Whenever I suffer a particularly bad case of creative constipation I flee to the nearest bookstore, where the number of books in my bag when I walk out are a tell-tale sign of exactly how bad my case of writer's block is. Two or three is fine, six is serious and nine... nine is a worrying record. Not that I'm out of ideas, per se, but I just have no idea how I want to get them down in writing or where I even want to start. The worst cases of writer's block are when I have so many ideas that I can't write anything down at all for fear of losing all the other ideas in my head. Sad, I know, but true. So rather than trying to work on anything in particularly, I jot down the concepts and run to the nearest bookstore or look around online.

It's no secret that we all draw inspiration from other people's works sometimes, to greater or lesser extent. This is true for every writer out there, from the obscure ones like myself who post tidbits on the internet to the greatest names in literature- every single one of us learned from those who came before. We take a legend and turn it into an epic poem, we take history and turn it into a play. Everywhere around us there are little fonts of creativity just begging us to drink from them and we inevitably always do.

There is much to be learned from other writers if you're willing to look close enough, and this is the mindset that usually has me moving back from writing to reading. There are the obvious things like ways to do descriptive narrative or how to incorporate dialogue effectively, but for those of us willing to look with a little more scrutiny, there is so much more.

I don't look at every sentence with a magnifying glass when I resort to a reading frenzy, of course. Mostly I just devour books and think about them carefully afterwards. There is no particular system to this- I do not necessarily analyse the way the author described his characters or how the surroundings were brought to life. I just think of whatever I found most striking: the weird and wonderful as much as the downright appalling. Whatever comes to mind first is what I look at and I ask myself what I loved or loathed about it, and why.


Any number of big name fantasy authors have taught me that I do not ever want to write a huge series. You know, the kind that spans anywhere between 9 and a million books that count some 800+ pages each? I'm sure it's good money, but... no. Really, no. If I'm going to write more than one book set in the same world, it should be a story that can exist and be enjoyed on its own. It may have links to other stories, of course, but it shouldn't be sequel after sequel after sequel.

The big problem with huge series is always going to be about keeping the pace and keeping things interesting. If a story is dragged out across thousands of pages, a lot of things will start to get irritating. The last thing I would want to do to my readers (if any) is to make them feel as if they have to plough through the next five/six/seven books just to get somewhere. I know for a fact that a good many would give up.

The Sword of Truth series (Terry Goodkind) is a good example of this. It starts out promising, but after the fourth book it slows down and nothing the protagonists do seems to make much sense anymore. They end up behaving mostly like self-righteous children, engaging in repetitive monologues and doing all kinds of things that directly contradict with everything they believe in. I eventually made it through all books in the series, and to Goodkind's credit it's brought to a satisfying close, but... I really did feel that it took at least six books to long.

The Wheel of Time series is another good example. Robert Jordan actually died before finishing his epic saga... and he was already eleven books in with the end nowhere in sight. I forget which one it was, but one of the books featured a prologue that counted almost a hundred pages. The saddest part is that I'm not even joking. You have to wonder why it was even called a prologue at all. I gave up after book ten, because by that point the plot seemed to be going absolutely nowhere and there were just too many characters running rampant all over the place. Yes, diversity is nice, but there is really such a thing as overdoing it. It becomes impossible to really care about any of the characters, because in any given book they may only be mentioned in passing or have ten pages to shine if they're lucky. You end up reading hundreds of pages about scores of people you just don't really care about.

And then there is, of course, A Song of Ice and Fire (George R. R. Martin). I got curious after seeing a few episodes of the HBO show based on the series and decided to get my hands on a nice box set to check out the source material. It started off really promising, but sadly turned into a very long lesson in everything I want to avoid like the plague in my own writing. It didn't help that the author's note at the end of the fourth book (800+ pages) went like this:

I did not forget to write about the other characters. Far from it. I wrote lots about them. Pages and pages and pages. Chapters and more chapters. I was still writing when it dawned on me that the book had become too big to publish in a single volume... and I wasn’t close to finished yet. To tell all of the story that I wanted to tell, I was going to have to cut the book in two.

