Minimal Words, Maximum Impact
- A chapter from How To Write Evocative Poetry -
The human mind evolved to conserve energy. It doesn’t want to waste time trying to interpret ambiguity or confusion. When faced with such, most will give up and move on. This isn’t to say that we don’t want to be challenged, but rather we want to be challenged in a way that we desire. If the grammar and spelling in this book was off, you wouldn’t have read this far, the effort would have been too much. If I used a weird/borderline illegible font to present my poetry, it would never be read. You would take one look at it and move on.
The next time you see advertisements, either in person or online, study the font choice and number of words used. Chances are that it is big, bold, clear, and focused. Marketing agencies know that they have minimal time to attain maximum impact.
Do the same with your writing. Use as few words as possible to convey meaning. Remove all loose words. Replace stanzas with sentences, and sentences with words. Cut everything that adds no new information to a sentence. Remove all instances of ‘very’, replacing them with their single word replacements, eg: ‘very big’ becomes ‘humongous’. Most instances of ‘that’ can be removed without impacting meaning. Practice with haiku and twitter posts as the restricted nature of the format forces brevity. There is a temptation to over explain yourself. Don’t. Trust your reader to get it and allow them to come up with their own meanings.
Initially Fleeting’ was significantly longer, but subsequently far less powerful, ‘When eyes meet for a fleeting moment, the possible futures fractaled outward endlessly…’, became:
Fleeting
Eyes meet
A fleeting moment
Futures fractal
Possibilities endlessTurn away
A moment passes
Fading memories
What can never be
I started remember with ‘and then’. What happened before this instance is irrelevant to the point of the poem and would have distracted and detracted from its power.
remember
and then
you remember
the breath
and the silence
within
All unnecessary words have been cut from the poem tomorrow. Nothing more can be cut without altering meaning, nor can anything be added.
tomorrow
i’m borrowing
from tomorrow
to pay
for today
The poem angry conveys a message as briefly as possible and thus is quite powerful.
angry
i’m angry
at you
for not being
more
like me
No matter the length of the poem, you want it to be as concise as possible. Consider all the longer poems shared within this book. Hopefully there are no loose words, or unnecessary repetition. Of course, you may want to purposefully repeat a phrase, word, or symbol to convey meaning or drive home a point – as long as it is a conscious choice, you are golden.
Summary
Be brief.
This chapter is from the book How To Write Evocative Poetry
