How to Write Narrative Poems: A Step-by-Step Guide

The Outline of a Poem

When starting to write a poem, it can be helpful to have an outline. This can be a more formal, detailed outline like you would for a school paper. Instead, a poetry outline can be more like a road map to help you get from the first idea to the finished product.

Here are some things to consider when making your poetry outline:

• The topic or central idea of the poem
• What feelings or emotions do you want to convey
• What theme or message do you want to communicate
• The poem’s overall structure (stanzas, rhyme scheme, etc.)
• What images (five senses) or symbols do you want to include

“One step at a time is all it takes to get you there.” —Emily Dickinson

Remember that a poetry outline is just a tool to help you get started. It is not set in stone; you should feel free to deviate.

The first step in creating a poetry outline is to determine the purpose of your poem. This can be one of the most challenging aspects of writing a poem, as it requires you to think about what your verse is saying and how it will express this meaning. Free writing is an excellent method to help flesh out what the poem is about and give form to abstract language. Once you have determined the purpose of your poetry, it is essential to decide on a theme or message.

This should be relevant and meaningful to you as a writer. Still, it can also be an important idea or concept in literature. With a theme in mind, you can choose your poem’s title. Poems often have titles that are descriptive or metaphorical. Still, it is also acceptable to give your poem a title that simply describes the emotion or feeling of the work. Finally, you will want to choose a form of poetry that suits the theme and purpose of your poem. There are many forms of poetry, but they can be divided into two broad categories: narrative and non-narrative.

Narrative poetry can be divided into narrative poems and dramatic poems. Narrative poems are poems that tell a story in chronological order. Dramatic poems, however, tell stories in a way that is not necessarily chronological. Saving story details for later in the poem might add to the drama or tension of the poetry.

Non-narrative poetry does not tell a story. Instead, it is intended to evoke an emotional response from the reader. The poet uses words, sounds, images, and other literary devices to communicate this response. Poems can be written in a variety of poetic forms. Some common forms are free verse, haiku, limerick, sonnet, and ballad. Free verse is poetry that does not follow any specific form or rhyme scheme. Instead, its structure is determined by the poet, and it can take various forms, and even a short poem can carry a lot of weight.

Example of Structures

When you think of poetry and structure (outline), you don’t think of the two in the same room. And yes, you can do without the way I look at it — each line of a poem is subsets to a whole rather than standalone parts. However, each line holds its own significance and weight. When read together, the poem’s message, soul, and entire embodiment are captured.

If I choose to tell a story with exposition, climax, and resolution as the structure to follow, or if I decide to tell a storyline where a change needs to be discovered and made with a decision, I will utilize one or more techniques such as Narrative Arc.

Narrative Arc

Narrative Arc can vary between the Hero’s Journey or Freytag’s Pyramid. Still, the most common and quite traditional is the Three Story Act, first observed in Classical Greece, most notably in Greek Tragedies, where the famous philosopher Aristotle analyzed how stories progressed, and in his book, Poetics; he posited a story has a cause-and-effect relationship rather than standalone pieces and broken down into three acts:

• Act I — Setup: Exposition, Inciting Incident, Plot Point One
• Act II — Confrontation: Rising Action, Midpoint, Plot Point Two
• Act III — Resolution: Pre Climax, Climax, Denouement

The poem, Adonis & Venus, is in the book The Cool and Warmth of Hearts, the same story as Venus & Adonis found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and William Shakespeare’s adaptation. This is how I wrote it in a three-act story.

Act I

1. The speaker is Venus, and she patiently waits one day perched on her cloud and ruminates when her lover will bestow their presence and reignite her passion as the days grow impatient and weigh on her soul.
2. She contemplates further if no mortal man can imagine the sight of a beautiful goddess without seeing one before. She continues to hope, and then she catches a beautiful man and drapes him with clues with her divine powers.
3. This man named Adonis could not bother to notice and is fixed on his activity—which angers her. She plots how to capture his attention, and the more she thinks about it, the more she falls in love with him, while Adonis is still fixed on his hunt with his hounds.
4. She wonders if perhaps she’s intoxicated by his presence and is dreaming within this reality that she dreamt up. This dream will give her the courage she needs to win his affection.
5. She devises that her beautiful verse will shock and choke him with no words as she hides behind the tree, yet he is still unfazed and locked on his hunt.
6. And she returns to her daydreams and plots if she should jump out in front of him. By this, he will surely recognize how beautiful and imposing her divine nature causes him to saddle Venus onto his horse and join him on his hunt.

Act II

1. Then a sudden scream wakes her from her fantasy, and she looks around to find Adonis; she gapes in shock to see Adonis wounded and bleeding as he lays dying and asks why mortal men embark on dangerous activities, knowing how fallible they’re to do something that gets them killed while his hounds run off to chase the boar who impaled him.
2. Venus sprints to his side and, lost for words — devastated; she tries to heal his wounds with the blessing of Jove’s lightning rod to smite the miserable pain that leaked from his injuries (pores) because she could not intervene with mortals without the permission of the king of gods.
3. Yet, not a word is utter from him, and his green eyes begin to cloud, and she reaches down for one last kiss and, as she looks upon her lover’s eyes and only sees death in them and now lives in Hades’ domain.
4. Venus, distraught and heartbroken from this event, decrees that love will henceforth be mixed with suspicion, fear, and sadness.
5. Adonis’s body grew stiff and pale. His blood gives color to the surrounding plants and taints the white rose a blood red.

