Poetry started as an oral art. So I always listened to stories, and my work as a poet makes me migrate to metaphor, trying to learn the truth about one thing by looking at something like it. As a poet, I've also tried to cultivate a precision of language that would probably help anybody write anything better. Pound likened this to Dante's notion of verbum perfecium, the word made perfect. That's a lofty goal, but poetry urges you toward it.
Poetry also makes one a compulsive reviser.
I can do as many as sixty drafts trying to feel my way into whatever's interesting or true in a poem. My editing style is to slash and burn. Viking would never have paid me, and I needed the money. In The Liars' Club you describe several years of your childhood and then shoot forward seventeen years to recount your father's death. I ate my entire life to reach the point where her secret was unearthed.