Fiction, Poetry or Both

I love to write…I love it more than anything else I do. It is cathartic, surprising, challenging, and deeply personal. It is also frustrating, scary, humbling, and a journey. I like to write fiction AND poetry but I can’t seem to do both at the same time. I don’t shift gears easily.

I wonder if anyone else writes both and experiences the same problem or if it is just the way my brain works. I have a story rolling around in my head right now and it seems to block the poetry side of my thoughts. If I am on a roll with poetry, I can’t seem to switch to fiction.

Can I do both?

I feel like I should have started years ago and now I am running to catch up. Is that part of the problem? I seem to run forward and then crawl backwards to read and take notes and figure out what I need to know to keep moving forward. I think I have a talent for it. I know there is so much I need to learn. I’ve jumped ahead and there is a lot of bad writing to do with the goal of becoming better.

Maybe I just need to slow down and relax a bit…slow down and take more time with each piece. I have been taking part in the local Poet’s Society and it is a whole new high, to get an immediate reaction to what I have written. It motivates me to write more and better. I’m still stuck…but I know it is temporary.

5 thoughts on “Fiction, Poetry or Both

  1. Jae Rose

    Hi Dee – yes, you do have a talent..maybe it’s best just to write what you have churning away and in someways let other people decide if it’s ‘poetry’ or ‘fiction’ – can the two be interchangeable? can poems be re-spun into stories? Isn’t it a famous sports shoe brand (which comes in all sorts of wonderful colours)that says ‘Just do it!’..most of all keep enjoying it..and sharing it..glad you’ve joined a poetry group..Jae 🙂

    1. Dee Post author

      thanks Jae. It’s a weird thing that happens to me and frustrating. For now I will just write through it and see where it takes me. Your writing seems to cross over to both – poetic prose. Maybe it does all flow together eventually for me as well 🙂

  2. paschal

    Both. No rush there, sister. We’re living to 127 anyway, aren’t we? Time enough for all the writing that needs to come.

    1. Dee

      paradoxically – when there is time is when the writers block starts. I seem to do better when I do NOT have time (shakes head in frustration)
      It’s a conundrum professor.
      I have a story in the works. I am planning on shutting myself in my office and turning on something loud and rocking and see if I can sort of move through the fight scene…should be a hoot if I can manage to not injure myself or break a window!

  3. paschal

    I hear you on the paradox. I am reminded of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, poems scribbled on his lunch breaks, while working in Manhattan; whether half an hour or the full 60 minutes, an endless sea of time when compared to the usual five minutes max for the poems that shoot down the Lucy/Ethel conveyor belt for me. I like the idea – and challenge – of poems in the nooks of time.

    Summer is just round the bend there, Ms Writer.

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