Act III

1. Before she leaves, she marks Adonis as a star in the constellation of Taurus — implying maybe one day he will transform himself into a bull and charge at the red rose she holds of him and abduct his lover Venus from the clutches of her heartbreak.
2. Meanwhile, Venus, bereft of this tragedy, leaves to hide her sadness on Mount Olympus. When the stars twinkle — Adonis will glimpse from hell with endearing love. Each breath he draws that fills a foggy clime will remind her how painful their separation is but still filled with hope for all time.

The other popular technique to use is:

Character Development

Each of us, whatever the situation experiences—a change, a discovery, or a decision—we might feel that the moment is an intensely personal one. Truthfully, it is the intensity of that moment, not the moment itself, that inspires us to write.

For instance, the poem, A Renewed Feeling, is in the book The Cool and Warmth of Hearts. The poem is a transformation of the speaker, who was once gloomy. Still, the sight of a woman he then fell in love with renewed vigor and her divine disposition graced him with kindness to help atone for his sins. Read below to learn more about the speaker transformation process in each stage. Goes through the process of Change, Discovery, and Decision, starting with Change.

Change

Life is a continual process of change, so just about any moment can inspire you to write. Throughout your life, you will experience overwhelming changes, like marriages, births, and deaths, and seemingly insignificant ones, like new tastes in food and variations in your appearance. Each of these events affects how you perceive and interact with the world. A timeline of major events of when great changes have taken place. Changes, in turn, lead you to make discoveries and decisions (source).

The speaker in the poem goes through a change in the entire poem from the moment he discovered his beloved, heaven’s divine speaker, with lady grace. While in the change process, the speaker questions why such a rare love is gifted to mortals with finite bodies to have such a short time to savor it. The speaker contends with their negative thoughts, almost child-like behavior, and in doubt, questions why they receive a gift in an imperfect world and are burdened with their sins. By the poem’s end, his beloved angel has shown the speaker the mercy to atone for their sins by developing compassion.

Discovery

Moments of discovery occur every day; sometimes these discoveries are life-changing, and other times they are much more subtle. Finding the courage to cope with situations may lead you to make yet another discovery or to make a very important decision. By exploring the feelings surrounding a discovery, whether in writing or through using another form of expression, you can make informed and appropriate decisions (source).

While the speaker goes through the process of change when he first meets with their beloved, he discovers along the way in their time with their angel how horrible they would feel if fate removes them from their beloved too soon. They realize how short human life is and how naïve they’re for not seeing what life offered until their angel came into their life. Yet, like a sunrise, you don’t always recognize how beautiful life is when window blinds are shut until one day, the crack of light that beams through fills you with joy and takes note of this phenomenon. The speaker recognizes this finite reality they live in and how that fear makes people do selfish and reckless things but being in the presence of heaven’s gift bestowed unto them, all those fears and sins of the speaker can atone for discovering the kindness grown in their heart.

Decision

You have to make decisions every day of your life. Whether a decision is important or trivial. By assessing your feelings and releasing them in poetic language, you may come closer to a solution or decision. And even if you are still looking for the right choice this way, you will at least have created personal art (source).

The speaker, who is undergoing change, makes a choice that aids in their transformation by allowing these revelations to take shape gradually, welcoming the benefits of life, and letting the divine enter them. As a result, they become a person who has developed in kindness.

Process with Examples

If you’re someone who loves to read my entire poetry writing process with examples, then you can check out my free download, where I provide the following:

• I provide the entire poetry writing process with an example poem published in my book, The Cool and Warmth of Hearts, from start to finish.
• I provide this in several formats for free, such as a PDF and JPG with an infographic.
• Lastly, the Google Doc template I use for every poem can be downloaded in other formats, e.g., .docx, .odt, and more.

Here is the link to it, and I hope you enjoy it! Thanks—Poetry Writing Process.

The Gist

“Have more than you show, Speak less than you know.” —William Shakespeare

The structure of writing poetry is a process of growth and being honest with the written word that comes from the soul. The ability to manifest abstract words into concrete terms and then combine them with poetic elements and figurative language happens beyond the first draft in the editing process. To write poetry is to sing from the heart, to reveal the deeper meaning:

• When starting to write a poem, it can be helpful to have an outline.
• What images or symbols do you want to include. Remember that a poetry outline is just a tool to help you get started.
• The first step in creating a poetry outline is to determine the purpose of your poem.
• Once you have selected the intention of your poetry, it is essential to decide on a theme or message.
• With a theme in mind, you can choose your poem’s title.
• Finally, you will want to select a form of poetry that suits the theme and purpose of your poem.
• There are many forms of poetry, but they can be divided into two broad categories: narrative and non-narrative.
• Narrative poems are poems that tell a story in chronological order. Dramatic poems, however, tell stories in a way that is not necessarily chronological. Saving story details for later in the poem might add to the drama or tension of the poetry.
  Non-narrative poetry does not tell a story. Instead, it is intended to evoke an emotional response from the reader. The poet uses words, sounds, images, and other literary devices to communicate this response.
• Poems can be written in a variety of poetic forms.

The following poetry writing process covers a word list.