This can essentially be translated into: sorry, I got carried away and I kind of lost my own plot. Because, really, if your story counts over 800 pages and you're not even halfway through the book, you've lost the plot. You got carried away with details, uninteresting minor characters, irrelevant and/or uninteresting subplots and overall unimportant filler material. If you don't understand my point, try reading through A Feast For Crows and count how many times Martin mentions the Lannister/Stark/whoever house banner/colours/motto in some detail, the number of paragraphs he wastes on Cersei's Fashion Statement of the Hour (or, actually, Cersei in general), or any other things you encounter that look suspiciously repetitive. Martin must think his audience consists of simpleminded people and extremely senile octogenarians, judging by the way he keeps repeating the same boring bits over and over again.

Not to mention that every character that is remotely interesting or appealing is killed off as soon as a new and colourful way of doing so has been thought up. That's right, almost all of the people who deserve some manner of sympathy drop dead sooner or later- usually sooner. That means you're left with egotists, maniacs and the generally irritating douchebags of the uninteresting and impossible to relate to variety. Character plausibility is rapidly headed in the general direction of the dodo.


This doesn't mean that above examples were entirely tripe and not worth reading at all (although some of the books would look better in a fireplace than on a bookshelf, I'm sure). A lot of things the authors do, they do right. They do it well. They have interesting concepts and really imaginative works. It's just that they dragged out their works a little too long for my liking, and that's when the weak points really start to stand out and stick.

It's all right. We all learn from our mistakes, and there is no reason why we can't learn from the mistakes we perceive in others. I learned that I don't want to drag out a single story into twenty books at a thousand pages each. I also learned that I don't want to swamp them with hundreds of characters no one can keep track of or care about- I even learned that if I am to let a character die, it had better dang well be for a good reason.

I've also learned to be more critical of everything I put down on paper. I love descriptive narrative. I'm not necessarily good at it, but I love it when I come across it in a story and I have this irritating tendency to keep trying it myself. I've started to consider the things I describe more carefully.

Do I really need to put to words exactly how the table was set (J.K. Rowling)? If I do, would anyone actually care? If I rarely or never described what my characters look like in the first place (J.R.R. Tolkien), would it really be missed? Should I describe the outfits of my characters, not once but every time they change them? Is it even remotely relevant to the story? Will it be creative after the umpteenth time, or will it make me look like a one-trick pony?

I think I have a long way to go before I would consider myself publish-worthy, and the things I add to my portfolio aren't perfect or necessarily even to my satisfaction... but they're a start. I go back to edit and polish every time I read something of myself. Whenever I do, I take into account the lessons I have learned through reading- the good, of course, but also the bad.

So really I'm a hopeless perfectionist, and I try to learn from everything I come across and use it to improve my own writing. That doesn't mean that I feel any of the authors mentioned above are bad or that I am unable to enjoy their stories. I guess it really only means that I am extremely critical and raise the bar high for myself. Suddenly that writer's block is starting to make a lot more sense. :)

 

A recent email alert reminded me of the existence of something I had all but forgotten: my profile on FanFiction.net. It came with mixed emotions- nostalgia for the many hours I spent there, happiness for the fellow writers I met, and sadness for the fact that the place eventually went downhill (in my view) so far that I did not want to come back to it ever again.

Most of all, though, I was surprised. The last time I published anything there was some time in 2004. Over the following 8 years or so, people apparently still found their way to my profile, liked my stories and left reviews. Even now, long after my last update, I still get the occasional email alert telling me that someone has added me to their Author Alert list so that they're aware of it when I update. It's some kind of impressive, I suppose, for someone who is as obscure as she is. I've never given those once-in-a-while emails much thought, but recently I got one to notify me that someone had actually sent me an honest-to-God message through the site.

Let me recap: Someone actually found my decade-old profile despite the fact that it has not seen an update and therefore has not had any kind of bump out of obscurity, in 8 years. It would have taken this person 30 seconds at most to conclude that the odds of me still being active were none. This person left me a review, added me to their Author Alert list... and messaged me.

It's weird how these things go.

