Rhetorical Devices Thread

You don't have to write everything in the poetic style you admire. If you're stuck right now, it might help to exercise writing something simple and easy until you've built up more confidence and gotten back into the habit of writing. I mostly stopped writing for a few years, and when I was getting back into it, I wrote something easy and enjoyable, a folklore retelling that had rather simple prose. As I wrote more often and got more comfortable with it, and learned to find it fun, it became easier and less laborious to incorporate poetic style as well. If you won't accept anything less than excellent prose, you'll end up writing very little at all.

The other thing is you can't write when you don't have something to say. You care a lot about improving your writing skills, but without content for those writing skills to communicate. You've been going about it backwards. I'm much more motivated to write when the piece makes me feel strongly. Maybe you can try a memoir about something emotionally significant that happened to you or fiction with a theme you really care about.

In my own case, I had an idea for a novel whose theme is important to me, and whose character's struggles made me emotional. I knew that I wanted the prose to be very poetic and stylized, styled after one of my favorite authors. Not only do I enjoy such stylization, but I felt it would fit the tone of the story. I wrote it down very rapidly during NaNoWriMo last year as a sloppy, badly written mess. Now that I know the things that happen, I'm in the process of rewriting it in the style I want, not purely to write well, but also because I want to produce a certain effect in the reader and convey a story I really wanted to tell.