A Writer's Notebook, Day One-Thousand-Two-Hundred-And-Thirty-Nine

I am still working on writing more fiction, and I am thinking about what it is that allows me to feel comfortable writing poems on command, more or less.  A large part of that is my recognition that anything can be put into a poem, that whatever thoughts I am having can be shaped in order to express the idea is a poem.  The problem in trying to do the same with fiction is that I seem to feel there are certain necessary elements that can't just emerge in that same way as in poetry, but when I consider this more and more, I feel like it is really just an illusion.  I had a similar feeling when I started working to get back into writing poetry a few years ago, and I certainly did not have the sense, at that time, that I had the capacity to take any thoughts or feelings I was contemplating and use them to generate a poem.  Note that I am not in any way saying these are always good poems, but just that I recognize that anything can be fit into that form, and that I can access a way to do that without much difficulty and without needing to be certain I know what to write about.  It is a form, a way of organizing and expressing the ideas, a container of a sort.  Anything can fit inside a box, it does not need to be the right type of thing.  I often speak of how I think story is a way of organizing, of putting things into a meaningful shape.  In the same way that anything might be made into a poem, so to anything should be able to fit into a story.  That is to say, I think it is a way of looking at ideas, of understanding them as fitting into a certain paradigm.  When I consider this in terms of poetic understanding, it is largely the recognition of it all as metaphor, and understanding that whatever is in the poem is always pointing towards more.  In a story, it is more about organizing things in time and space and causality, and I think it is largely that last one that might be the thing to consider.  I am not certain, but I think the real key is going to be learning to recognize story as an inherent possibility in any set of ideas I might want to write about in the same way that I can now recognize the poetic possibilities that exist there.

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