Young Writers Society

I'm very interested in this subject because lately freeverse novels have just been pretty popular. SimonPulse has advertised their major freeverse novelist, Ellen Hopkins, author of "Burned", "Impulse", "Glass", and "Crank". The newest one is novice Lisa Schroeder with "I Heart You, You Haunt Me". So what's up with all these stunning debuts in a seemingly contemporary section of fiction?

I'm not sure. There's always been something about these books that I've admired: quirkiness. Personality. Eloquence. In just a few words, that author can convey it all. I'm not sure if it's the author or the style, the ease of the book.

One of the reasons I was curious about this new thing was because for some reason I've had an urge to write a freeverse novel myself. "I Heart You" was just so powerful, so beautiful, it nearly made me cry in Hardback Cafe.

But here's my main question: How is it done? There must be some point of "freeverse" novels, in that there's not really a format, right? Is this just an area where you can go with your gut concerning word placement and all? Or is there some sort of order that goes with it?

Feel free to discuss that, and anything that comes up with it, here.

I'm not the greatest Ellen Hopkins fan, but it seems to me she chose the format because it's easy to tell the story with a good degree of emotion--it's "raw".

The problem--to me, anyway--with Ellen Hopkins novels is that they're too raw. It's harder to have backstory in free verse because it ends up sound exactly the way prose would, which is where those novels begin to lose their luster. It's why story poems are best in rhyming verse--it's too easy to slip back into regular prose. There's a big difference between poetry and prose. Some authors can blur these lines effectively, but most YA free verse novels don't. It's just prose in a freaked-out format.

If you're going to write a free-verse, I would make sure to practice a little before you set out on a novel. Get the basics down: how are you going to present a legitimate storyline this way? How do you like the words to sound? Have some people read it for you and see how you're doing.

And don't write things for shock value. Please? If you have it in your head that you are going to write something Controversial, there will be many not-controversial things about it. Like the fact it will be bad.

But, alack! I have faith in you. You've got enough sense of what to do with words to do it well. ^_^

Ohh. I see.

I wouldn't do it in shock value. It's just that the novel I had in mind seemed like it'd be best to tell in freeverse, since "I Heart You" did it so well. But then again, I am not much of a poet myself.

XD

I've read a couple of Ellen Hopkins' books and I still don't see the magic. It's sort of like... the verse is just a veil for another one of those teen novels that I never would have picked up in the first place except that my librarian recommended it. *shrug*

It sort of reminds me of Alexander Pope... like, "Hey, I don't know if this will stand well enough on its own... let's write it in verse instead!"

I think if you're going to write something in verse, it really ought to be something that can't be written in prose, if that makes sense. It should be something that needss the verse.

I've never read any Hopkins, so I can't comment on her - what I have read is the fantastic The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth. It's entirely in verse, and is much the better for it: Seth is an incredible writer with or without the technique, but here he pulls it off brilliantly.

If you're looking for other examples, you should read Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, which is one of the classic staples of Russian literature, written all in iambic tetrameter. Equally brilliant (though different, of course) is Bēowulf for giving you some guidance on how to write in verse - there are several translations, but especially relevant to this discussion is one of the latest, a translation by Seamus Heaney. Heaney is a poet first and foremost, and it really shows, as he's managed to keep a gloriously fresh sense of the Anglo-Saxon poetic style and spirit in the translation, something I think other translations have been lacking.

Anyway, those are just a couple of examples - Vikram Seth is probably the easiest to read and the most contemporary, but you're really and truly missing something from your literary life if you haven't read the other two, they're both - quite rightly - classics.