I set up an archaeological site and dug up my login credentials. Not that I intend to spend much time over at the place anymore, but I felt that this person deserved at least the effort of a reply. Sure, it was largely along the lines of "hey, don't expect any updates here", but I wanted to return the effort somehow.

With my reply written and sent I clicked through my old collection of published fan fiction. It was a little awkward and embarrassing (of the "Oh my God, I wrote this?" variety), but refreshing all the same. Here's why.



I've been making up stories since the day I was old enough to make things up. I've been writing them down from the moment I first learned to write. Most of them have probably not survived the years, but if they had, there'd be a very clear trend: fan fiction.

Most of what I made up between the ages of 3 and 15 (or 17 to a lesser extent) can be categorised as some kind of fan fiction. Mixed universes, self insertion, epic adventures... it's all there. Some of these stories only had cameo appearances of characters from whatever book, show, or film I adored at that particular moment, but others were full-fledged Universe meets Universe style ideas. You know, like the Avengers. Only a lot crappier.

Ultimately, fan fiction is what set my creative train in motion. When I was 9, I wrote a story set in the Bambi universe. Really. I submitted it in the school writing contest and won. It was my first (and, so far, only) ever "real" writing award, but it meant a lot to me back then. I can still remember how proud I was of it. It was reassuring for me that the dream of being a writer some day may actually be achievable for me. It motivated me to continue writing and improving myself. I've been doing so (or maybe trying to) ever since.

I realise that the award is pretty meaningless in the grand scheme of things, but it got me going. It's probably the reason why I'm still writing and seeking to improve today. Of course I know that a school award for a 9-year-old isn't exactly a ticket to having my stuff published, but it sure as hell doesn't mean I shouldn't try.

Fan fiction is not a field I care to explore much further (although I will finish the last few chapters of "Mesmer's Mask"  eventually, honest!), but it is a field I have to acknowledge. It wouldn't be fair if I didn't. After all, fan fiction is not bad by definition, regardless of what some people may think about it. Fan fiction is as awful or amazing as the state of development of the author's mind. It has some very strong points going for it. At the very least, it has the potential to be beautiful. If you ignore the majority of it as the poorly written daydreams of teenage girls and boys, you are left with a small but brilliant selection of stories that happen to be written by someone other than the original author of whatever universe they are set in.

Fan fiction is a good place, for example, to practise characterisation and continuity. An existing character has to be recognisable beyond their name. Samwise wouldn't be Samwise if he'd abandoned Frodo to continue his quest alone. (Are you taking notes, Peter Jackson?) If Samwise were my character, I could make him do what I want, but he's not. He's an existing character, so a good deal of what makes Samwise into Samwise has already been defined. The challenge, then, is to write him in such a way that other fans will recognise him. They love him for a reason and the last thing I would want is to ruin that.

The same can be said for continuity. Things have to happen in a certain order, according to a certain rule set defined to greater or lesser extent by the original author. If I deviate, things will no longer make sense. In other words: if a story's timeline is linear and gravity exists in the world, it means that a character must first fall from a tall building before ending up in a puddle on the pavement. In the same way, it would not make much sense if Aragorn were king before the One Ring was destroyed... or if Legolas were pro with a sniper rifle.

There is some leeway, of course, if you know your universe well enough. It's possible to write a What If scenario and change a choice a character makes, for instance. You can explore what else would change from there, if you leave the characters as they are. They would still be honourable, evil or morally questionable, so how would they handle this new situation? Would Frodo have completed his quest if Denethor had sent Faramir to the Council of Elrond instead of Boromir? (Give it some thought- I personally find this one quite intriguing.)

So even within fan fiction it is possible to establish rules, and working with them will ultimately help to develop into a better writer. Once you can successfully write plausible stories set in Middle-earth (or wherever), it becomes easier to come up with your own. Sure, you're free to build your universe and characters from scratch and it may seem harder, but the basics are there. After all, your own world will need to conform to whatever rule set you come up with, and your characters will have to behave in accordance with whatever personality you bestow upon them.



