Compression as Craft: What Fiction Writers Can Learn from Poets

January 14, 2026

by Angela Jackson-Brown, fiction faculty

When my fiction begins to feel overworked, when scenes linger past their usefulness or explanation crowds out feeling, I turn to poetry. Poetry reminds me that language does not need excess space to carry power and that writing under pressure forces each word to earn its place. That pressure sharpens resonance and clarifies intention. In this essay, I offer a working definition of compression, examine how poets and hybrid writers practice it on the page, and consider how those strategies can be adapted for fiction. My aim is not to suggest that fiction should become poetry, but to argue that fiction grows stronger when it adopts poetry’s habits of density, restraint, and trust in what language can hold without being explained.

What I Mean by Compression

Compression is often confused with brevity, but the two are not the same. Brevity is a matter of length. Compression is a matter of pressure. By compression, I mean the deliberate distillation of language so that a single word, image, or syntactic choice carries more than one burden. Compressed writing does not simply move faster. It moves with weight. One sentence can deepen character, gesture toward a past we are never shown, and reinforce the story’s thematic concerns. The example below illustrates compression through a mother whose family is struggling to survive and who must do the unthinkable: kill the chickens that once provided eggs and companionship for her children. She feels guilt and sorrow, but hunger leaves her little choice:

She scrubbed her hands till the water ran clear, then scrubbed some more, crying right into the sink. The yard had gone still. No clucking, no fuss. The chickens were gone. Tonight, the pot would carry both relief and regret. She hated how narrow their lives had gotten, how hunger kept deciding things for her. Still, the children would eat, even if they cried while they did it.

Fiction writers are often taught that depth comes from expansion. We are encouraged to explain, to contextualize, to name every feeling and justify every choice. The example above resists that impulse. The prose never states that the family is impoverished, that the chickens were beloved pets, or that the mother is overwhelmed by guilt, coupled with pages of exposition and backstory. Instead, those truths are carried by image and pressure: the relentless scrubbing, the quiet yard, the mingling of nourishment and shame in the pot. Meaning accumulates without exposition. Compression asks fiction writers to trust that voice, image, and rhythm can hold what explanation often flattens. Where poets rely on formal strategies such as line breaks and associative movement, fiction writers achieve compression through sentence-level precision, careful scene selection, and a willingness to let implication do the work that summary so often performs.

 Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl”: Voice as Narrative

Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” remains one of the most instructive examples of compression in narrative prose. Though often taught as a prose poem, I approach it as a lesson in how voice alone can carry story. The piece unfolds as a single sentence composed almost entirely of commands, yet within that compressed structure, Kincaid renders a world shaped by gendered expectation and constant surveillance.

Consider the line “on Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming.” In this directive, Kincaid compresses social norms, maternal fear, sexual regulation, and generational tension. There is no exposition explaining these forces. They exist in the language itself. Even the daughter’s brief resistance, “but I don’t sing benna on Sundays at all and never in Sunday school,” is quickly absorbed back into the mother’s monologue, reinforcing the imbalance of power.

As a fiction writer, I’m reminded by this piece that compression allows voice to replace explanation. Syntax and repetition can do narrative work often assigned to backstory or scene setting. Compression here sharpens conflict rather than obscuring it.

Patricia Smith and the Compression of History

Patricia Smith’s poem “The President Flies Over” demonstrates how compression can collapse time, politics, and personal perspective into a single lyric moment. The poem layers critique into image rather than argument. Early lines describe the historical past of the U.S. by saying “what staunch, vicious trees” and “what cluttered roads, slow cars.”

These images appear ordinary, yet their accumulation carries ideological weight. Smith does not explain how power distances itself from lived experience. She shows that distance through vantage point alone. Compression allows historical and political meaning to emerge without didactic exposition.

For fiction writers working in historical or socially engaged modes, Smith’s work offers a crucial lesson: theme can live inside image. Compression invites writers to trust resonance rather than commentary.

Danez Smith and Directness Under Pressure

Danez Smith’s “in lieu of a poem, i’d like to say” demonstrates that compression can coexist with urgency and clarity. The poem moves quickly, propelled by repetition and sensory detail. A phrase such as “apricots & brown teeth in browner mouths” compresses image, memory, and cultural context into a single line. The language resists ornamentation, yet the poem is meticulously shaped.

Smith’s work reminds fiction writers that compression does not require subtlety at the expense of precision. Declarative language, when intentional, can carry emotional weight without explanation. Compression often depends on confidence, the willingness to let a line stand without apology.

Conclusion

In the classroom, I teach compression as a revision strategy rather than an aesthetic mandate. I ask students to identify a paragraph where explanation outweighs action and to revise it by cutting it in half, not through summary, but by replacing explanation with image, gesture, or voice. Compression has reshaped both how I write and how I teach fiction, reinforcing what poets have long understood: language gains power under pressure. Studying writers such as Jamaica Kincaid, Patricia Smith, and Danez Smith reveals that compression is not about shrinking stories but about intensifying them. In a literary culture that often rewards volume and speed, compression offers an alternative ethic grounded in intention and trust in the reader, and for fiction writers willing to learn from poets, it becomes a vital tool of craft.

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Angela Jackson-Brown is an award-winning writer, poet, and playwright. Her novels include Untethered, When Stars Rain Down, The Light Always Breaks, and Homeward. Her poetry collection, House Repairs, won the 2021 Alabama Authors Award in poetry from the Alabama Library Association. She was also a finalist for the 2022 Indiana Authors Award. Her short fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in numerous literary journals, including The Louisville Review and Appalachian Review. Her plays have been included in the IndyFringe DivaFest, the Indiana Bicentennial Celebration at the Indiana Repertory Theatre, and OnyxFest. She holds an MFA in Writing from Spalding University as well as degrees from Troy University and Auburn University. Visit her website at https://www.angelajacksonbrown.com/.