A technique for dealing with abstractions in your writing

Here at Infinite Authors we're often asked how you know if an idea is suitable for a poem. Any idea, however faint, that gets you excited, that touches a nerve, or evokes an emotional response can be the spark of inspiration. The trick is to fan that spark with enough strength to create a fire without flapping so much you blow it out. The biggest pitfall is going for the big topics, such as love, death, time, nature and God, without sufficient preparation. All poets tackle some of these subjects at some point - it's why poetry exists, and it would be unusual if you didn't want to at least try to explain through verse the reason you became a high priest in the Society of Waco. But in order to capture the essence of these abstract phrases you need to know how to keep it personal.

When you try to write about love, for instance, you're always in danger of obscurity and repetition. The word love isn't tied to anything specific, it's different for each and every person and nobody can pin down exactly what it feels like. The more abstract and high-flown the phrase, the less precise and evocative it will be. Try to avoid abstract terms altogether in your writing - it's difficult to empathise with a vague impression.

Try this. Make two lists, the first containing locations (a bathroom, a garage, a church) and the second containing abstract terms (love, anger, madness). Randomly pick a word from each list to make an abstract location, say 'the bathroom of madness'. Now write a short poem or prose piece describing the place, without using any abstract words (even the one you picked). The idea is to convey the feel of a place using the evidence of your senses and the truth of your own experience and not have to rely on meaningless, shadowy abstraction.

You can write about an abstraction without referring to it directly with subtle, personal hints rather than a slap in the face. Instead of using a poem to tell your reader about a terrifying experience, show them. In other words, don't use the word terrified (a reader's eyes will brush over it, it means nothing to them in the context of your poem), but try to convey the experience of being terrified - how you felt, what you were thinking. Everybody has been terrified at some point in their life, and if you evoke the way you were affected by the experience you can attract a reader's empathy.

I'm not necessarily talking about metaphors here: to write a poem about an old man visiting a cemetery might involve a headstone as a metaphor for the inevitability of death. This is a fairly obvious symbolic link. Instead, the same old man may be looking through his dead wife's wardrobe for things he can donate to charity and come across a tatty pair of shoes she wore forty years ago. The shoes aren't a direct metaphor, but they embody the sadness he feels at her passing. Through the object you can evoke a powerful, terrifying feeling of loss; the painful flood of returning memories; the distant abstract made flesh and soul. This is how powerful writing is born.