HINTS TO YOUNG WRITERS

Ladies' Mirror, Volume 3, Issue 4, 1 October 1924, Page 47

HINTS TO YOUNG WRITERS

By Dolce A. Duncan

THE RULES OF VERSE CONSTRUCTION CRITICAL NOTES ON MANUSCRIPTS

[No MS. will he returned unless accompanied by stamps. No liability is undertaken re voluntary contributions, though every care will be taken to ensure return. Writers are advised to keep duplicates. Name and full address must appear on the MS. itself, regardless of any covering letter .] Judging by the large number of MSS. that reach us there are many young people in the Dominion who have thoughts to express in prose or in verse. Frequently the material is good, yet the story itself is useless. It is drearily drab and uninteresting. Why is this ? The answer is that the writers fail in their method. They forget that they are not writing a school essay or exercise. I shall assume that handwriting, punctuation and grammar are all they should he. These are very important. The next thing is to make your story interesting. How shall you do it? By being brief, simple, direct. You cannot be over-precise as to your meaning. Avoid slang, padding, and long, involved sentences. Cut them up into short, crisp ones, packed full of meaning. Study good models, not the newspapers. Their purpose is to convey information solely. Avoid the popular novels of the day like poison. If you fill your mind with such reading, and take them as your models, you will surely fail with your pen. But novels that are classics, and particularly the histories of foreign countries and the biographies of great men will stimulate both mind and imagination.. As to verse construction. Do not imagine that lines of equal length ending with rhyme-words are poetry, or even verse. There are certain definite rules to he followed in verse-making. Possibly a great poet like Keats or Tennyson may write without having studied them, but it is doubtful. Most textbooks on Composition, and many English Grammars, contain a chapter devoted to Prosody. In it the beginner will find all the

information and rules necessary for his guidance in verse construction, and unless these rules are followed the result is mere doggerel. As for “Free Verse,” the beginner should leave it severely alone. As space is limited I shall refer to a few points merely, dealing with rhythm, metre, lambic and Trochaic measures. Rhythm means a regular succession of movements. There is rhythm in prose, but it is irregular, or it would drop into sing-song. In poetry the rhythm is regular. In English poetry an accented syllable alternates with one or two unaccented syllables. Such a combination is called a. foot, or a measure. Most beginners and many poets use the lambic foot. It consists of an unaccented syllable and an accented one, the two syllables making a foot, or measure. The regular recurrence of such feet, or measures, is called metre. lambic foot equals unaccented plus accented, as in a-gree. Gray’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard is an excellent example of the smoothness resulting from the use of lambics. It should be scanned as an exercise, marking the syllables thus: — “The pl6ugh\man k6me\ivard wends \ his wea\ry way.” The Trochaic foot consists of an accented syllable and an unaccented one. Thus it is the opposite of the lambic. Trochaic foot equals accented plus unaccented, as in sing'-ing. So “Lissom | wild flowers \ 6ver\wdnder Lustrous | meadows, \ sweet sa \ vdnnahs” is in Trochaic feet. When you understand how to attain melody in your verse, be sure you have something’ worth saying in that medium. Avoid self-conscious-ness. Forget yourself, and look outwards. Cultivate a habit of observing what many people pass by unseeing. Note colour and sounds in Nature. Study human nature above all, and if you are in earnest you will “find” yourself and express yourself accordingly.