The Poet Returns

Sonnet 601 finally arrives, after a 3-month hiatus!

I stopped writing in December 2021, but only to turn my poetry into books. 500 of my previous 600 sonnets been have rigorously edited and formatted into four books, out of a series of five, 125 sonnets in each. That leaves me with 25 more sonnets to write, to complete the fifth: 5 x 125 = 625. This, then, may be a short return - I will need to create the fifth book as soon as I have 25 more poems. Actually, 24, after the one above.

It takes less time than you might imagine to ‘do’ each book. Most of the previous three months were spent designing the layout and the covers, and writing software to create the print-ready PDF files. I quickly realised that as a computer programmer (40+ years, man and boy!) I could be so much more precise with my own code than I could ever be while using Adobe’s publishing tools. I don’t need a complex, cumbersome, general purpose piece of software. I need a small utility to compile my poems into five separate books, all with exactly the same layout. Needed. I have it. I wrote it.

Beyond these five books, I have no firm plans, but the lure of ‘one more book’ to get me to 750 sonnets will probably prove to be too much to resist.

Books 1-4 are entirely complete. I have printed samples (wonderfully crafted) of the first three, and I’m waiting on the fourth, ordered today. My software creates PDF and eBook versions simultaneously, so those are already available, but not to you, not yet. I may upload some samples - covers, most likely - but it’s not a priority for me right now.

I won’t be going back to the poems uploaded on this site to add the changes to every sonnet. As the saying goes, ain’t nobody got time for that! But I will be adding punctuation to the line endings from now on. No, I didn’t think I needed it. Yes, I needed it. Everything in the books is properly punctuated. There are other changes too - some changes to titles, sometimes the odd word which didn’t quite work, and one or two substantial rewrites to poems which I didn’t think were up to my own high standard. Barring any minor tweaks and typos, the book versions are my best work. So far.

Today I return to the writing I have started to miss.

It begins.

Creativity Gap / ‘Powers’

You’ll notice there’s a gap here. The last poem, dated 5 March 2021, brought an end to a fairly long and productive spell of poetry writing. Was there a reason for this?

By looking at that poem, A Moment, Maybe, you’ll find a sonnet describing the end of a relationship. Did this happen to me? Yes. Did I write this just after the end of a relationship? No.

In fact, the sequence of events was this:

5 March - I wrote the poem
6 March - I read it to my partner (as I had always done with all my poems)
7 March - She ended our 8-year relationship

She did not of course end it because I wrote the poem. It had been on the cards (unbeknownst to me) for a long time. But writing a poem about a break-up and then having it happen almost immediately can kill anyone’s creativity, instantly. This, then, explains why my writing ended so abruptly in early March.

My ability to supposedly make something happen, just by saying it, is something I laughingly call my ‘powers’. Famous people have died the day after I wrote something related to their life - that has happened three times now. Of course these are all coincidences, and I have zero belief in any supernatural nonsense. But it does make life interesting. I am a lethal reincarnation of Nostradamus, apparently!

By early April (I’m writing this on 15 April 2021, but I’m adding it in situ to the blog so have had to give it an arbitrary date) I am over the shock of what happened, and back in full flow. My powers are still working - I wrote a poem, Infamy, with a line ‘The king is dead, but long will live his name’. The very next morning Queen Elizabeth’s husband, Philip, was indeed dead. You may say he was not technically a king, but ‘husband of a queen’ is as close as it gets, and that is a massive coincidence. He had, after all, been on this planet just shy of 100 years, and I wrote that line the night before he died. Was this just a coincidence? Yes, of course.

Need another? On the day of the death itself I was explaining this crazy coincidence to a friend. It’s important to note that my friend is female and has suffered with serious back pain for decades. She said, in a text, and I quote, ‘Don’t write about me unless it’s about being pain free’. Earlier that day I had already written the first draft of another poem, The Limousine, which includes the line ‘The pain she feels will never fade away’. Again, a coincidence, but these things certainly add colour to an otherwise unremarkable existence.

And before you ask, my powers do not work to order, so please, no assassination requests!

How to Write a Limerick

If you look at my recent posts you’ll see I recently went from writing ‘nothing but sonnets’ to ‘nothing but limericks’. That’s little more than finding what I enjoy doing and sticking with it until something else catches my interest. Right now I’m writing limericks simply because I’m having a lot of fun doing it. I find them easy to write, which is why I’ve been writing 10 of them every day. So it should be easy to explain how to write a limerick, shouldn’t it? Famous last words!

I’m going to use this one as an example:

    In a shower of shimmering lights
    She descends from the heavenly heights
    So angelic, so pure
    Such a dazzling allure
    But there’s quite a big hole in her tights

The number of syllables is 9-9-6-6-9, and the rhyming scheme is AABBA, which simply means all the ‘A lines’ (first line, second line, last line) rhyme, and all the ‘B lines’ (third and fourth lines) rhyme.

When I was writing sonnets I regularly woke up thinking in lines of 10 syllables! Now I’m in the middle of my ‘limerick affliction’ it’s down to 9 and 6, with a completely different rhythm. The most mundane things will suddenly pop into my head:

    When I look at the carrier bag
    There’s a photograph there of a dog
    See the battery left on the floor
    What’s the time, am I ready to eat?

That was just after a quick look around the room. If I move over to haiku at some point it will no doubt change again. With haiku, I used to regularly count every syllable (5-7-5) on my fingers, but the rhythm of a limerick is easy to ‘do’ in my head:

    In the mountains of deepest Nepal

    da-da-DAH da-da-DAH da-da-DAH
    da-da-DAH da-da-DAH da-da-DAH
    da-da-DAH da-da-DAH
    da-da-DAH da-da-DAH
    da-da-DAH da-da-DAH da-da-DAH

Although sometimes the longer lines have 10 beats, which goes:

    There's a mountain range up in Kentucky
 
    da-da-DAH da-da-DAH da-da DAH-da

These variations are the ones I'm most comfortable with, but the ‘standard’ limerick is this:

    There was an old man from Nantucket
 
    da-DAH da-da-DAH da-da DAH-da

Or:

    There was an old lady from Rome
 
    da-DAH da-da-DAH da-da-DAH

You Need to Metre

The most important thing to remember is not the rhyme, which is easy (if it rhymes you know it), and not even the number of syllables (which you can count). No, it’s the metre, always the metre. That’s really the rhythm of the poem, and comes from the pattern of syllables, which can be short or long, stressed or unstressed. If you get that wrong, a limerick, or in fact any poem, won’t trip off the tongue – instead, it will walk into a wall!

In my examples above, ‘da’ is unstressed, ‘DAH’ is stressed. The simple way to remember it is to imagine the actual words are capitalised:

    In the mountains of deepest Nepal

    da-da-DAH da-da-DAH da-da-DAH

    In the MOUNTtains of DEEPest NePAL

‘Mountain’ works there, as do ‘deepest’ and ‘Nepal’, because they are 2-syllable words with stresses where I’ve shown them. If you replace those words with 2-syllable words where the stresses are in different places you’ll see the rhythm is immediately lost:

    In the lagoons of serene Venice

Same number of syllables, but those words do not work at all. You cannot read that in this way:

    In the LAGoons of SERene VenICE

The words are actually stressed as follows:

    In the lagOONS of serENE VENice

And that simply won’t work for a limerick. That really is all you need to remember about the form of the limerick. Get the rhyme and the rhythm working and you’re halfway there.

What About the Story?

