? No. There is much that is rather routinely played out writing in prose that will be left to the underwater part of a story in verse.

But when we make resonance work, our verse novels have the kind of impact the best picture books do.

If they really work, they may even do what picture books are most famous for, call their readers back again and again and again.

That’s true of stories, anyway, and it’s something I’ve known about them for a long time. In fact, when I first assemble a story I always have a few basic things in place: the story problem, the character who will struggle to resolve the problem, other characters who will assist or create more difficulty along the way, the incident that starts the story off and . . . the ending. I won’t necessarily know how my main character is going to resolve her problem, but I will understand, like a shiver that reaches to the soles of my feet, exactly what a resolution will feel like.

It’s the feeling that is key, and knowing that, feeling it, will also let me know what my story means, will reveal what English teachers refer to as my story’s theme. When I’m writing I never put that meaning into words, though. My story has to work by making the reader feel, not through handing out lessons. 

I have always been intrigued with writers who tell me that they sail into a story without knowing the ending. I’ve even heard some say, “If I knew the ending, I wouldn’t write the story.  I write in order to find out how it will turn out.” And though I would never argue with anyone else’s method of working—if it works for you, it works—I don’t understand how such a journey is possible.

To me, setting off to write a story without knowing where it is going would be very much like starting a road trip without deciding whether my destination is going to be California or New York. If I were driving, I would end up circling endlessly somewhere in Indiana.

This is something I’ve known about my own writing for a long time. And yet it’s something, every now and then, I find myself having to discover again. And I’ve just bumped into this simple truth about the way I work once more.

And bumped hard.

This winter after breaking my elbow and finding myself unable to keyboard, I began writing by dictating through voice-recognition software. At the time, I was working on Blue-Eyed Wolf, a long-suffering young-adult novel, but after dictating a couple of new scenes I grew distrustful of the process. Writing through dictation seemed to be altering my style, not a good thing halfway through a long novel

And so I decided to take a leap—eyes practically closed—into a new verse novella similar to Little Dog, Lost, which I especially enjoyed writing. Verse seemed a medium more conducive to dictation. The story I landed in is about a calico cat, and, at least for now, it’s called Patches. (Often my titles come last.) And so I began writing, that is dictating, with an idea half formed. I did, however, have a general kind of ending in mind. It wasn’t the definitive moment of strong feeling I usually rely on, but at least I knew where everyone would be by the last scene.

I wrote the whole story or nearly the whole story. I discovered various interesting events as I proceeded, as I always do.  But when I got to the end I encountered a problem. The conclusion I’d been aiming toward was too vague. And when I stepped into the squishy territory of this vague ending, I discovered that I could go on and on and on, writing more and more events. But I absolutely could not draw what was supposed to be a small, simple story to a conclusion, because no conclusion I could imagine felt right, nothing I tried meant anything. 

A story doesn’t end because the characters have finally arrived at some defined place. You end your story when you’ve revealed your heart’s truth, especially to yourself. And if your heart’s truth—the reason you began writing to start with—is going to mean anything to us when we encounter it, the story must be aimed at that truth from the first lines. That’s what makes it truth when we get there, that we’ve known it all along.

As I write this, though, I still have a story without an ending. So . . . what’s to be done? Go back to the beginning, of course. Find out why I entered this story at all. And then set my compass again.

California, here I come. Or will it be New York?

All I know is I’ve got to get out of Indiana!

Here are some more responses to my question:

Janet Fox said this:

I have such a similar story, in a way. My mother was a frustrated writer. She wrote children’s stories at a time I was off doing everything else but writing. She died suddenly, and I found a batch of her unpublished work among her papers, and that’s what started me on my path today.

So now I write for my mother—not because she discouraged me, but because she never saw her work in print. Every success I have, I think, “You’d love this, Mom. You’d be happy.”

I don’t want to die without having made every effort to write the best possible stories. For my readers, of course, but also for my mom.

So once again the motivator lies in a relationship with a parent. It would be interesting to know whether, if I were talking to people who write for adults, the motivation underlying their careers would, so reliably, go back to the primal parent/child relationship.

Carol Brendler took the conversation in a different and interesting direction. This is what she said:

I have never thought about the courage it takes to become a writer. I know all about persistence, but have never considered how brave it is of me to try this work. Wow. Where did it come from, this courage? From a deep-seated need to prove to an indifferent world that I do indeed have something worthwhile to contribute to it (beside producing one very smart and handsome child)? Is it a play for attention? Or is it simply that I have no marketable skills or aptitude for anything other than playing with words and telling tales? None of these seem courageous. Let me think about this some more, because I’d really like to think that I might be courageous.

After reading Carol’s comment, I had to stop to ask myself why I used the word courage? I decided that the word came out of precisely the kinds of questions she poses: Can I stand in the face of an indifferent world? If I do, will anyone ever notice? Can I accept the fact that playing with words and story is my sole talent and take ownership of that talent, no regrets allowed? No one gets past those kinds of questions without courage.

Sandra Warren, whom I quoted last week, also took on the question of “courage.” This is what she said:

Our writing isn’t what takes courage. It’s the believing that it’s good enough for someone else to read; good enough to want to get it published; good enough for a publisher to want it; a belief strong enough to sustain us through the process–the rejection that surely comes–to stick to it, persist and not quit; that’s the part that takes COURAGE.

Where my courage comes from I’m not sure. All I know is that deep down I have this strong belief that I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing.

And that’s exactly what I’m talking about, the courage that keeps us at a task—often for years—because we believe in what we’re doing and choose to go on believing even when the world has yet to support us in our conviction.

I especially like that Sandra ends with “All I know is that deep down I have this strong belief that I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing.”

What better place to end this discussion?