I’m really excited to share this fascinating and insightful piece from YA (and middle grade!) author Cordelia Jensen. Jensen’s debut novel, Skyscraping is one I adored, and when I heard she had another verse novel coming, I couldn’t wait to read it.
Earlier this month, you might remember poet Amanda Lovelace sharing some of her favorite YA novels in verse. This essay digs into how those verse novels are structured, and offers up a wealth of additional verse novels for your reading needs. It will also pique your interest about The Way The Light Bends, out tomorrow, March 27.
But without further ado, Cordelia!
There is a wide debate about what makes a verse novel a verse novel. Generally, verse novels incorporate some conventions of poetry while telling a story. The most common poetic conventions used are: an increased use of white space and line breaks, an emphasis on imagery and on a playfulness with words, for instance by using repetition, alliteration or rhyme. However, something freeing about the verse novel is that each author essentially gets to decide how much poetic convention they might incorporate into their book. For example, some verse novelists tell a story in individual poems like in Melanie Crowder’s Audacity, whereas others use more of a stream-of-consciousness format such as Martine Leavitt’s My Book of Life By Angel, which is broken up only with lines from Milton’s Paradise Lost. How do these poetic choices then come to inform their story construction? What do verse novels have to do to make a story work? What do they get to bypass? How do the poetry conventions actually work to reveal story and lend themselves to creating a stronger novel?
For Skyscraping’s debut I wrote a post on imagery construction for E. Kristin Anderson’s blog Write All the Words! The post outlines the way Thanhaa Lai uses the image of the papaya to reflect the emotional growth of Hà in Inside Out & Back Again. I did my graduate work at Vermont College of Fine Arts on how authors can use imagery to reflect the psychosocial developmental stage and changing identity of the main character. Verse novels, because of their hybrid nature, have the ability to do this more than poetry or story. Skyscraping uses celestial imagery throughout the book because Mira, the main character, is studying astronomy and this pursuit helps her reflect upon the changing constellation of her family. In The Way the Light Bends, Linc is a photographer and, therefore, photography is used as the lens through which she sees the world and ultimately fuels her emotional growth. When writing verse novels, it is important to ground your image system in the reality of the main character. For example, in Home of the Brave, Kek’s emotional state is reflected in the weather since there is such a stark contrast between the weather where he lived in the Sudan versus the weather in Minnesota. The imagery makes sense because it describes what is on that character’s mind. This is often not true in poetry itself—a poet may skip from image connection to image connection because poetry does not need to be grounded in context or character. In fact, it is often purposefully not. However, in verse novels, imagery construction is as much reliant on poetic convention as it is on story convention.
As a verse novelist, having the ability to play with white space freely is great fun. In The Way the Light Bends, the main character is a gifted artist and this allowed me to play more with white space—to see myself as a sculptor—more so than I ever had before. Sometimes the play was just about the word itself, such as the word “up” being up a line from the word that precedes it. But, often, the interplay with white space doubled in meaning because of the story. So, for example, in the beginning of the book Linc sees herself as alone and as the rest of the world partnered around her, therefore she describes herself this way:
Here, the white space is used in a poetic way but it is a testament again to character and context that gives the lines their emotional depth. If this poem was read without the rest of the story you may not understand why Linc is feeling isolated. Read in context, you not only understand this but there is also a story promise set up that Linc will find a sense of belonging.
There are a few aspects of verse novels that make storytelling different than writing a conventional novel. The first is less emphasis on, and more creative freedom with regards to, dialogue. For example, in Skyscraping, I used recorded conversations between the main character and her father to give readers more access to the father’s voice. But no matter what, there will be less dialogue in a verse novel than a conventional novel because of the poetic form. This often presents a challenge to the author: How do you create fully fleshed out secondary characters with minimal dialogue? Even more challenging, how do you do this without having the lengthy narrative description you might in a novel? There are a number of ways verse novelists deal with this. The first might be to use multiple points of view that are stylistically different. This is something I explored in Every Shiny Thing, the co-authored Middle Grade book I have coming out in April. In this story, my character’s point of view is in verse, whereas my co-author, Laurie Morrison’s, character is in prose. Often, she was able to round out characters in her sections—through dialogue and description—that I, writing in verse, could not. There are other verse novels that span the thoughts of many characters, such as The Last Fifth Grade at Emerson Elementary by Laura Shovan, which incorporates eighteen points of view. But what about in a singular point-of-view verse novel? Can you show a secondary character’s emotional growth without including their point of view?
