Avoiding Difficult Writing? That Poem Is Usually the One
Every poet has one poem they keep walking past. A contest judge explains why that avoided poem is usually the best one, and offers five practical ways in.
Every poet I have ever worked with has one poem they walk past the way you walk past a room where an argument happened. They can tell you what it is about in one sentence, usually while looking somewhere else. The hospital summer. The brother. The thing that was said in the car. They have written forty other poems around it, poems that circle the block but never park. If you recognize this, I want to make a claim you will resist: avoiding difficult writing is the single most expensive habit in your practice, and the poem you are dodging is, more often than not, the best poem you currently have.
I say this as someone who scores hundreds of contest entries a month. I can feel the avoided poem the way you can feel a missing tooth. Something in the batch is organized around an absence.
The Poem in the Corner of Every Notebook
Here is what the avoidance actually looks like on the page, because it does leave fingerprints. The poet writes beautifully about weather. They write about their grandmother's kitchen but never the year she stopped recognizing them. They have six poems about the sea and none about the person they scattered there. The craft is real, sometimes exceptional, and the whole portfolio has the careful energy of someone setting the table for a guest who is never invited in.
A submission that taught me this arrived two winters ago with a cover note that read, in full: this is not the poem I meant to write. The poem itself was a decent piece about repainting a fence. But the last two lines swerved, just for a breath, toward a daughter who no longer called, and those two lines were so much stronger than everything above them that the fence practically caught fire. I scored it, and in the feedback I wrote one sentence: the poem you meant to write is hiding in lines 13 and 14. Three months later the poet entered again, this time with the daughter poem itself. It placed. The fence poem, I promise you, never would have.
Why We Keep Avoiding Difficult Writing
The standard explanation is fear, and fear is real, but I think it flatters us. Most avoidance is not terror. It is a bundle of smaller, more manageable excuses, and naming them shrinks them:
- The perfection excuse. This material matters too much to waste on my current skill level. So we wait to be better, and the waiting becomes permanent.
- The privacy excuse. Someone I love might read it. Legitimate, and also solvable with craft: persona, distance, changed detail. Poets have handled this for centuries.
- The tidiness excuse. I do not know what I think about it yet. But poems are not verdicts. A poem is allowed to end more confused than it began, as long as the confusion is precise.
- The pain excuse. It will hurt to sit with it. Sometimes true. Also true: it is hurting anyway, in installments, every time you walk past the room.
Notice what all four excuses share. They treat the difficult poem as a door you must someday burst through in one heroic draft. That framing is the problem. Nobody bursts through. The poets who write the avoided poem get in through a side entrance, and side entrances are a craft question, not a character question.
The poem you are avoiding is not waiting for your courage. It is waiting for your craft.
Five Side Doors Into the Poem You Cannot Face
These are the five approaches I recommend most, in the order I would try them. Each one lowers the stakes without lowering the voltage.
- Write the inventory, not the event. Do not write the funeral. Write the list of what was in the car on the drive there: the wrong shoes, the printed directions, the mint someone offered you. Objects hold grief without melodrama. If you need proof that things can carry what statements cannot, spend an evening with poems built on concrete imagery and watch how rarely they name the feeling.
- Change the pronoun. Write it as she, or you, or a stranger watching through a window. A persona is not a lie; it is a handle on a pot too hot to grab directly. You can always change the pronoun back later. Most poets find they do not need to.
- Write the day before, or the day after. The event itself is a black hole; its edges are where the light is. The morning before the diagnosis, when everything was still ordinary, is often a stronger poem than the diagnosis, because the reader supplies the dread themselves.
- Set a container that ends the session for you. Fourteen lines, or twenty minutes, whichever comes first. Difficult material expands to fill unlimited time and drowns you. A strict form is a flotation device. I have watched more than one poet finally reach their hardest subject only because a sonnet told them where to stop.
- Write it badly on purpose. Announce at the top of the page: this is the terrible version. Then write fast. The terrible version cannot fail, because failure was the assignment, and somewhere in its wreckage will be three lines that are not terrible at all. Those three lines are the real draft.
A Worked Example: Going Through the Side Door
Suppose the avoided subject is a father's last phone call, and every direct attempt collapses into either sentiment or silence. The head-on draft usually sounds like this:
I never got to tell you what you meant.
Your voice still echoes somewhere in my chest.
True, probably. Also inert: all summary, no scene, the language of a sympathy card because sympathy cards are what we reach for when we are protecting ourselves. Now the side door, using the inventory method and the day-after method together:
Your reading glasses are still on the microwave.
The crossword folded to a clue you solved.
I microwave my coffee and say nothing,
the way we said nothing, expertly, for years.
Nobody cries on the page. Nothing is declared. And yet the second version holds the entire relationship, including its long practiced silences, in four lines of household detail. That word expertly is doing what the first draft's echoes could not: it admits something specific and slightly guilty, which is what difficult poems are for.
What Judges See When You Finally Write It
I want to be practical about the contest angle, because there is one. When I score poems on emotion, I am not scoring how much the poet suffered. I am scoring how much the reader feels, and those are almost unrelated. Avoided-subject poems, once actually written, tend to score high not because the material is heavy but because the poet, having circled it for years, knows it with unusual precision. All that avoidance was secretly rehearsal.
They also tend to score high on theme, because a poem written under pressure almost never wanders. It knows exactly what it is about. Writory entrants get a score breakdown across five criteria, and I have lost count of the poets whose highest-scoring entry ever was the one they told us they almost did not submit. That sentence appears in cover notes so often it is nearly a genre.
One caution, because honesty matters more than encouragement: difficult material does not excuse loose craft, and judges can tell when a poet believes it should. The subject buys you nothing. The precision buys you everything. Write the terrible version, then revise it like it was about a fence.
The Room Gets Smaller Every Time You Walk Past It
Here is the argument I actually want to leave you with. The avoided poem does not stay neutral while you avoid it. It leaks. It flattens the poems around it, because you are steering every draft away from one part of your own vocabulary, and readers can feel a voice that is braking. Poets sometimes ask why their technically clean work feels bloodless, and the answer, more often than they would like, is standing in the corner of their notebook with its coat still on.
So this week, not someday: pick one side door from the list. Twenty minutes, one inventory, one changed pronoun. You are not required to finish the poem, show the poem, or survive a catharsis. You are only required to stop walking past the room. If you want somewhere for it to go afterward, there are worse fates than a contest where strangers who have read thousands of poems will tell you, criterion by criterion, that the thing you were avoiding was the thing you did best. It usually is. That is the whole secret, and every working poet I trust learned it the same way: badly, sideways, and later than they wanted to.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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