Halfway? The other half is of course the story you want to tell. I can’t give you much advice about that because the weird (dis)connections in my brain are what lead me to my finished poems. But I can tell you one of the ways I will create a limerick, using the example I showed earlier:

    In a shower of shimmering lights
    She descends from the heavenly heights
    So angelic, so pure
    Such a dazzling allure
    But there’s quite a big hole in her tights

The way I create most of my limericks is this: I think of a first line, which gives me a general idea of the subject, then I think of a ridiculous last line, and lastly I fill in everything between.

To get my first line I often go to the ‘Daily Deviations’ or ‘Undiscovered’ sections of DeviantArt and just browse around, waiting for something to catch my eye. Or I may generate some random words. If no idea presents itself, I go to the next image or word list. Eventually something will happen. The spark of an idea will form, and that will give me my first line:

    In a shower of shimmering lights

That was, as I remember, a picture of a beautiful woman surrounded by (you guessed it) shimmering lights. So now I’m writing about a woman (who later becomes an angel), who is beautiful and glamorous. In a limerick the last line will reverse all that, drop the glamour and add a punchline.

I don’t know what’s going to fit there, but I do know I need a rhyme for ‘lights’, so I look for that in the rhyming dictionary whose praises I endlessly sing – Rhymezone:

    http://www.rhymezone.com

There are plenty of rhyming words for ‘lights’, but the page highlights the most common ones, which is where I usually look first:

    bites, cites, heights, nights, rights, sights, sites, tights, whites

What immediately strikes me is ‘tights’. She’s a glamorous woman, but she has a hole in her tights. It’s as simple as that. I have a last line, the punchline to the scene:

    But there’s quite a big hole in her tights

Now it’s just a case of writing 3 more lines to build her up, up, up, so that the verbal pratfall at the end leaps out at you.

Hitting the Rhymezone Hard

‘Heights’ is another rhyme, so I thought of ‘heavenly heights’. Maybe this is now an angel:

    She descends from the heavenly heights

Here’s another thing I do when I’m writing poetry: I think of the end of the line before I know what I’m doing with the beginning, so I write it down before I forget it. So with that line I might have thought ‘heavenly heights fits’ and I want her to, er, fall down? Doesn’t fit... no other ideas... let’s just get the end of the line in and worry about the start of it later:

    She xxx the heavenly heights

Every x marks a syllable I need to fill. I also know the rhyme scheme is making me put da-DAH-da there.

My choice of words is dictated by the metre (see above), and yes, Rhymezone does let you display only words which fit the metre you need! I might want a 3-syllable word with the metre da-da-DAH, and I can find it. If it was DAH-da-da, or da-DAH-da (as here), that’s also possible. For rhyming poetry with metre, which is what I write, this is a priceless tool.

I initially though of ‘fall’ so I can put that in to find a synonym or related word, with 3 syllables, restricted to x/x (Rhymezone’s equivalent of da-DAH-da). I still don’t find one. But am I looking for one word, or do I need two? Does she fall from the heavenly heights? Small change:

    She xx from the heavenly heights

I could use ‘falls down’ here and it would fit. But if there’s a single word, a better word, I’d rather use it. I need a 2-syllable word for ‘fall’, with a metre of ‘da-DAH’. I put that in, and high on the list is ‘descend’. Perfect:

    She descends from the heavenly heights

Just the ‘short lines in the middle’ to go. The method is the same. I’m describing a beautiful angel, so at some point I found ‘pure’ and ‘allure’. To get there I might have put a few different words into the Rhymezone search, found their synonyms, and eventually discovered a couple of words which rhyme and which appeal to me (all very subjective). Here are the completed lines:

    So angelic, so pure
    Such a dazzling allure

I often think of a word but know it’s boring, so the synonym lookup is useful for that. If I thought of ‘shiny’ I could then find ‘dazzling’, which is a far better word here.

I do want to emphasise that if a word looks like it isn’t good enough (too bland, perhaps), there are probably many other words which can be used instead. Synonyms, related words, rhymes which lead to a different meaning altogether, are all part of the process. If you change the word at the end of the line, of course, you are going to need to make sure your rhymes are all intact.

I should also mention alliteration, which for any humorous poem is something you cannot ignore. That is, two or more words, side by side, beginning with the same letter/sound. Decide which one is better:

    Shower of shimmering lights
    Shower of glittering lights

I hope you picked the first one. Similarly ‘heavenly heights’ is alliterative. It’s pleasing to the senses when you recite it. Why? It just is. Don’t question the magic!

So, with those 3 additional lines, it’s done. That’s the whole limerick. Here it is once more:

    In a shower of shimmering lights
    She descends from the heavenly heights
    So angelic, so pure
    Such a dazzling allure
    But there’s quite a big hole in her tights

Conclusion

Straightforward? I like to think so. I’ve gone to great lengths to describe things in detail, but basically you just need to make your poem rhyme, make it fit the metre, and make it fun. It can be a time-consuming process, and sometimes it’s not easy to produce something you’re happy with, but as with many things, the work you put in makes the end result all the more satisfying.

So let me try one more, completely improvised for this journal:

    If a limerick you will be writing
    Try to make it sound really exciting
    If you can’t tell a tale
    And you think you may fail
    Add a rude little word or some fighting

That took me 2 minutes from start to finish... perhaps it shows!

Remember that you can use these same guidelines for writing any other poetic form, so long as it has metre and rhyme.

Good luck!

An Antidote to Free Verse

What I know about poetic form has been absorbed gradually, over many years, sometimes accidentally, sometimes when I’ve actively looked for more information. Much of the time I’ve simply read a poem which I’ve appreciated, and then tried to write one with similar structure, or adapted its form to meet my needs. I’ve really just been playing it by ear.

The sestina and the villanelle are two forms I’ve discovered only this year, and I’ve come to enjoy writing them, but there is a temptation to just written dozens of those and nothing else. Now I feel like I need to learn about more forms, and to stretch myself to see what is possible. I’ve looked into buying books about poetic form, but they all seem to be very dry and overly academic. I keep falling back to Google searches, giving up, and going back to ‘if in doubt, write a sestina’, albeit customised to suit the poem I’m writing – I do break ‘rules’ if they need to be broken.

Yesterday I searched for ‘poetry’ on YouTube and found the video shown above. Stephen Fry (a legend in so, so many ways), talks about poetic form, and more importantly mentions a book he wrote about that very subject, teaching poetic form to people who want to write poetry.

It was a joy to listen to him talking about and promoting poetic form. The structure of poetry is what gives it something far more than prose, and I find it immensely satisfying to do the hard graft required to bring to my poetry the control required by whatever form I’ve decided to use.

Poetry without form is called ‘free verse’, so allow me to hit that particular topic with a sledgehammer. Although he was careful not to disparage free verse, it’s hard not to get the impression that it’s certainly not Stephen Fry’s favourite thing. I am far less coy about that subject. I have no love for free verse at all. Not because there aren’t any good writers of free verse (he mentions some in the video), but because 99.9% of free verse is, let there be no doubt, absolutely awful.

Random words thrown down without any structure at all, flowery phrases pulled out of someone’s backside just because they thought, ‘Oh that sounds nice,’ do not make great poetry. They just make a mess. They are not stirring my emotions at all, unless you count frustration as one – I am frustrated that people don’t know how to use words to write poetry, so they think that just writing a long jumble of lines is the way to go.