The first "fics" I published myself were of the horrible variety. They're no longer available online because frankly, I'm too embarrassed. I was 15, totally into everything Tolkien... and the results weren't pretty. It was all there, bad attempts at comedy and character maiming included. I probably owe J.R.R. an apology or two. They did, however, get me to write more actively, instead of just once every 6 months or so. I actually started to grow.

Pretty soon I established the first concept of the Seven Realms. You know, that "Legends of the Seven Realms"  item in my portfolio that looks suspiciously empty... well, it's not, and its first concept was put down on paper at the age of 15. That makes it about a decade old and it's grown far beyond a simple concept since then. I have 2 novels in the works for it (working titles: The Ivory Tower and Crown of Chains), a collection of short stories called "Great Arcana"  (3 currently up, several more coming soon), and a third novel in concept that I may or may not choose to develop. In other words, it's become a pretty ambitious project.

This, of course, has made me consider fan fiction from the other side: would I still approve of fan fiction if the fiction in question involved my own universe and characters? Would I allow a website like FanFiction.net to host these stories, or would I write polite letters to websites like it asking them not to allow for anything set in my world to be published? I know a few very famous authors who have done just that, and now that I have grown as a writer, I think I understand.

I won't get to choose what people write about my world or characters. It's my intellectual property of course, but if I allow for fan fiction (of the fair use, harmless non-profit kind), I open the door for all kinds of fan fiction. A few individuals would try to make money with my intellectual property and I suppose I would go down the legal road in those cases, but that's not even what scares me about it. Like I said, some fan fiction is amazing, but a good part is so horrible that it makes my brain do funny things just thinking about it, like hiding in a dark little corner where it can't be found.

During my time at FF.net I came across an immense amount of slash fiction: romantic pairings (e.g. Aragorn / Arwen) that were typically completely different from whatever the author had originally intended for these characters. A disturbing amount of these fics were male/male (which wouldn't have been so bad if the characters had been known to be gay) and a significant number of these involved the sub-genre "mpreg": male pregnancy. Think about the love child of Aragorn and Legolas for half a second and you'll understand my reluctance a little better.

Characters were also sometimes maimed beyond all recognition: Boromir the misogynist, Arwen the bondage queen, and even Samwise the evil. I'm still not sure which of these I find the most weird and disturbing. What I do know is that I would really, really hate for something similar to happen to my own characters and I know that if I allow for fan fiction, it will.

My characters are a bit like my children. My babies. Like a mother I feel (overly) protective of them, even if they're the mad and murderous sort. When it comes down to it, they're still my babies and I want to protect them from harm. Other than the harm I will inflict on them myself, of course, but that's my prerogative as the one who gave intellectual birth to them.

Take Drystan, for example- he's a character in Crown of Chains and although he's no Sauron he's not exactly a sweetheart. He's one of my most fleshed-out characters so far and for what it's worth, he's the sort who'll commit fratricide without remorse and who'd burn down villages to get what he wants. This does not stop some of my writer friends from loving him anyway... or thinking him sexy. There's no arguing about taste I guess. Not that they'd write fics about him, but if they love him then others will surely do too. I'm not sure I want to think too long about what sort of fics he would spawn but I can hazard a guess and it's not pretty.

So honestly... I'm more inclined to say no to fan fiction, if ever it came down to that. At the same time I'd feel like a hypocrite. It's how I started. It's how I grew and came to be where I am today. I hope it will one day prove to have been the foundation of something far greater than this.

I think fan fiction can be a cradle for greatness, a nursery for creative minds. Do I really want to stunt the growth of the next big thing?



It's food for thought.
 

...with 2 new poems!

These took me a while to get down on paper, mainly because my Muses went AWOL. In the end determination won, though, and so I finally managed to get the concepts worked into actual poems. Both are dedicated to someone, because ultimately it is life that gets me to think about things I would like to write.

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The Fall of Narcissus  [E] On a man's vanity. by L.V. van Efveren

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I, Object  [ASR] On the treatment of women by some kinds of men. by L.V. van Efveren

So I finally, finally... FINALLY finished the poem I've been frustrated about for the past two months or so. Am I happy with it? Quite. It was a small nightmare to get the words down on paper, and once I had finally pinned (penned?) them in graphite there were bits and pieces that needed serious editing to actually, like... work. Yeah.

