July 6, 2020
How to Use Poetic Licence Properly
Poetic license (or artistic licence) refers to ignoring factual truth for creative purposes. There is a wide area covered by this definition and so, inevitably, some uses are proper whereas other improper.
In other words, there are ways to use poetic licence properly (enhancing the affective power of your novel), but also improperly (muddling the waters and creating confusion).
In this post we’ll take a look at all these elements – what poetic licence refers to in more detail, ways of using poetic licence, and of course which (and why) are the ways I consider optimal.
Poetic Licence and Negative Capability
If you recall my post on negative capability, the one-line definition I gave was this:
[Negative capability is] when you write beautiful things and you don’t care if they make sense.
Using poetic licence, in its widest definition, is related to this. Essentially, the author chooses to focus on affect instead of hard reality, in order to express a particular meaning or emotive reaction.
An Example of Poetic Licence
Before we talk more about different ways of using poetic licence (and which ones I recommend), let’s see a short, easy example.
It’s from my book The Other Side of Dreams, so it’s also a recommended case! We’ll see later why.
This excerpt is near the end of the book. The protagonist is about to depart from Helsinki for a destination the reader does not know – an element consistent with the ambiguity describing the ending. And then, the following incident occurs.
He reaches the airport and goes to the monitors to check the information regarding his flight. He notices that the flights to Athens, Munich, and Islamabad are all listed one after another. A beam of meaningful, satisfying astonishment explodes on his beardless face. He stands there for quite some time looking at the trio, knowing that only one of those is his flight.
Chances are, you don’t even notice any kind of poetic licence here, am I right?
And yet, there is one detail that is counterfactual: There is no direct flight connecting Helsinki to Islamabad, and as a result it wouldn’t have been displayed on a monitor.
However, this is immaterial for my creative purposes here, which needed these three specific cities listed for the protagonist to see – and for reasons that would have been obvious if you had read the book.
However, if we suppress reality for creative purposes, it’s crucial to know what kind of reality we can suppress, and to which extent.
Ways of Using Poetic Licence
Let’s now take a look at different ways of using poetic license in a novel (or short story). The good is what I recommend, the bad is what I don’t, and the ugly is one that will depend on your personal circumstances and priorities.
The Good: When Readers Don’t Notice
The reason my example above, from The Other Side of Dreams works well as artistic licence is because an overwhelming majority of readers don’t even notice there’s anything untrue there.
Let’s use another, imaginary example. Suppose it’s important for your creative purposes to have a character accidentally get locked inside a public building, before sunset. But it’s winter, the sun sets early, and the public building in question should be still open.
It doesn’t matter; go ahead and write the scene this way.
The reason it doesn’t matter goes back to what I mentioned in the previous section: the kind of reality you suppress, and the extent you suppress it.
Opening hours of a building can be a fluid thing. Most readers won’t even realize there’s anything untrue there, and the few that will do, can likely provide their own explanation. Remember that you shouldn’t explain every little detail, and readers need to supply their own meaning. Maybe the building closed earlier in that area, maybe it was a specific day, maybe there was a water leak. Readers come up with explanations if they need to.
The second important element is that such a use of poetic licence is very brief and very subtle; an insignificant detail. The extent is marginal, which makes it easier for the “deception” to pass unnoticed.
But what if it were extensive, tilting the balance away from the narrative?
The Bad: When Poetic Licence Overshadows the Narrative
When the use of poetic licence is extensive, it’s easier to notice it. This in itself isn’t necessarily bad – remember that readers can supply their own explanations – but an instance of poetic licence that is extended also signifies an imbalance toward the plot and away from the narrative.
In other words, once you tell a big lie, you might feel the need to keep lying simply to keep the thing from imploding.
Imagine you have a character who is a gardener. Let’s say she plants tomato seeds, and already two weeks later, they’ve grown and produced tomatoes. If it’s a one-off, the audience – though they will likely still feel something’s not right with this discrepancy – might forget about it.
But what if you turned this into some sort of plot element? What if, for your creative purposes, the gardener grows plants at a much faster rate than we know it’s possible? Your audience can’t go beyond this constant, blatant disregard of basic biological facts. Although there is some nuance there, as we’ll see in the concluding section, the fact remains: Such extensive instances of poetic license confuse the reader.
Also keep in mind that, the closer a big lie is to the end of the narrative, the likelier the chance of creating a Deus ex Machina (Surprising-and-Avoidable) kind of ending, which isn’t a good thing. See more about this in the post on narrative endings.
The Ugly: Aspect of Genre
If you take a look at my post on worldbuilding in fiction, you’ll find a note explaining how you can’t distort scientific facts if you’re writing science fiction. There might be spaceships, teleportation, and what not, but you better be well prepared to explain why, in a scientific manner.