Bad free verse is no more than the literary equivalent of Jackson Pollock, who just spattered paint onto canvas in any old direction and called it art. No, Jackson Pollock’s splishy splashy crap was not art, it was just splishy splashy crap. Look up his stuff on Google images and tell me that any idiot with some pots of paint couldn’t do that. The art world is one of those places where if you can talk the talk you can get away with convincing art ‘critics’ that your plastic bag full of dog shit is ‘a commentary on the futility of war in a post-modern society’, or some bollocks like that. Free verse is exactly the same. People are telling you it’s art, but it’s not. It’s dog shit. In a bag.

Free verse, certainly in the hands of anyone I’ve seen on DeviantArt, is nothing its authors should be proud of. Maybe it’s just ‘not my thing’ in the same way as Jackson Pollock’s nonsense is ‘not my thing’, but I doubt it. It’s The Emperor’s New Clothes in poetry – there is nothing really there, and I’m calling it out for what it is. This journal post wasn’t originally intended to be a public lynching of free verse, but I’m glad to have put my feelings on the subject out there now.

What I really started this journal to say was that I’ve now ordered Stephen Fry’s book, The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within, and I’ll be trying to add to my skills, taking my poetry in new directions, at least new for me. If poetic form was good enough for the great poets over the centuries, then that’s good enough for me. Free verse is definitely not good enough for me.

How I wrote 'Selkie Skin'

Selkie Skin is a poem about a selkie and her skin. Well, that wrapped everything up more quickly than I expected! The poem was written over a period of 4 days, and changed a lot during that time. This is a description of how the poem came about, and the process I went through to complete it successfully.

Time

When I say it took 4 days to write Selkie Skin, I really do mean 4 days. If you work a 9-to-5 job in an office and sit down in front of the computer all day, well that’s not nearly the number of hours per day I spent in my 4 days of writing poetry. I tend to start at midday and keep going until I simply have to sleep, usually 4 or 5 am. I usually stop to eat, but sometimes I find I’ve missed a meal altogether! Do I eat dinner at 3 in the morning? Yes, sometimes I do.

I put a lot of time into this poem because, as usual, the story inside me demanded the time from me. This is not a simple story, or a snapshot of an event. Selkie Skin is a full story, with a detailed plot, characters, and many twists and turns. That all takes time.

Rhyme

And it’s poetry, with rhyme and metre. Rhyme is easy. Find two words to rhyme and put them together. You’re done. You can even get two lines which rhyme and have the same number of syllables, fairly easily. But that’s not the end of it. Read this aloud:

    There is a house beyond the blue hill
    Underneath it is an orange mill

Those are two lines which rhyme and have the same number of syllables, but they have no real metre, or at least none which flows naturally – there is no rhythm to these lines. They don’t even stutter along in the same (bad) pattern as each other. When you read them aloud your brain says, ‘Something is wrong, I don’t like this’, and your brain is absolutely correct!

Metre

I won’t be explaining what metre is here, and I won’t be getting too technical, so you’ll need to look it up elsewhere if you’re not sure. Try this link for the basics:

    Metre (poetry)

Writing with metre can be difficult. Sometimes you will find the perfect word and the perfect rhyme, but if its metre is DUM-da-da and your line needs da-da-DUM, you simply can’t use that word. And that doesn’t just apply the end of the line. The entire line will have metre, so every word has to have the correct metre, at the place you want to put it within the line. My poem is 188 lines long, and that’s a lot of lines, a lot of words, a lot of syllables (2024 of them!) all needing to fit the metre I chose for the poem. And that metre is...

    Dactylic tetrameter

I used the same metre in Forgotten Empires, and liked it there so I knew it would fit with the tone of this story.

And yes, as with that poem, you can also sing this one to the same tune as the opening bars of  ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ by The Beatles. But please don’t do it. I must stop mentioning that!

Story

Of course, within these severest of constraints (which, by the way, makes writing this kind of poetry more enjoyable, not less), I also have to tell a story. The story may sometimes change, because what I want to say at a particular point won’t fit the metre, or because the metre forces me to use one word rather than another. When I say ‘forces’ I also mean ‘suggests’. I may find a word which fits, but which then makes me go in a different direction with the plot, or gives me further ideas for developing the story. That’s how I write most of my poems, certainly the longer ones. Everything is always open to change, if the changes are improvements.

All of this together takes time, huge amounts of it. Imagine that you have a jigsaw with 2000 pieces, and that you’re constantly trying to move and fit the pieces together. You find a piece of blue sky, but where will it fit? You see another piece of sky, but no, it’s the wrong shape (the metre), so you have to keep trying until it fits. When it’s all put together you have the big picture, and I have a poem. Unless, that is, I’ve looked at the clear blue sky, decided I’d rather see a cloudy grey one, and now have to make new and more interesting pieces to fit my puzzle!

Selkies

I’ll talk more about selkies in a while, but for now all you need to know about them is this:

In Scottish mythology, selkies, meaning “seal folk”, are mythological beings capable of changing from seal to human form by shedding their skin.

That’s from Wikipedia, and if you need more you can read the whole entry here:

    Selkie

From this point onwards I need to assume you’ve read my poem. If not, consider this a huge spoiler alert!

Dreaming

Let’s talk about a dream I had. The date was 13 November 2019 and when I woke up I wrote down what I remembered of the dream:

A couple find a baby on a beach and take her home, adopt her and look after her. But when the mother dies the child is abused by the father in a terrible way. She runs away and the father pursues her, finding her eventually on the very beach where she was originally discovered. He is dragging her home when she gives an awful cry. The sound is answered by a population of seals who seem to come from nowhere and come ashore on the beach, surrounding the man and separating him from the girl. Some of the seals take human form and kill the man. Those still in seal form devour him. The girl returns with them to the sea. They are selkies, as is the girl.

I didn’t really need a spoiler alert there, because that dream is not the plot of this poem. But, when I started writing it, that was the plot I had in mind. I immediately wanted to have the baby (it was still a baby then) appear after a storm. So the very first stanza of the poem I wrote was this:

Seething and surging, the withering thunderstorm
Lashed with a murderous, merciless roar
Shattering waves hurled invincible energy
Rearing as demons, they pounded the shore

Writing something like that also helps me get into the correct mindset. I knew this would be a long poem, so would need a gradual build-up, but a few lines of high drama often gets the creative juices flowing more easily.

At the time I wanted an island with a couple living on it, who find the child. Why would a couple live on the island? Could I instead use a monk and a nun? Change of direction again. Problem: monks and nuns do not and did not live in that way. Not one of each, together. But for a hermit (in the religious sense of the word) it would work perfectly. So far I had: hermit finds stranded baby after a storm.

Back to my dream. The central theme to it is an abusive relationship. So the timescale now became an issue. Did I want to wait, in my story, until the baby grew up? No. Did I really want to explore ‘man abuses child’ in this poem? I’ve done that before, many times, because there are terrible things done to children, and I write to bring them to light and condemn them. But I had the sense that I wanted to go in a different direction here. ‘Woman in an abusive relationship’ is where this poem really started to take me. That’s the direction I went. The dream led me to a certain point, then I simply took a fork in the road.

More forks led to me ‘the hermit is a monk who loses his faith and goes bad’ and ‘the storm is called when he does a deal with a devil’. Those led directly to ‘finds a woman’, ‘loves the woman at first, but his evil nature is revealed’. Much much later we find that the path leads to ‘he gets what he deserves... or maybe not... oh yes he does... but does she have a happy ending?’ and we’re all the way into spoiler town again.

Research

You’ll be best served by me not repeating everything I’ve read but simply guiding you to some of the material I found to be most useful.

