Writing poetry is a peculiar thing for me, because I cannot explain half or maybe even more of the decisions I make while writing it. Line breaks, word choice, line-length, sounds -- I'm running almost purely on instinct, a sense of This works or Nope, need to change it.

Compare this to writing fiction, where I can probably explain about 90% of what I'm doing. (Word choice and sentence structure, especially where related to what I perceive as the rhythm of the prose, I do part on instinct and part on knowing that, for instance, you don't do three sentences in a row that start with the same word and have similar lengths (unless you're going for a particular effect)). I can come up with logic for most of what I'm doing. Poetry? Not so much.

This is going to be problematic when it comes to learning how to get better. At the moment I'm trying to read more poetry, as that's how I learnt (and still learn) a lot of my writing craft skills. I also have links somewhere to written tutorials on poetry-writing, which I will check out sometime.

(If you want to read more poetry, why not wander on over to the latest issue of Goblin Fruit.)

In some sense, though, this muddling forward is quite fun. And certainly rewarding when I come up with something that I think works. (About half of it, maybe more, doesn't. Maybe I'll be able to fix them when I'm better at this.)

Wrote a 10-line little'un today. I think it works.

Onwards I go.

Tags: poetry