5.7 struggles of a poet trying to become a writer and 3.1th is not hilarious

Bal Krishn Birla
3 min readDec 8, 2014

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First a brief background. I have been writing from a young age. It did not matter how it was but what else will a introvert guy do. But most of it was poetry. It just came out when it filled up inside. There was nothing complicated or planned about it.

And now trying to write prose instead of poetry. So here are the main struggles.

  1. Poetry just comes, prose doesn’t. You have to try hard. If it reminds you of some other activities in a day, don’t blame me. I mean in poetry you reach a point where you just can’t keep it inside. You have to let it out. But as far as, prose is concerned, you have to plan and execute it like an assassin.
  2. Poetry is a single shot art. You write it and then you forget it. I have struggled to rewrite what I write as a poet. Somehow I have always felt, rewriting as a poet is a betrayal to emotions which were going through your mind while writing. But as a writer, you write it, and then rewrite it again and again….
  3. Poets are lonely breed. It can not be written with anybody else. Haven’t heard of anybody else trying that either. Prose can be co-authored. People can write various pieces of prose and merge them. Some co-authors write different chapters, some write various aspects of the same chapters. There are many ways to collaborate.
  4. Poetry is about emotions of a single person and prose has to understand and create emotions of many. Now that is a tough bridge to cross. As a poet you almost fall in love with your feelings and in fact you examine them to death. But as a writer you need to look beyond and also understand the same issues from multiple perspectives. Single character novels can be written but it is tough and it becomes too one sided if you do not build other characters.
  5. Poetry is minimalistic while prose can be ornamental. Have you every tried making TV or Radio commercials. You face exactly the same problem. Time is money and you want to convey your thoughts in minimum possible words as words. As the copywriters say, chop every word till you start losing sense. That is what you end up doing as poets some time. But in prose you can be more generous with words. This is a struggle for people like me who has been minimalistic with words.
  6. Poets are poor and writers are rich. Let me clarify, that is not the reason why I am trying to become a writer. But isn’t that true. Can’t think of any poet who made millions. Writers are plenty. People just refuse to buy poetry books.

Anything else you guys can think of. Just mention in the comments.

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