The Selkie-folk
Imagine a seal, which takes off its skin. Inside it is a woman. But she cannot become a seal again without the skin. What if someone steals and hides the skin? The web page describes how selkies live, how they shed their skins, and how their skins can be taken so that the selkie is forced to stay, unable to return to the sea. It also describes the ‘seven tears’, which is important to my poem, although I changed its meaning a little to suit the story I had in mind. There are other links on that page to more selkie information.

Monk – Hermit – Mendicant
A complicated one because monks generally live in monasteries, with other monks. Hermits live alone and don’t mix with other people, so that’s why my main character is a hermit. A religious one, so the information about monks was important too. He’s a mix of all I read about monks and hermits. I mention the word ‘mendicant’ in the poem – someone who ‘relies chiefly or exclusively on alms to survive’. That ties in with the boat delivering supplies of food to the island.

The Island
The hermit’s island is in the North, and so are the selkies, so in my mind it was a small, remote island, part of the Orkney Islands. One of them had (or has) a chapel on it, but chapels aren’t for living in, so I built him a hermitage.

The Middle at the End

Once I was well into writing the poem, I realised I had a beginning (call down the storm, find the selkie) and an end (the selkies rise up against the hermit) but no middle. I actually went straight from the selkie waking up to, in the very next stanza, accepting her fate and saying she would marry him. And in the next stanza he was taking advantage of her and planning to leave the island. That was some quick turnaround!

So the very last thing I added was the gradual seduction of the selkie by the hermit, followed by his change in mood and abusive nature as soon as he got what he wanted. This was all to add weight to the idea of an abusive relationship, a universal truth found in all too many relationships, right up to modern times.

Revenge

The hermit is punished, but he has a card up his sleeve and plays it when he knows he has nothing to lose. My original thoughts were that the selkie would find her skin, accuse him of hiding it, take the boat, and leave him on the island to starve. That sounded like too much of a happy ending to me (if you call starving someone to death ‘happy’). If you know me, you’ll know I don’t do a ‘Disney denouement’. Yes, the hermit is dealt with, but he hid her skin – why would I not want her to spend her life looking for it? The older versions of many fairy tales delight in avoiding happy endings. As do I. Poor selkie. You’ll hear her cries on the wind, if you just listen.

Conclusion

Massive poem. Massive amount of work. Massively satisfying. This is one of the best poems I’ve ever written. I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope you found these insights of some interest too. On to the next one!

How I wrote 'The Bleakest Show on Earth'

I’ve just concluded a huge, intense writing session, finally completing my poem ‘The Bleakest Show on Earth’. The method I used was a little different from the path I’ve followed for other poems, so I thought it might be interesting to share what just happened.

My usual way of working is this: I search for inspiration, think of an idea, come up with a suitable rhyming scheme, then put down a few lines to see if it’s going to work out. Sometimes it doesn’t – the rhyming scheme may be too restrictive, or just doesn’t seem to fit with what I need. That’s easy to change, so when I find something which ‘fits’, off I go. Sometimes I veer away from my original path, which is more normal if I only have a vague idea about where I was going with it!

The length of the poem dictates itself. ‘The Queen of Every Nightmare’ didn’t want to go beyond 4 stanzas, and those were hard-fought battles to get them onto the page. It’s a very dense, very intense poem, a hard one to craft to my satisfaction. Whereas ‘The Giant Who Could Not Sing’ flowed easily off the keyboard, is a long, long poem, and it’s a much lighter piece.

Back to ‘The Bleakest Show on Earth’. I had no ideas for this poem, not at first, so my thoughts were that I could go to DeviantArt and look at some random posts and pick something which spoke to me. To avoid having to find something (DA is a big place), I usually look for an artist or a curated group which fits my own (dark) tastes. In this case I found a group called ‘Dark-Asphyxiation’ which seemed to fit the bill. Here’s a link:

https://www.deviantart.com/dark-asphyxiation/gallery/9233355/featured

There is some fantastic art there, but perhaps I was overloaded with too much quality to pick just one, and meanwhile nothing was telling me ‘here is a story you should tell’. So that in itself gave me the idea – what if I told all of the stories I was seeing?

Time to sidetrack again. Back in 2011 I wrote one of my favourite poems, ‘Who I Am’, which tells about the regret someone has at the end of their life. It’s a series of rhyming couplets, which are connected by the theme of the poem, but in actual fact could be jumbled up and put into any order (though in practice, I did rearrange the couplets to find what flowed best). There’s a ‘header’ and a ‘footer’ to lead in and out of the poem, but the meat of the poem is a list of ‘things’, which I wrote by creating those couplets as they presented themselves to my imagination, and putting them into the finished poem.

Back to the present. The thing with the couplets? Didn’t want to do that. What I decided to do was look at every image in the DA group and write a single line, the first impression which came into my head. No thinking, no ‘let me sit back and consider what I’m seeing’. Look at the picture, write something down.

So that’s what happened. I ended up writing two pages of single-line thoughts, 104 in total. Here are the first 20, to give you some idea about what I ended up with:

• Tainted angels burning high upon a bridge
• Flower-covered maidens frozen in an icy pool of their own tears
• A bloody-nosed young girl who could not bear to go school
• A hand closed tight upon the eye now blinded in its palm / grasp / grip
• A choking mass of cobwebs fill the mouth and blind the eyes
• A wedding veil torn apart, still covering the bride’s head, bruised
• A broken body lying in a field of burning skulls / burning body + broken bones
• A priest whose robes hide the things he has stolen
• A silver-haired child carrying her heart in a dirty carrier bag
• A old man kneeling in the ruins of his home
• A well-dressed woman, strangled by a feathered scarf around her neck
• A girl without hands trying to feed herself, but she has no mouth
• A woman waiting beneath the surface of a stagnant pool
• Burning stairs, above and below, with people trapped between
• A dying child, being comforted by the woman who killed her
• An army of crows, circling their mistress
• A boat carrying children to their deaths
• A snake-eyed woman, fingers pushing into her own skin
• A witch, cutting out her own tongue
• An angel crying, lying on a broken shield

You may be able to fit some of these with the images in the DA group, but I should add that when I clicked on the art to look at it, sometimes that would lead to other images from the same artist, so if they steered me towards an idea I wrote that down too. It was not a strict ‘I must have one line for every image’, but I kept within the general area, made a few detours, and ended up with 104 ‘scenes’.

In ‘Who I Am’ I had many rhyming couplets. Here, I had no rhymes at all, just a list of scenes. I had no theme and no title. If I came up with some poetry, what form would it take? Could I write one couplet per scene? Possibly. But what I decided to do was find some kind of theme where, like ‘Who I am’, I could simply add the scenes in any order. I could then pick any two of the lines I’d created, make them rhyme, and add them to the poem.

So at this point I really had to find a theme. You can’t just throw something into a poem if the poem has no direction at all. How would these scenes all fit together. They would make a list of some kind, but a list of... what? Here are the ideas I went through before I settled on the final one:

• Things I have seen but never want to see again
• Day trip to Hell
• Demonic job interview
• A collection of broken/damaged souls. Is the collector trying to fix them? Or did he break them himself?
• Museum of madness
• Dinner party guests, or just a party
• Carnival freak show

Right there. That was it. A carnival freak show. The first stanza is four lines, inviting you in to see the freaks and oddities inside. It’s a ‘roll up, roll up, come and see the...’ idea, and every line which follows begins with ‘See the...’, as if the carnival barker is calling out the attractions one by one.