Using poetic licence in such a context clearly departs from my recommendations further above, stating that you can do it if it passes unnoticed.
You might argue that many of your potential sci-fi readers might indeed not notice something unscientific, and you might be right. But would you be willing and ready to face criticism from those who will call you on your choice?
That’s what makes this “ugly” rather than simply “bad”. Narratively speaking, it might not create issues, but generically speaking (in terms of genre), things change. And with that, let’s talk a bit about such “special” genres.
Poetic Licence and Genre: Fantasy and Magical Realism
Instead of a conclusion, let’s wrap up by pointing out an important fact, which is a separating line between using poetic licence and writing, say, fantasy or magical realism.
Using poetic licence is a literary device. Fantasy and magical realism are genres (or perhaps modes; see my post on the difference between the Gothic and other modes for more details).
In other words, you use poetic licence in order to boost the affective power of a scene, or to underline the symbolic nature of a certain excerpt.
Fantasy and magical realism in a way achieve the exact opposite: “Poetic licence” (the suspension of facts and reality) in such genres do not appear out of place (and hence don’t draw the reader’s attention), precisely because counterfactuality pervades them.
Poetic Licence is Noticed only among Factuality
You’re reading Lord of the Rings. There are orcs and dwarfs. Alright, big deal. Take a look at my “Gothic, Horror, Fantasy, and Science Fiction cheat-sheet”. The idea of fantasy fiction is that the reader (and, obviously, the characters) don’t pay attention to counterfactuality.
Of course, the suspension of reality does allow for certain plot elements to materialize, which is ultimately a creative purpose; a creator of affect.
Perhaps this is especially the case in magical realism, which is basically a highly realistic – even naturalistic – world, our world, but with the unexplained and even the supernatural going through it.
But the fact remains: Poetic licence is a literary device, meant to be deployed in an otherwise factual narrative. Ultimately, it’s not really relevant in magical realism or fantasy, and perhaps not in experimental fiction other.
If you choose to extensively bend the truth in an otherwise factual narrative – as we saw in the gardener example earlier – you’ll run the risk of confusing your audience in terms of genre and the associated expectations.
9 Comments
Comments are closed for posts older than 90 days
Without poetic license, we would all be writing high school English as approved by Grammarly!
If it works, the reader won’t notice the mechanics, but have a feeling of pleasure from the reading. If you can see it, it is forced. Work toward making it transparent – to the readers you want.
For that, the measuring stick is yourself, as first reader. Get distance – via such tricks as changing the font, letting some time pass, or having the computer’s robot voice read it to you – and see if it works for you. After that, at least a trusted beta reader before the rest of the world.
All of this is work, and it is the writer’s job. And the writer’s pleasure.
Changing the font is a very intriguing trick, I’ll have to try it. Thanks!
Anything to make it look as if someone else wrote it. I do that every time I use any of my Old Text (from the very rough first draft). It’s so old I have it in Courier, double spaced, the way you used to submit manuscripts to publishers!
Copying each possible chunk, formatting it in 14-pt Times New Roman, and using Scrivener’s ability to turn quotes into smart quotes – it complete removes me as the author, and I have a lot faster success isolating the little pieces that might be worth keeping. They still get put through the ringer, but the fact that even the rough draft took ages to write back then, and therefore makes this (mostly trash) text worth saving used to make it very hard to cull.
I can’t write things in longhand – physically taxing and pointless because I’m going to need to digitize it when I finish – another tactic some authors use successfully.
Anything to alter your connection to your own work.
I’d have to disagree and say that the differentiator, for me, is how intentional it feels. I say ‘feels’ because really I cannot know for sure the author’s intention (even if they claim it to be, lying is a linguistic feature, not just an (un)ethic decision). So called “post-modern” literature used it to some of the best examples: Calvino, Foster Wallace, Barth, Perec, Giudice, Eggers, the late Nabokov of Pale Fire, sometimes even Eco crosses the line, not to mention Pirandello’s plays. I mean, Don Quijote and Tristam Shandy are major examples from ages ago that do well in showing us the gears at work rather than hiding them. The thing is how well-played this game becomes on such texts. it feels a lot like reading source code to me and it has been invaluable at helping me shape my fiction, because I had the chance to understand, finally, how to achieve some effects. It all starts with those early Greek and Roman rhetoric treatises.
And I have to test changing the typography, that’s one hell of a tip!
I wonder to which extent we could squeeze some Shakespearean fools into that list of examples (with which, I must confess, I’m mostly unfamiliar with).
I mean, Shakespearean fools habitually broke the fourth wall and – indeed, much as ancient Greek choruses – revealed certain mechanisms to the audience, steering them in the intended direction (which was sometimes a deception, all part of the creative interplay of audience manipulation).
