Joyce Carol Oates once wrote that if you get stuck while writing your novel, you should put your work aside and compose a poem.  For those of you who don’t know:  Joyce Carol Oates is one of the great American writers, often shortlisted for the Nobel.  Besides the fact that she writes beautifully, she is also so prolific that she has published over 50 books and many, many collections of short stories.  Leave it to such a prodigious talent to suggest something like this:  that when faced with the dreaded writer’s block, you should simply write more.

Even though I have never once followed this advice in the twenty years since I have read it, it has still stuck with me.  And now I’m beginning to see its wisdom.  Most probably Joyce Carol Oates was envisioning writing some kind of conventional poem:  a confessional poem, for instance.  Not one of those postmodern fall-apart-in-your-hands poems like the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poems—the kind that are supposed to make almost no sense.

Why poetry instead of prose?  Poems are perfect little objects that will say things explicitly.  And they will say things in a perfect way, so that you will remember the directive encoded into the novelty of the language.  And if you forget, you can look back on the poem as a source for the narrative’s design.  Like tea leaves emptied onto a saucer of fine, bone china.

So today during my post-writing jog, I flashed upon Joyce Carol Oates’s idea.  It was then that I decided to write a poem.  It would be a soliloquy of the villainous serial killer, in which he spells out his motives and his intentions.  It would be Shakespearean in it’s way—dramatic and bombastic.  And then I suddenly realized that, though soliloquys no longer have a place in realistic writing, they are very much a part of the detective genre.  It’s pretty much the villain’s speech.  Thanks Joyce Carol Oates!