That also gave me the title, a variation of ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’, which of course was now ‘The Bleakest Show on Earth’.

So, my next question: do I want to use the same structure and rhyming scheme as ‘Who I Am’? I am always wary of doing that, not wanting to re-visit old ideas, but here it was irresistible. That was decided. Compare the two poems, and you’ll see the obvious similarities, but only in the structure. This new poem’s content is a completely different beast.

I now had 104 one-line scenes, which I needed to pair up into rhyming couplets, but at first there was no need to do that. I reasoned that I could put some structure into 20 or so lines, the 15 beats per line of the rhyming scheme, and then later I would put together pairs of lines which rhymed. This would have been very effective if any of my line endings had rhymed, but I had 20+ single lines, so then I began the much tougher work of pushing new lines to couple with existing lines.

That’s the hard grind of my poetry. I use an online rhyming dictionary, RhymeZone, which does exactly what you would expect. Type in a word and it gives you words which rhyme. But, and this is so important, it also gives you synonyms and related words. In my case I could then change the word at the end of the line, to see if it could fit with any of the 20 or more lines I’d already prepared. Or I could change the end of any of those lines to fit. And so on. That is very much a simplification, but basically I use  RhymeZone as a tool to give me as many words as possible, which I could not possibly think of so effectively, at least not with my limited human capacity!

Many of the 104 one-liners did not make it into the final poem. Some were too similar to existing scenes, some were simply weaker ideas, not good enough to be of any use – remember that each time I’d written down the first thing in my head, so some ‘chaff’ was to be expected. Some of the scenes were mixed together, or elements from one were used elsewhere. If I needed a particular character doing something else, I made it happen, or invented someone, or something, new. Remember that none of this is ever set in stone. The one-liners were ideas, to be changed and manipulated at will, which is why my initial list looks less like the final poem than you might otherwise expect.

As always, the poem seemed to tell me when it was done. My list of good ideas dwindled, and I paired the last few couplets with some difficulty. I ended up throwing a few 15-beat structured lines away because they just weren’t good enough.

Now I had the poem, it just needed an ending, the ‘punch in the face’ and the ‘what just happened there?’ all in one. You may be reading this before reading the poem itself, so I won’t add a spoiler, but I will say that I am pleased with the ending, and it all wrapped everything up nicely in a single 4-line stanza.

Poems like this don’t happen every day. Using this method I’ve now written two, one in 2011 and one in 2020. Although I used the same rhyming scheme in both ‘Who I Am’ and ‘The Bleakest Show on Earth’, and the similarities are obvious if you compare them, they are very different stories. They stand apart, but they also stand together. I’ve wanted to use the techniques employed in ‘Who I Am’ for a long time, and I think I took it to a different level. I’ve ended up with a piece of work of which I am extremely proud. And that is all I ever want from my writing.

About my writing

I've been recording more audio - my usual leanings towards H P Lovecraft, but also the epic that is Homer's Iliad (2 books out of 24, it will be years before I'm done). However in an enforced hiatus brought on by a severe cold, I started writing a horror story about catching a cold... which has developed into a horror story not about catching a cold.

So I'm writing again, but I think that I write more when I'm not writing about my writing. Hence I'm writing this to explain that I probably won't be writing about writing and will now be concentrating on my writing.

I hope that clears things up?!

Washout

July was a complete washout. No writing at all. I had other things on my mind and there was no space for anything else. Oh well.

Tangents

Well, 'the book that never was' seems to be turning into 'the poem that never was', in that the few verses I've written so far are sitting abandoned, unlikely to be joined by others in the foreseeable future. This was, however, not writer's block, but simply the urge to do other things.

As you'll have seen from my last blog, I wrote an entirely new poem, and quite quickly at that - one day, from start to finish, including recording, editing and uploading the audio to YouTube. When I say 'day' I actually mean that I refused to go to bed until it was finished, so it was more of a literal 24 hours, after which I slept for a long, long time, then woke up for a couple of hours and slept again.

Yesterday (which could be counted as today, since I've not actually slept between the end of one day and the beginning of the next) saw the arrival of an idea which could have been a new poem, but which unexpectedly turned into prose. It's so rare that I sit down and write prose that, yes, I sat down and wrote, continuing until I felt I'd done enough. All being well, I'll continue with it tomorrow (actually today - it's almost midday, so if I sleep now I'll wake up later in the evening). Without giving too much away, it's a story you need to read once to find out what happens, then read a second time with 'the spectacles of hindsight' to work out what was really going on.

Tangents are welcome. They at least are signs that I am doing something productive, even if, at the same time, they show that one or more existing projects have been left behind.

Slow Start but Building Momentum

Even though I started work on The Big Project (I'll have to call it that until the final title is decided upon) five days ago, I've still only written six verses. I was hoping for more but it does seem to be taking a while to get my head around the fact that a section of story I've already written as prose needs some severe changes if it's ever to work as a poem.

My first challenge was that I immediately have two female characters who are not known to each other, so great care is needed with pronouns until their names are revealed. Too many tangled instances of 'she' and 'her' will inevitably confuse things, and it can only get worse in about, oh, three or four more verses, when I introduce three more girls into the mix!

Since the poem will be divided up into chapters, I've used the device of starting each chapter with a brief hint at what will follow. Of course, it had to be in the form of a rhyming couplet:

In which Anya meets a mystery, an enemy, a friend
And discovers one on whom she can depend

That solved part of the first problem - introducing the name of the main character. I didn't want to use her name at all in the first verse, mainly because I'd already written that verse, so now I don't need to make any kind of fuss when I use her name in the poem itself for the first time.

I had contemplated changing the names of some of the characters, not least because the name Anya doesn't really rhyme with anything, but I did spend a lot of time choosing those names, many of which have meanings relevant to their place in the story, so I decided against it. However in the prose version everyone has second names and there really is no place for those, other than in exceptional circumstances which won't appear for a long while yet.

Moving on, the problem of describing each character raises its head. I simply cannot bring someone into the story and devote a whole verse to her physical appearance. Okay, actually I have done that for the 'stranger' I've just introduced, so that's my rule completely abandoned. However, the main character of the story has not been described in any great detail. We know she's a girl of school age and she's carrying a bag of heavy books on her back. The rest is up to the reader's imagination. It was always my plan (even in the prose version) to let the reader picture the main character for themselves. She is you, the reader, or someone you've met or imagined. You know what she looks like better than I do.

Many details from the prose version have had to be abandoned, and on the whole that's a good thing. As I said last time, my prose tends to be overly descriptive. I spent a couple of sentences describing how she walks between two parked cars, sees the other person sitting opposite and can't comfortably back up to find a different place to cross. In the poem it's reduced to half a line, no mention of cars, and the words are simply and with no way to retreat, which give the same meaning, that Anya is compelled to walk towards the stranger because to do anything else would be to draw even more attention to herself.

Slow progress so far then, but that is also partly because it's a huge shift in the way I'm approaching the project, as compared with other poems I've written, even the longer ones. I've had to hold myself in check, which has been difficult. The Genie Within was relentless drama, an avalanche of huge, dramatic scenes one after the other. I think that would be too tiring to read on such a large scale, although I of course want to write a page-turner. If it's all drama there is no way to introduce more drama when the narrative calls for it. When you see earthquakes and floods on TV they are shocking. When you see them over and over, day after day, it's human nature to become immune to the shock of the event. So in my case the quiet parts of a story are just as important as the 'big' events because they provide the contrast needed to lift or lower the emotions of the reader.

I do need to press on with the poem now. One verse a day is not enough! Momentum please!