How long was this process? Here's a breakdown:

First stanza: 5 minutes.
Second stanza: 2 months.
Remaining stanzas: 2 days.
Editing: Do. Not. Ask.

The result, though, is something I can actually feel proud of- right now I feel extremely accomplished, and not just because I finally got past the near-fatal case of WB I've been dealing with. I'm feeling strangely euphoric about this whole affair, actually!

I chose and stuck with Ovid's version of the tale of Atalanta and Hippomenes to form the basis of the piece. I didn't go in for the same graphic style, but did choose to capture and allude to some of the more primal urges he describes so vividly, because in my eyes they are the essence of the tale. Interestingly enough, Ovid accounts for Atalanta's refusal to wed using the device of prophecy: when Atalanta goes to consult a god by means of an oracle she is warned against it. While neither god nor oracle is specified, it seemed likely to me that Apollo's Oracle at Delphi was the one in question.

As a hunter god (among many other things) and as the brother of Artemis (to whom Atalanta took an oath of virginity in another version of the tale) he would have been an appropriate deity for her to consult. There is also Apollo's own and similarly doomed race to be considered: the tale of Apollo and Daphne, which is told much earlier in Metamorphoses. The victor's crown of laurels attributed to Apollo is explained in this myth, and adds another suitable link to Atalanta- it would have been her due many times over by the time Hippomenes challenges her. At the same time, the laurel also symbolises Daphne's plight, juxtaposing the desire to win with the desire to flee. It is also interesting to note that Aphrodite (Venus) is directly and strongly involved in both pursuits.

These parallels have helped to shape my own retelling of the tale, although unlike the myths inspiring this version it might be said that it has a slightly happier ending.

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Melanion's Song  [13+] A tribute to a lover. by L.V. van Efveren

I've discovered that love is a horrible muse. Or rather, is anything but a muse. I have been over the moon for the past two months or so, and while I would love to put the feeling into words, every time I sit down to try I find myself at a loss. Usually I just end up snuggling up in the comfort of this warm blanket of emotion, going over all these little things that have me grinning like an idiot... and in the process end up producing nothing at all.

It is not strange, then, that I have been unable to write pretty much anything recently, although with dicipline and determination I have managed an occasional sentence or two. Right now I have my mind set on finishing a poem I've been mulling over for the past two months and I intend to finish it this week. With this in mind I've actually- finally!- managed to get the second stanza down, although it needs some polishing. The first one I am happy with, so I suppose I may as well share it as a sample of what is to come.

Melanion's Song

Too quick was she for any man
to catch her once she went and ran.
Too nimble for an honest win
was Atalanta, swift as sin.


More to come. Soon. I hope.
 

Think I'm coming down with something, which is generally uncool... and making my head feel stuffed with cotton. So, in the category of fail quotes of epic failure, I present:

Elv: I'll breathe when I'm d- oh, wait, no... I won't.
 

Been very absent lately and written all of one stanza of a poem in the past 2 months. Very productive. Yeah.

Generally been crazy busy with work, exams, and being a total fussbucket. Taken some time to party and go crazy (heading out again soon!) and enjoy the sunshine while it lasts. When none of that occupies my mind, the general euphoria of head^heels sends my brain on a mad dash after its own tail. On the whole it doesn't do any wonders for my productivity, or my attention span. Yay for procrastination!

Did have a look at the new and improved Port features and took a minute to add a picture of myself along with some info. Go see!
 

We've all had them- moments when we get excited about seeing a new review, only to have our hopes dashed by the content of said review. It could be for any number of reasons, but the person taking a moment of their time to tell you what they felt was wrong with your piece was not too positive about it. This is not always pleasant to hear, but it's valuable input and usually we can learn a thing or two from it even if we don't take everything in the review to heart.

Usually.

