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Young Writers Society


Epic Poems/Fiction in Poetry



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Wed Apr 20, 2016 6:07 am
Werthan says...



I feel like I really want to write books as epic poems (and short stories as not-so-epic poems). Is that a good idea or bad? I don't think any fictional stories in poem form have gotten published recently, and if they have, they're not widely sold or read. I plan on having another job besides being an author anyways so I might as well. I pretty much write all my stories so far like prose-poems with how much attention I pay to how words sound, how different the diction is from normal speech, and how much metaphorical imagery I use.
Und so lang du das nicht hast
Dieses: Stirb und Werde!
Bist du nur ein trĂ¼ber Gast
Auf der dunklen Erde

(And as long as you don't have
This: Die and become!
You are only a gloomy guest
On the dark Earth)

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  





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Thu Apr 21, 2016 3:52 am
Aley says...



I think you might want to narrow your goal down to a chap book rather than doing something as huge as an epic. If you research it I think you'll find that most epics are written in a certain style, they have rhyme, meter, etc, that they keep throughout the entire thing. It's a huge challenge. I mean, sure, you can always try, but there's an easier way to write a story in poetry than that ^.-

You can make a chap book with a collection of poems that all follow the same events, the same people, etc, and just, have many many many different poems revolving around the same idea. This is actually really popular in Latina/Latino writing, such as "The Latin Deli" as an example, and "Drown" which is a bunch of short stories, and several others, that I don't remember the name of right now.

Basically, they arrange a bunch of different poems into sections of a story. I think @AliceAfternoon is trying to do something like that too.

The thing you have to be careful about is that when you're writing like this you've got to be sure to not get too preachy as you write. Keep it conversational. Like diary entries about the situations that are going on in your plot. If you use this avenue you can really explore everything you want, any point of view, any area, anything really, you can even make a poem just to describe a scene, then like, the next 3 use that scene as their, well, scene. It could be done really really well.

Or you can go to the epic poem thing. Check out The Faerie Queen by Edmund Spenser, Child Harolde's Pilgramage by Lord Byron, and of course Paradise Lost by Miltion if you want some examples of poetic epics.
  





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Thu Apr 21, 2016 3:59 am
Charm says...



@Aley I did try and write what I called a story based poetry collection. It was a bunch of free verse poems following a girl named Marigold.
It was hard but fun so if you're up to the challenge I'd recommend it. I wouldn't say I was trying to write a novel though. It was mostly 15 poems so nothing huge like a novel.
  








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