The Big Project

It seems that The Genie Within has given me confidence in my ability to write long narratives in poetry, such I now think I could write really long narrative poetry. How long? Book long.

My previous post about Scrivener was actually meant to go on to describe a big project I was working on, and the one for which I needed Scrivener in the first place. However, as a review of the software I thought it was better to keep things separate. This, then, is what I was intending to do with it.

I was writing a book. And the past tense is unfortunate there because I am no longer writing that book. The book was planned out in full, with a fully realised plot, some incredibly detailed information for characters, settings, everything I'd need to begin writing the actual narrative. And I did begin writing it. And then I stopped writing it.

I stopped writing it because I have a tendency to be overly descriptive when I'm writing prose. I like to be 100% sure that my readers have the picture inside their head which I have inside mine. With prose there are few restraints, and my writing reflects that - I seem to be unable to hold back and self-edit as I write.

With poetry I find that the restrictions of writing, say, 8 lines with 15 syllables to a line, are exactly what I need to convey what's in my mind, but in a far more compact, more precise way. Every word is chosen with great care. There is no waffle, no fat, no waste. And I like that. I like the limitations. I like the challenge of working within those self-imposed rules and getting the best out of the medium. Quite simply, I like to write narrative poetry.

So here I am, looking for my next project, and I recently blogged that I needed to find myself a new story before I could begin. A day or two ago the penny dropped. I already have a story. I have a big story, a plot plan I'd worked on for about 6 months before writing even a word of narrative. I have a story I could turn into poetry.

Are there such things as novels written entirely in poetry? They are few and far between, and could more correctly be categorised as 'long poems long enough to fill a book'. One which immediately springs to mind is The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, which is an epic poem by any standards. Dante's Divine Comedy, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey are all epics. You can dispute the word 'novel' but they are all huge pieces of work. Wikipedia's entry on Long Poems has more.

Here's a short list of other titles, more modern this time: Novels in Poetry Form. I've not read any of them but I may take a look to see what's out there.

So what's my story about? I can't possibly tell you at such an early stage, for fear of jinxing it. I can say one thing: it's not a horror story, which is the genre into which I seem to have placed myself in recent times. As such it's a departure from the kind of poems I usually write, although since I created the story before I wrote most of my other poems, I don't quite know if it's a return to the past or a projection of the past onto my future. Yes, I'm confused by that too, so perhaps it's just as well that there's no time travel in it either!

Without revealing much more, I will share with you a couple of stanzas, written yesterday to explore the possibilities. You'll notice that I use the same rhyming scheme as The Genie Within. I have no hesitation in doing that because it served me so well in the writing of that poem; it really is perfectly suited to writing longer narratives.

Here then are two verses from chapter one of my yet-to-be-titled project. Don't even get me started on why, even after so long, there is still no title!

Chapter One Butterflies They were dancing, they were diving, flying, floating on the breeze, Over walls and into gardens, past the street lights, through the trees. As she followed them, the butterflies, with subtle, golden wings, Swept the memories and worries of a day’s unpleasant things To a place beyond her vision, where each flash of amber light Hid her troubles, hid reality, from sight. Were there two, or three? They flashed and turned so quick, so hard to tell, And she tripped and ran, caught up in their imaginary spell. In the fading, failing daylight, now the lamps all flickered on, And she stopped and turned, and turned again, but knew that they were gone. She was far from school, from home, from any street she’d ever known, And, without the golden butterflies, alone.

Famous last words: more will follow. Hopefully.

Scrivener

Before 2009 I'd tried to write books, or at least longer pieces of work, and failed because the complexity of the research and character/story building I was trying to do exceeded the power of the computer software I was using. Primarily I wrote everything in Word, which is fine if you're stringing together a long document, if you're writing the story itself, but for the research it's terrible.

Story development, for me at least, needs a separate page for each character, one for each scene, and many more pages just to set down random ideas and structure them in some way. You can't do that without a database. And yet a database is too rigid if you want the power of a word processor for each entry.

I also work very visually. I constantly look for pictures (and I'll say it again, this is where DeviantArt is in a class of its own) for my characters. Sometimes I have a general feel for a character and a picture will solidify that idea in my mind. Sometimes the picture will add to my original concept and suggest new areas to explore. It might be something as insignificant as eye colour or the shape of the nose, or perhaps the whole face stirs up some memory or half-thought of someone I once met, whose character can be introduced into the story.

Picture libraries are a vast resource of ideas, but a hard drive full of pictures is no use to anyone. They need structure. So again, I need software to give me that structure, and to allow me to put the pictures into my database so that when I'm writing I have the image in front of me. I can imagine what is going on inside that character's head and make notes, then later create the narrative, using the notes and the images as cues.

All that is a tall order, and believe me when I say I tried every possible solution designed to assist in the writing process, all to no avail. I can tell within 10 minutes that software isn't going to be of any use to me - if it doesn't immediately feel right I don't go beyond the trial version, and scrap it altogether. Some software manages to capture my attention beyond those ten minutes. I am, after all, looking to do fairly complex things, so if the basics are in place I might spend a few more days putting the thing through its paces. Such software is rare, and after a few days each title invariably failed and was discarded.

It was then that I heard of Scrivener, and when I read the product details I immediately knew that this what what I was looking for. I didn't even need to use it. In fact, I couldn't use it. Scrivener is for Mac computers only and I'd only ever owned PCs. Up until then I'd never even used a Mac, let alone owned one. What to do?

Compared to PCs, Macs are expensive. Yet the system requirements for Scrivener were quite low. I decided to do something crazy - buy a computer just so that I could use the software with it. It was actually quite cheap. I bought an old eMac from eBay for £40 which was a bargain. It's one of those all-in-one things with the computer and the screen in one big, heavy box. One problem: the seller said it had the version of Mac OSX (the operating system) needed to run Scrivener, but when I got it home it actually didn't. I had to download a later version and install the whole operating system again. Remember I'd never used a Mac before this point! But I got it working, I got Scrivener working and Scrivener is just an incredible piece of software.

It does all I ever wanted it to do and probably some things which I haven't thought of yet. A Scrivener project contains every single document and piece of information - text, images, links, all bundled together into one. Everything can be organised in a tree-style hierarchy, so you might have 500 documents/image/etc and they can all be arranged logically to suit your own personal needs. What's more, if you need to find a particular document you can just search for a phrase and all matching documents are brought up, ready to be selected and edited. With large projects I simply cannot work without that feature - I'd be lost in a mass of information.

While the eMac worked, of course it was an old computer (not to mention noisy!) and before long it started to creak under the weight of information I was adding to my projects. I needed something faster, so I ended up buying a Mac Mini which is a tiny, tiny, tiny computer (I currently can't see it because it's behind a book - an ordinary paperback!) with an up-to-date spec. Oh, and it runs almost completely silently which takes a lot of getting used to compared with the super-turbo fan noises of my older PCs. It was expensive, I'll not deny that, at least when compared with a comparable spec PC, but it runs Scrivener and that was my only requirement.

Of course Macs don't run PC software so I lost the use of some useful tools. Or did I? Well, no, because I also run Windows at the same time in a 'virtual machine' which lets Windows software run too. The best of everything.

If you're a writer you must - you must - try out Scrivener. Get a Mac, or get access to one, and just install the trial version and give it a go. You will love it.

Did I mention the mad, mad price of Scrivener? It's so low that I'm amazed they can get away with selling it at that price. Cost is not even a consideration. You won't find cheaper, and you certainly will never find a better piece of software designed specifically for writers, tuned exactly to how writers work.