The answer is yes, but it is harder. One way to do this is to go back to a poetry device—imagery. In Caminar by Skila Brown, Carlos describes animal spirits as a way for us to see people in his life. And this comparison allows for the reader to see people as “proud” roosters or “smooth and fast” jaguars, giving us a deeper vision of that character. Another way to give more information about a secondary character can be if this character takes up a lot of room in the main character’s head. If so, the character will often speak to the point of view of this character in their minds, and, if there is a great sense of longing, come back in flashbacks, as in Jacqueline Woodson’s Locomotion.
Another storytelling difference in verse novels is the fact that you don’t need to transition the reader from scene to scene as much as you might in a novel. So, for example, you might begin a poem “the next day…” without having to write a whole paragraph about what happened between one day and the next. While this can sometimes feel jarring to the reader, linking imagery from one poem to the next, or keeping the tone of the poems similar, may help build connective tissue throughout and establish a more fluid and continuous narrative. Of course, it’s all a matter of personal preference, and some readers say the white space itself makes a verse novel more readable because it offers time to breathe, time to transition.
When I am writing verse novels, I often think of poems not as scenes but as moments or snapshots. In fact, one “scene” might be comprised of 3-4 overlapping poems or, just as often, one “scene” might be just one poem. Regardless, each of these “scenes” needs to bring your reader somewhere new. And, in addition, each scene must use white space, and incorporate some poetic language while developing character and story. That is quite a lot to do.
There are some poets and some novelists who look down on the verse novel form as something that doesn’t match the standards of their genre. I believe verse novels are their own genre and ought to be seen as both defying and incorporating the “rules” of poetry and the “rules” of storytelling. In an article for the ALAN review entitled “Verse Novels and the Question of Genre,” author Michael Cadden shows the verse novel in the center with its genre influences around it: novel, poetry and drama. He argues the drama genre is also an influence over the genre in as much as the verse itself can be seen as a sort of inner-monologue. Cadden argues that the modern verse novel is a great starting point to teach all three of these traditional genres plus teaching students about the creative strengths of the verse novel itself. Cadden says: “What the verse novel lacks in description and extended narration, it makes up for in its insistence that the reader provide those things on his or her own, both demanding and enabling the reader to imagine appropriate and personally satisfying images that match the context of the soliloquy and/or dialogue-driven narrative. By using the verse novel as touchstone text to learn more about three distinct genres, we would be learning how the verse novel itself is its own thing rather than a failed version of something else.”
Maybe more useful than thinking about what a verse novel isn’t, we might think about what it is: a highly-readable, emotional journey of a character(s) undergoing life-changing events as shown in a series of image-driven moments.
As photographer, Linc in The Way the Light Bends would say, we might envision the experience of reading or writing a verse novel this way: “Click/Click/See.”
***
Cordelia Jensen holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and teaches creative writing in Philadelphia, where she lives with her husband and children. She is also the author of Skyscraping. Follow her on Twitter @cordeliajensen.
About The Way The Light Bends
A powerful novel in verse about fitting in, standing out, defining your own self-worth, and what it takes to keep a fracturing family whole.
Virtual twins Linc and Holly were once extremely close. But while artistic, creative Linc is her parents’ daughter biologically, it’s smart, popular Holly, adopted from Ghana as a baby, who exemplifies the family’s high-achieving model of academic success.
Linc is desperate to pursue photography, to find a place of belonging, and for her family to accept her for who she is, despite her surgeon mother’s constant disapproval and her growing distance from Holly. So when she comes up with a plan to use her photography interests and skills to do better in school–via a project based on Seneca Village, a long-gone village in the space that now holds Central Park, where all inhabitants, regardless of race, lived together harmoniously–Linc is excited and determined to prove that her differences are assets, that she has what it takes to make her mother proud. But when a long-buried family secret comes to light, Linc must decide whether her mother’s love is worth obtaining.
A novel in verse that challenges the way we think about family and belonging.
