"art of the glimpse"

Irish writer, William Trevor calls the short story the "art of the glimpse."

What is your story or poem trying to glimpse into? Once you know the answer, your structure can be created and refined.

First, you may need to write yourself to the place where the glimpse is revealed through journaling, freewriting, writing from prompts, or writing letters from characters.

If you've been keeping journals for a long time, read back through them to find those glimpses.

Have you ever found a forgotten story in your journals that offered a glimpse for your revision? Please tell us about it in Comments.

cast a spell

Here's a simple exercise, a warm-up, taken from sentence modeling exercises. Choose one line from your journal, then repeat the word order pattern until you have several lines that mirror one another in form but differ in content. Finally change one or two of the lines to create some variation and surprise.

cast a spell between the rows
heave hope into the trees
scratch sadness in the dirt
wake plans from the dream
sip wisdom from wet grass
and trouble from the glass beads
imagine death in the eiderdown
shovel anger over clouds
scrape anxiety on the pavement
burn despair into the pages
caress letters of the old ones
sing warmth out of wood
and softness out of hard shell
call back memory from the clearing
cast a spell between the rows.

Have you ever used a parallel structure to create a poem or to develop an idea in prose? Share your poem in comments or post a line that presents an unusual grammatic structure for us to play with.

sad couplet

He let go of my hand;
I never saw him again.