And that, I'm happy to say, is my totally unbiased opinion. Did I mention that I like Scrivener? I did didn't I?!

Reading the meter

Since completing The Genie Within, I've done my usual thing: absolutely nothing. I become so utterly involved and engrossed in a project that when it's done it's almost impossible for me to immediately switch to something else. So it has been for the past week or so, although when I say 'nothing' I really mean that I've not been writing any more poetry. Instead I read a book and bought several more, most of which will be forever neglected on my shelves - I buy far more books than I will ever read, and in fact reading one of them is a major achievement for me. I read all day, but usually I graze on short article 'snacks' from various blogs and news sites.

While doing 'nothing' I do, however, take plenty of notes because I find that I'm constantly coming up with new ideas and fragments of story which may or may not be useful. If all of those fragments became full-blown poems/stories I'd have written half a dozen books by now - this year. But of course that's not how these things work. I make notes, notes, notes until one day one of those notes flicks a switch and turns into a poem.

Today might be one of those days when that begins to happen, so I thought it might be interesting to document when and how it happened. It's sometimes difficult to know where ideas come from, although often I'm looking at an image and something simply presents itself. This is why I visit the DeviantArt site so often. It is my primary source for inspiration, simply because there is such a vast quantity, ever-increasing, of strange and unexpected pictures. But this idea didn't come from there. It just popped up and jabbed me in the brain, as if from nowhere.

First, some background:

I like to experiment with meter. I have never studied poetry, and in fact came to it only relatively recently, but I know that my own poems don't get started until I've identified the correct meter and rhyming scheme for each one. In fact I've abandoned poems after as many as a dozen verses because the meter was either too inflexible or just gave the poem the wrong tone. You can't write a horror story with a 'jolly' meter, and you can't write a comic piece when the meter reminds you of a dirge.

The Genie Within has, in each stanza, 7 lines with 15 syllables, followed by an 8th line with only 11, which is used to summarise or emphasise the first 7. Without knowing how to describe the meter (de-dum-de-dum-de-dum is the extent of my powers!), I just know that it felt right and worked well. It seemed to be perfect for the type of story I was writing. A sample:

Seven times the turning seasons thawed the winters into spring,
And to threads of fleeting sanity his mind could scarcely cling.
Thus, encumbered with the madness of a decomposing world,
He returned before the priestess, his barbarity unfurled.
In his eyes were all the cancerous depravities of man,
And his deviant delirium began.

Castles of Carboard, my previous poem, was even more unusual: 9 lines in total, the first line not rhyming with anything at all which is something I've never tried before. The syllables for each line are as follows:

9 --- 9 / 6 / 6 / 9 --- 6 / 6 / 9 / 9

So the lines were divided into that non-rhyming line, followed by 4 lines in which the first+last and middle-two lines rhymed with each other, ending up with two couplets of different length. And it worked perfectly for the story, because for some reason the final line seemed (to me at least) to underline the whole verse with melancholy, which is exactly what I was looking for. Again, I find it hard to know why that is the case. Sometimes I used the last line to reverse everything which had gone before in the previous 8 lines - just when the girl in the story thinks things are improving, the last line brings her back to reality. Here's a sample:

The beach is their pebble-strewn playground
Skipping stones out for miles ’cross the waves
Fair and young, grey and old,
Their adventures are bold,
As they splash in the pools, in the caves.
A warm hand holds her tight
As the day turns to night,
And a crimson sun sets on the sea.
And the flames fade to ash and debris.

For what will be a new poem if it goes beyond this initial stage, all I had were a few words: 'blood and stones and finger bones' and I couldn't tell you where they came from. They just rolled around in my head and eventually I wrote them down, added to them and found this weird couplet, whose meter and rhyming scheme is unusual to say the least:

She rose from a place of blood and stones and shattered bones,
    decayed remains, corroded chains and twisted trees
A night where the wind’s uncanny breath, born out of death,
    blew tortured sighs and frigid cries, with bitter breeze

While writing the second line I was myself so confused by the meter and the positions of the rhymes that I had to divide the thing up into much shorter lines, so:

She rose from a place
  of blood and stones
  and shattered bones,
  decayed remains,
  corroded chains
  and twisted trees

A night where the wind’s
  uncanny breath,
  born out of death,
  blew tortured sighs
  and frigid cries,
  with bitter breeze

It does seem to be much simpler written out like that - it's as if each line is a verse in itself, with a non-rhyming line (5 syllables) followed by two 4-syllable rhyming couplets, and a final 4-syllable line which rhymes with the next verse (actually, the next line when they are put back together).

I don't know how far I'll be able to take this poem. I usually experience some difficulty with ultra-short rhymes (4 syllables in this case) and these two lines are, on reflection, really no more than lists, so it will be interesting to see if I can add a narrative in future lines. Of course I can always add lines which don't follow the same meter/scheme, which may shake things up a little. Oh, and it might help to think of a story for the poem - as I'm writing this I don't have one at all!

While I can't foresee this being a long poem, that is no bad thing. I need to broaden my skills, so a short piece will be just the thing. In fact this overly-long blog will almost certainly be longer than the poem itself, so perhaps I should finish here.

---

Update
A day later, as I suspected, I have a definite problem: I have no story! I've written more, but the more I've written doesn't have any attachment to anything. I have the beginnings of a character but I don't know who she is and why she exists. So, like many of my ideas, this one is being filed away for now, until I find some place for it/her at some undetermined point in the future.

Ready... or Not

Today I finally finished writing what has become my longer ever poem!

Except... it has a significant plot hole, so I need to add an extra verse to paper over the cracks.

So it's not ready after all.

But it'll be soon I tell you, it'll be soooooon!

Which is a great way to excuse the inclusion of this video for no apparent reason:

Progress Report - The Long Haul

A while ago, in fact seventeen days ago, I posted this little nugget:

My current poem is definitely approaching the 'end game', although it will probably be several more days before it's completed to my satisfaction. I did a full read-through of all I've done so far and it took me almost exactly 13 minutes, which is long by my standards... and I have long standards! In fact only 'Little Red Ruby's Head' is any longer (24 minutes). Perhaps this one will get close but I doubt it will be any longer.

Evidently my predictions were slightly off, because the poem is now by far the longest work I've ever created. I haven't done a complete read-through from beginning to end because, well it's an exhausting task, but I estimate that the poem is now just over 30 minutes long, which certainly breaks the tape in the race to achieve a 'long' poem.

However, when I say 'end game' now, I'm not just approaching it, I am definitely in it, writing the final dramatic scene, about to bring everything to a conclusion. I could say 'end of the week' but 'end of the month' might be more realistic, given that it's only 7 days away.

I'll be posting the complete poem here as soon as it's finished, and before I record the audio for my YouTube channel, so for the almost-zero people who read this blog, you will be the first to know about it.

How much am I enjoying writing this poem? Every day, whenever a new verse has been completed to my satisfaction, I read it out loud and, knowing that it's exactly what I wanted to write, it's an amazing feeling. I smile. I sometimes clap, in an embarrassing, child-like manner! And I realise that the 3, 4, 5 or more hours I spent forging 6 lines of perfection was time well spent. That's why I write poetry. That's the feeling I miss when I'm between poems, searching for a new one.