Come to think of it, it wasn’t even just fools doing that. When Hamlet talks about “this distracted globe”, does he refer to his own mind, or rather to the Globe, where the play was being performed?
Good stuff!
Changing the font isn’t an original idea of mine – I forgot where I stole it from.
But anything that makes your brain have to restart, and reinput the data, can do the trick. That’s why many people write on the computer, and edit on a printout.
It’s much easier for me to do the other things, and doesn’t waste paper.
Don Quixote I can deal with – he’s delusional. But I don’t like magic realism, because then it’s the world that is not logical, and I’m not happy with that.
What’s funny is that, being a Latin American, I can tell that magical realism is a clearly European category, as said literary texts are more verging on the symbolic side of things for us. I don’t know if this stems from a language barrier, from a personal experience (I mean, I grew up on video-games and anime, so…), or simply from the fact our fiction has dealt with the most absurd of things because our reality is so weird it could be called magical to begin with.
I mean, think of education: our history classes drag on for a long time following the European highs and lows and a bunch of wars and then suddenly, out of nowhere, some adventurous Europeans travelling overseas and writing letters about naked people and their weird behaviors, and bam, that is our beginning. My great grandmother was a native indigenous of the Atlantic rainforest (southern region, mostly devastated now), but you see, her people’s history simply vanished because of the mass killings (be it via straight up fight or via disease-spreading methods, so Corona ain’t that new to us after all, or as a friend said: the native indigenous of the Americas are getting used to surviving the end of the world, might as well laugh off of Mad Max if they think that’s how the world ends). So I feel literally in my personal experience that my family was created ex nihil, out of thin air, it simply sprouted into existence suddenly, because written history in itself is already the privileging of a culture over another.
I could go on with others stories – like when Bolsonaro was elected, a few weeks later, a blond dude, feeling legitimized by the extreme discourse of the newly elected president, invaded the faculty where I studied with an army knife and threatened us all, claiming we were all “shitty drug addicts who do nothing but spread propaganda” (his paranoid gaze burnt at the back of my retina to this very day), thankfully we gave him quite the beating and took his knife away, for the university security weren’t doing anything. But with all this in mind, you can tell reality can get pretty magical for us Latin Americans. I mean, it seems magical to outsiders, but it is just our reality.
Last, but not least: no one has proven our universe to be logically consistent, quite the opposite, David Hume’s challenge precisely puts it into question and I honestly don’t buy into Kant’s (pseudo)solution for the problem, rather I’ve embraced hyperchaos, as Quentin Meillassoux has labeled it. I strongly recommend his book, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, it is fairly accessible in its presentation and easy to follow the reasoning, whilst presenting a deep and thorough argument.
If I may offer a somewhat tangential comment to this very interesting discussion, I wonder to which extent the presence of a unified, clearly defined, homogeneous cultural history can also be an obstacle. I mean all nations have their mythologies – put there precisely to create a unification that wouldn’t have existed otherwise – but some nations are more peculiar in that regard.
Take Greece, for example. Imagine trying to run a marathon carrying an elephant on your back, and that’s about what describes modern Greeks: The presence of an impossibly weighty (and to an extent imaginary) cultural past, that is impossible to live up to. And yet, in a bizarre exercise in psychological self-flagellation, many modern Greeks have incredible delusions of grandeur, without realizing that these delusions keep them from producing any kind of advancement of their own.
To name a characteristic example, there’s this oft used phrase which truly disgusts me. Whenever some European leader, newspaper, or other source criticizes Greece, the usual response is “When we [sic] were busy building the Parthenon, you were still in the caves, foraging for nuts”.
Let’s take another country as an example I’m very familiar with: Finland. Although as a nation Finland’s history can be traced in the past few centuries, it’s still a somewhat vague one. It’s Finns themselves who, referring to their country’s beginnings, say it went something like that: “We’re not Russians, we don’t want to be called Swedes, so let us be called Finns”. Independence didn’t come until 1917.
The modern Finnish people are the exact opposite of Greeks: self-deprecating, too modest, very quiet. (Of course, let’s remember that in both cases – Greece and Finland – this is only a generalization). Meanwhile, without the weight of an imposing past, Finland consistently tops every metric related to societal well-being, happiness, personal improvement, and what not, on top of being a technological leader.
I’ve quoted Moretti many times here, but it’s only because I find his commentary incredibly apt and poignant. When it comes to understanding Otherness and how it is habitually manipulated to create a social cohesion that wouldn’t otherwise exist, nobody has said it better:
In some sense, these writings leave behind the mimetic desire, that of reflecting reality, to, in its place, deciding for affecting reality. In this sense, they were monstrous texts.