The Lorenzo’s Oil of literature is distilled into being by writers skilled in nail-hitting, atom-splitting and advanced rabbit-out-of-the-hat-ology.

It begins with a rendering of pain, joy or poignancy, trimming off fatty irrelevance and scratching out insipid detail.

The next step is to compose a sumptuous simile, in the same way that Mozart selected notes at random to produce a masterpiece.

But, DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES be tempted to dress up any old metaphor in elegiac finery and let it loose on the page.

At some point that will-o-the-wisp ‘The Muse’ usually helps out, but this relies on the conscious and subconscious getting along and we know they have a reputation for caprice and ephemerally bad behaviour.

Choose your classical references wisely. Pithy Homeric epigrams are so ‘last year’.

Quick recap:-

Distillation

Rendering

Metaphor

Muse

Classical reference

in no particular order

or quantity for that matter.

Finally, and most importantly, you need to imagine your poem trying to describe to some heartless alien how its first kiss felt, not forgetting to be beautifully vague, oh and leave curious voids where all your tear-splashed thoughts bleed on the page.