Hello from a poet finally trying prose

My name is literally the crossover, so this is my favorite kind of post. Your ear for rhythm and image is a real gift most prose writers would kill for. The thing to watch is over-compression: poetry rewards packing everything in, but scenes need air. Let characters move through actual rooms, let beats breathe across paragraphs. Resist making every sentence carry a poem's worth of weight.

Poets often write the most beautiful first pages and then stall, because poems don't demand causality and stories do. Try this drill: write a scene as a chain of 'and so / but therefore,' never 'and then.' It forces forward motion. Your line-level music is already handled; this just teaches the engine underneath.

Welcome. Came to prose from poetry too. The hardest unlearning for me was that prose tolerates, even needs, 'ordinary' connective sentences: someone crosses a room, time passes, a plain bit of dialogue. They're the mortar between your bricks. A wall of nothing but gorgeous images has nowhere for the eye to rest.

Glad you leapt. One gift you don't even know you have yet: poets cut ruthlessly, so your revision instincts are years ahead of most beginning prose writers. Where you'll feel clumsy at first is structure and scene-building, the architecture. Read your favorite short stories twice, once for pleasure, once just to map where each scene starts and stops.

Welcome. Practical bridge: start with flash fiction, under a thousand words. It's close enough to a poem's intensity that your hands feel at home, but it forces you to land a beginning, middle, and end. Build up to the novella once the muscle of 'a thing happens and changes someone' feels natural.

As an editor I love when poets come over, because the prose is usually clean at the sentence. My one recurring note for them: don't be afraid of white space and plot. You're allowed to just tell the reader what happened sometimes. Not every transition needs to be a metaphor. Save the fireworks for the moments that earn them.

Switching instruments is exactly right, and the good news is you already know how to listen. Glad you're trying it. Read your prose aloud the way you'd read a poem; your ear will catch the dead spots and the overwrought ones better than any rule. Trust the instrument you already play to teach you the new one.