/lit/ - Literature

>>18681868
Practice. Years of practice.
>>18681908
There are no rules, but rather guidelines and best practices. For example, Martin Amis says that to make beautiful sentences, you avoid repeating suffixes in the same sentence. Conception-reflection, dryness-baldness, etc. But this rule can be broken to create repetitive harmony. Here are some more guidelines.
--order any list of 3 (nouns, adjectives, verbs etc) from shortest to longest. Friends, Romans, Countrymen. Patris et fillii et Spiritus Sancti.
--Do not end every line on a caesura (period, comma, or semicolon). Otherwise the lines become predictable little ponies galloping toward the end stop.
--Rhyme is disposable but meter is not. I'm not saying you must rigidly follow iambs, but that you should always have a sense of the shape and inflection of your sentences. Poetry is as rhythmic as music, and as improvisational. Many a bad poet either fails to establish rhythm or follows blindly the established rhythms.
--Serious writing begins at age 25 according to the Jew-baiting Eliot. The reason he says that is because everyone starts writing juvenilia and doesn't stop until life has mellowed them out. Rimbaud is an exception but you are not Rimbaud.

>>9129840