some of the best writing advice i was ever given

I’m working like a crazy lady this week on a short story due on Thursday. A little glitch I hit with this story reminded me of some really helpful advice I was given once by Dr. Briante, my poetry professor. I think it was my Junior year when I wrote a poem for her class— a short little poem, mostly descriptive— that I felt was not being understood by the class. So I went to her office to talk to her about it. I told her how when I wrote it I was feeling all these complicated things about memory and loss and human frailty and survival and how I felt like so little of that was actually coming across to people when they read the poem. 

Then she said, “sometimes you get that feeling not because you need to say more with that particular poem, but because you’ve got more poems you need to write about those ideas and feelings you’re working with.” 

It was really good, liberating advice. It gave me permission to not try to do so much with each particular piece of writing, to not try to pack all my ideas and my entire worldview and all angles of a topic into one poor overstuffed little poem. The truth is made up of so many beautiful little splinters and each one needs to be written about. And anyway she was totally right about that particular poem. It didn’t need any more. To this day it’s one of the handful of pieces from my undergraduate years that I’m still happy with.