In fact it's almost tempting to make the poem longer, so that this feeling never goes away, but in the same way that I can't predict how long the poem will be, I also cannot in any way influence its length. I know how it will end. I write towards that ending. How long that takes, how many lines, how many verses, how many days, are all things out of my control. I'm also now wanting to get to the end, because the anticipation of the feeling of achievement I get whenever a piece of work is complete is starting to become unbearable!

Wizards of Wordcraft

Tim Minchin is almost certainly one of the finest comedy songwriters and word magicians on the planet. Others, myself included, can only aspire to have the merest fraction of his talent.



In fact he's so good he's deserving of a little more of your time...

Writer's Block - A Blip

I had a blip yesterday. Or was it the day before? I lose track of time because I write for most of the night and then climb into bed well after dawn. But Saturday was a day in which I was not writing for the most of anything. I didn't write at all. I was attacked and critically disabled by the dreaded writer's block.

It surprised me, it really did, because during the writing of this, my latest poem, it hasn't happened to me at all. I knew exactly where the story was going each day, and if it took a turn away from the original plan I quickly amended the plan, always for the better, and headed off in a new direction. Except on Saturday I found myself painted into a corner, having absolutely no idea how I got there and wondering how the hell I was going to get out again.

I'll try not to reveal any of the actual detail, but now that I'm approaching the end of the story I of course want a big finale, so I dreamed up an impressive-sounding plot device to get me there. Except it didn't. It just got me nowhere, stuck in a rut.

I decided to sit in front of the computer all day until inspiration re-appeared.

It didn't.

Then I decided I needed a break (from the pointless nothings I'd been doing all day) and perhaps I would then return fresh and inspired.

No luck.

More than a break then, why not go to bed? I don't usually sleep 'off schedule' because then I wake up at irregular hours and am more often than not in a bad mood until I set my internal clock back on its proper path again. That's exactly what happened. I woke up in a foul mood, made worse because I still had no inspiration, and sat there seething.

Finally, I gave up, watched TV, didn't bother even thinking about writing. I decided that the next day I would try again, though if nothing happened I would probably have to bypass my dead-end by cutting out some of the poem and re-writing it with a different plot device. I hate doing that, but reversing out of a cul-de-sac is much better than being stuck at the end of one going nowhere.

Today (yesterday? Sunday!) I fully intended to ditch my last three verses and rewind my story. But guess what? I sat in front of the word processor, read through those three verses and thought 'I know where I can go from here'. The block had been removed. And in fact today I wrote more than is usual for me on a normal day, so it's averaged out pretty well over the two days.

What's more, the path I'm taking with the story is now firmly in the 'let's finish this sucker' department - the end is very near now and I should be done in perhaps two or three days, subject to the usual revisions when this first draft is complete.

Writer's block is awful. Thankfully, it's almost always temporary.

---

Footnote
Don't remind me about the mega-project which is lying unfinished precisely because I got writer's block, under exactly the same circumstances, a couple of months ago. That one is a little bit more than 'a blip'. However, I've put it out of my mind and I'm focused on what I'm doing right now. Progress is good, so that's as good as it gets.

Screaming Search

One of the more unusual searches I've had to do has been Googling for this:

Can you scream without a tongue?

Unfortunately I found only pages which would not in any way be regarded authoritative - no more than someone's opinion - so in the end I just held down my own tongue to find out what noises I could make. Some of those sounds are much more pathetic and miserable than a scream, so perhaps that's the way I'll take the story; some kind of guttural gurgling, which handily ties in with my previous post about alliteration.

This page is steering me towards a 'yes' answer to the original question, and I include it because I found it interesting in a 'listening in to someone's chat' kind of way:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/35452

I could always find someone without a tongue and ask them.

Or maybe not.

Alliteration... in Moderation

Alliteration is definitely my friend when I'm writing horror poetry. When drama edges toward melodrama, a little alliteration is agreeably acceptable and automatically allowed! Hence:

As the doors exploded inwards with a blast of shattered wood
Striding through the smoking splinters, sneering savagely, he stood

However, if every line used alliteration the story would lose some of its weight; this is not a comedy but is, rather, a darkly dangerous diatribe... er, there I go again. The example shown above is an extreme case - 6 words beginning with 's' is on the edge of ludicrosity (a word which the OED tells me is rare but definitely real even if my spelling checker refuses to accept it).

More commonly, I will simply pair two such words together, as here:

...whose life was surely lost
...ground to powder and to paste
The mad magician’s whisperings...
Its pages, ripped and ruined...

Notice that you don't have to put the two words immediately next to each other for the alliteration to come into play.

As with all things, alliteration should be used in moderation. Unless of course you write a whole poem based entirely around words which begin with particular letters of the alphabet. Which of course brings me to this...



H P Lovecraft's ABC
by Nick Gisburne

Ancient and accursed, the amorphous arborescence grew
Blasphemously barbarous, as if for brutish beings who,
Croaking and cadaverous, convulsed in cryptic catacombs
Daemons decomposing in discordant, diabolic tombs

Effervescent effluence effused from every eldritch source
Fluctuating fluids festered, fecund with a foetid force
Gangrenous and glutinous, they gurgled on their grisly way
Heaving in a hellish haze of horrors, hunting hapless prey

Iridescent insectoids infested Earth's infernal isles
Jabbering, their jaundiced joints were jellified in jaded piles
Killing in kaleidoscopic kingdoms kept beyond our ken
Lighting up their loathsome lanterns, leprous lunatics, once men

Monstrous mottled monoliths maintained malignant mysteries
Necrophagous nightmares noted in neglected histories
Of octopoidal oligarchs, obliterated, overthrown
Palsied and pulsating to a protoplasmic pyrophone

Quivering, each quadruped's quiescence quantified its fear
Restless and remorseless, the repugnant raptor's reek drew near
Slobbering, it shuffled spectral sinews with each seething breath
Teeming, thrashing tentacles transacting a traumatic death

Underlings, unearthly, ululated in unhallowed tombs
Viscous vapours vomited in vortices from vanished rooms
Weakened, withered walkers wailed with wasted, wormy, waxen skin
Xanthomatic xerophiles drank xylene with their xeno-kin

Yearning now, we yield to you, to Yog-Sothoth, and yea, your name
Ziggurats we build with zeal at this, the zenith of your fame

---

The full text of H P Lovecraft's ABC can also be found on my DeviantArt page.

Eradicating Weakness

Yesterday, almost certainly because my sleeping was interrupted (I had to set the alarm clock to be up early), I wrote very little, and what I did write was absolute rubbish! I'm currently between two major events in the story, and the connecting piece I'm trying to put together was so lightweight and wishy-washy that I almost wondered if I'd actually written it with a different brain. It was particularly disappointing given that I'd only just posted a relentlessly grim video, showing my 'disturbing influences'. Why I then descended into miserable mediocrity is anyone's guess.

Needless to say, today everything will be ruthlessly hammered into shape. I've set myself very high standards with this piece of work, and I won't let them slip, even for a relatively minor piece of the plot.

Sample 'weak' lines written yesterday:

Thus, in generations numbered by the histories of men,
I saw nations rise and flourish, march to war and fall again.

And their replacements (subject to any further changes and improvements), written today:

Thus, in generations chronicled by histories of lust,
Savage nations, once triumphant, fell to slaughter, burned to dust.

'Numbered' = weaker than 'chronicled'
'Histories of men' = weaker than 'histories of lust'
'I saw nations' = weaker than 'savage nations'
'Flourish' = weaker than 'triumphant'
'March to war' = weaker than 'fell to slaughter'
'Fall again' = weaker than 'burned to dust'

Those are just two vastly improved lines. In this poem I don't do weak!