My first challenge was that I immediately have two female characters who are not known to each other, so great care is needed with pronouns until their names are revealed. Too many tangled instances of 'she' and 'her' will inevitably confuse things, and it can only get worse in about, oh, three or four more verses, when I introduce three more girls into the mix!
Since the poem will be divided up into chapters, I've used the device of starting each chapter with a brief hint at what will follow. Of course, it had to be in the form of a rhyming couplet:
In which Anya meets a mystery, an enemy, a friendThat solved part of the first problem - introducing the name of the main character. I didn't want to use her name at all in the first verse, mainly because I'd already written that verse, so now I don't need to make any kind of fuss when I use her name in the poem itself for the first time.
And discovers one on whom she can depend
I had contemplated changing the names of some of the characters, not least because the name Anya doesn't really rhyme with anything, but I did spend a lot of time choosing those names, many of which have meanings relevant to their place in the story, so I decided against it. However in the prose version everyone has second names and there really is no place for those, other than in exceptional circumstances which won't appear for a long while yet.
Moving on, the problem of describing each character raises its head. I simply cannot bring someone into the story and devote a whole verse to her physical appearance. Okay, actually I have done that for the 'stranger' I've just introduced, so that's my rule completely abandoned. However, the main character of the story has not been described in any great detail. We know she's a girl of school age and she's carrying a bag of heavy books on her back. The rest is up to the reader's imagination. It was always my plan (even in the prose version) to let the reader picture the main character for themselves. She is you, the reader, or someone you've met or imagined. You know what she looks like better than I do.
Many details from the prose version have had to be abandoned, and on the whole that's a good thing. As I said last time, my prose tends to be overly descriptive. I spent a couple of sentences describing how she walks between two parked cars, sees the other person sitting opposite and can't comfortably back up to find a different place to cross. In the poem it's reduced to half a line, no mention of cars, and the words are simply and with no way to retreat, which give the same meaning, that Anya is compelled to walk towards the stranger because to do anything else would be to draw even more attention to herself.
Slow progress so far then, but that is also partly because it's a huge shift in the way I'm approaching the project, as compared with other poems I've written, even the longer ones. I've had to hold myself in check, which has been difficult. The Genie Within was relentless drama, an avalanche of huge, dramatic scenes one after the other. I think that would be too tiring to read on such a large scale, although I of course want to write a page-turner. If it's all drama there is no way to introduce more drama when the narrative calls for it. When you see earthquakes and floods on TV they are shocking. When you see them over and over, day after day, it's human nature to become immune to the shock of the event. So in my case the quiet parts of a story are just as important as the 'big' events because they provide the contrast needed to lift or lower the emotions of the reader.
I do need to press on with the poem now. One verse a day is not enough! Momentum please!
