Consider this sentence from Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel:

Artemis Victor has no idea what it takes to own a house, but she knows what it takes to beat other people, which is what owning property seems like, beating other people at owning a piece of the earth and making that piece of earth yours, not to be shared with other people, because the owning of the property is a product of your victory over other humans, as in, you won more dollars than them so now this slice of land is yours for keeps.

Artemis is one of the young women boxers in Bullwinkel’s novel. This one-sentence summary of her appears early in one of the sections of the book in which she boxes. The novel is organized like a March Madness bracket, with each pairing of characters having a winner that moves on to the next pairing until finally the two characters most likely to win box each other. One thing to learn from Bullwinkel is the value of a clear organizational structure for a novel, especially one with many characters.

The sentence above is its own paragraph. It stands out on the page. It also reveals key elements of one character, specifically. It suggests what she does not know and how she thinks about the world. This is stated directly and succinctly. As readers learn more about the character, such as her feelings about her sisters, for example, Artemis becomes more rounded. So, one technique for writing a round character is a concise, memorable sentence juxtaposed with contrasting scenes. The sharper the contrast between the scenes and summary, the more sides the character will seem to have and the better readers will get to know them.

Lorna Crozier’s prose poem “Vituperative” is an excellent example of several techniques. It also effectively models a structure. The title tells readers the name of the poem, and the body shows the title. This showing includes images driven by sensory language, synonyms, and examples. Poetic strategies include alliteration. Rather than the happy ending readers might be trained to expect, consistent with its title, the prose poem doubles down on its bitterness.

Simple and powerful.