It may be presumptive of me to title this post after Stephen King’s famous guide to writing.

Suffice it to say that this post cannot and will not attempt to replicate the level of insight that “On Writing” offers – rather, I’ll be going over common advice and historical tidbits that I’ve picked up throughout my journey in writing poetry.

This is a living document, to be updated with further thoughts from a future, wiser me. I hope what follows may offer some insight to you.

Start local.

You need to start somewhere, and the fastest way to get better is to have other people read it. Take it to forums, text it to friends, take a class if you can. Start a blog! 😀

I guarantee that people will want to read work about themselves, so if you’re hurting for readers then try your hand at writing about someone else. You may not get an honest opinion from them about your poem, but give it a shot. Either way, personally-crafted gifts (especially unexpected ones) are just really, really nice things to get.

Read poetry

Seriously, read poetry if you want to write it. It’s a good way to give yourself ideas and see what works for other people. You’ll find new weird words to use, new turns-of-phrase, new perspectives on common things. The Poetry Foundation is an excellent resource, as they are probably the foremost authority on modern Western poetry. Other magazines exist, but there are too many to name. All I can say is that your best bet is to track down individual poems you like and then see if there is a magazine that publishes more in that style. Once you find that, you’re well on your way to getting published or finding new favorites, whichever suits your goals.

Keep an eye on your writing practices

Common advice says that you should be writing a certain amount every day until you find a level that you’re comfortable with. This is not a requirement. If you find yourself dreading the thought of sitting at your computer and writing, then change your approach and give yourself a break. It is proven that people can become averse to anything if it causes enough stress over time, and the best way to kill your desire to write is to beat yourself up over self-imposed requirements like word-count or poems-per-week or whatever. I wrote every day for months in order to get my thesis published, and my ability to sit down and write suffered because of it. Your brain is a muscle too, and overworking it for short-term goals can harm your long-term prospects.

Write because you can.

Ezra Pound said there are six kinds of poets: the inventors, the masters, the dilutors, the minors, belles-lettres, and the starters of crazes. The inventors created new forms while the masters perfected them: Ezra Pound is credited with influencing much of the imagist movement, while T.S. Eliot and Hilda Doolittle (also known as H.D., a criminally under-appreciated artist who I highly recommend) are regarded as the prime examples of imagist poets. Dilutors flood the poetry game with sub-par work in order to capitalize on the popular: they remain forgettable. Minor poets are mostly good poets writing mostly good poetry, who are remembered largely through personal taste. Belles-lettres originally meant “beautiful” or “fine” writing, loosely-defined as anything that didn’t fall into the larger literary categories. Pound uses it in a slightly pejorative way, to describe poetry of beautiful language without much deeper meaning. The starters of crazes, as the name indicates, began fads and trends that did not ultimately have much impact on the historical continuum of art.

I wrote all of that to illustrate poetry’s tendency to try and define/divide itself. Music does the same thing with hundreds of sub-genres, as any metal-head or folk fan can tell you. With those six types of poets, Pound is deciding the value of different pieces of art – and at the time, few people were in a better position to do so. He was the king-maker. People like him are still around, claiming what is and isn’t good or great. Sometimes they have audiences, and sometimes they’re just words next to a name in a comment section. Often, the most critical eye comes from within.

So if you’re trying to write and you’re worried about not being good enough for those people, remember that art is a means of expression. You have your own unique, valuable way of seeing things, and an audience will find you even if it’s just one family member, or one friend, or your cat, or your cactus. I’m hardly an accomplished author, but if you need permission to write something, anything, then you have it from me. Do it, because you have something to say.