Excerpt from “Personal Poetry for Novelists”

By Gwendolyn Womack, 3-28-2025

Note from Mark Waldman: Gwendolyn Womack wrote this wonderful article to celebrate April’s National Poetry Month. She is the USA Today bestselling author of The Fortune Teller and the RWA Prism Award-winning reincarnation thriller, The Memory Painter, and her word reflect the recent research coming from the field of neurocognitive poetics: Poetic writing and speaking is essential for effective communication with others.

Your brain learns through song and melodic talking, and when you learn how to think in brief poetic phrases followed by several seconds of seconds, the listener’s brain can take the time to turn your words into meaningful expressions that personal value. Even nonfiction writing needs to follow the rules of prosody if you want to hold the reader’s attention.   – Mark Waldman

Gwendolyn Womack:

April is National Poetry Month, and it inspired me to write this post. I call it “personal poetry for novelists” because I’m talking to writers who are attempting to write books, not poets who are writing poems. Masterful poets spend their entire careers focused on their craft. So I’m not suggesting anyone can write a brilliant poem. What I am suggesting is that novelists should gift themselves the creative freedom to write some poetry. Closet poetry. Layman’s poetry. Bad poetry. Whatever kind of poetry you want. And here’s why:

Think of poetry as yoga for words. Flowing Tai Chi for feelings. Karate for mental thought. While writing poetry, you can stretch your wordplay, bend your meanings, dive into thematic ideas, and play with a word playground you usually don’t allow yourself to visit. We tend to keep our characters and plots front and center. With poetry, thoughts, feelings, and ideas instead take center stage. That coupled with a wellspring of words to dip into can be very refreshing! Writing poetry—even bad-God-awful poetry—will pull and tug on a creative muscle inside of you and allow a newfound flexibility when you return to your work.

I have used poetry for years as a tool of creative self-expression and exploration. I’ve also ended up using lines from one of my poems in a book, either as character dialogue or a reflective moment within the prose. I also have found inspiration reading poetry. The power of words compacted into the singular precision of a poem is so inspiring to me. The incredible weight of a single word. A line. A break. It reminds me to bring my own rhythm and form into the novel I’m working on. Poetry is also a great reminder to trim the narrative fat and cut out what is not important in the manuscript ….  (Read the entire article here: https://writerunboxed.com )