Even the best authors aren't lauded for every single thing they write, every single step of the way. They've faced criticism, bad press reviews (a good reminder why WDC's private review option can be a blessing), moody editors and any number of issues anyone with a pen, a bit of paper and an idea might run into. So really, it's unreasonable to expect that your audience will always be excited about whatever it is you choose to write down, with the possible exception of your parents if they happen to be your only audience.

But even keeping this in mind, some reviews can still manage to be frustrating. In those instances, it is difficult to determine how to respond to a review. If someone is patently rude and nonconstructive, the best approach is just to let it slide, however hard it may be at first. A reply written in anger is, after all, as nonconstructive as the comment that prompted it. It gets trickier, though, when people are actually trying to be helpful. I'm a cynical bitch, so the first thing I think upon reading comments like that isn't the most tactful reply.

The section below contains a few examples of comments everyone will probably have received at some point, in some form or other, along with a selection of replies to reviews like these that (fortunately) never made it to my Sent Items. I've added a few notes, because when cynical and caffeine-deprived, I tend to produce more snappy one-liners than the average Hollywood blockbuster.


Review: You misspelled word such-and-such.
Response: No, I didn't. Invest in a dictionary.
Note: No, seriously. Invest some time in looking at a dictionary. You might discover you were the one who was wrong. This is especially true about frequently misspelled words, and there are many. It's also really, really bad to teach someone something which is blatantly wrong and, ultimately, it's also entirely nonconstructive.

Review (variant of above): You misspelled words A, B, C...
Response: No I didn't. Invest in a dictionary. Learn some English.
Note: British English is not American English. There's some variation going on with the spelling between them, but as long as an author uses one or the other consistently, neither spelling can be considered wrong. Besides, if you want to talk about spelling and wrong, that's an aspect of linguistics far more complicated than most people realise. Without some sound knowledge about phonetics and philology, you don't want to be touching that.

Review: Your punctuation's wrong.
Response: No it's not. Learn to punctuate.
Note: Punctuation's tricky, and although many people think so, there's no real black-and-white simplicity to it. The rules of punctuation aren't set in stone, although some are clearer than others, like a full stop belonging at the end of a sentence. Once it gets to things like commas, dashes and semi-colons, it gets to a grey area that linguists can argue endlessly about amongst each other. Your English teacher was teaching a preferred style, not a rule. The particular phrasing an author chose to use might not be the most elegant option available, but that doesn't make it wrong.

Review: Your grammar is wrong.
Response: Do you even know the definition of grammar?
Note: Grammar is not the same as syntax, nor is it the same as punctuation (including capitalisation). If you can't get your terminology right, why on Earth should your advice be taken seriously?

Review: You're not supposed to capitalise personal pronouns.
Response: Ever opened a Bible?
Note: Sometimes an author intentionally breaks a set convention. This could be done in any number of ways, from the above mentioned example to weird spelling or messed up syntax. Ultimately, though, there is a reason for it. Is it an isolated incident, or is there a pattern? If there is, it's probably worth considering why the pattern is there, rather than assuming that the author simply made a language boo-boo. It might just be a Revelation.

Review: Your story needs more life.
Response: Congratulations, you completely missed the point.
Note: It's important to try and determine the theme of a story to understand the style better. A story about death could have been written in a more severe tone for the specific purpose of adding another layer to the way the topic at hand is presented. It might not be your particular cup of coffee, but understanding what a story is really about is vital when trying to give tips for improvement. If you leave the impression that you have no idea what's going on in the first place (or actually really don't), then chances are that the author won't take a single suggestion seriously.
 

Style; a summary
To me style indicates the sum of the poetic devices employed by a poet. It is a culmination of form, placement, punctuation, rhyme, rhythm, shape, and the many aspects of meaning. Style can be the shape of one particular poem, or it can be the pattern of a poet’s collected works.

We have to see the whole picture before we can really start making proper sense of it, insofar as the poem or poet allows for this. Sometimes just the one poem is enough, sometimes it is necessary to look at a poet’s other works to get some understanding about why the poem was presented in a certain way. Often what seems like a flaw or failure of skill turns out to be a very careful and deliberate insertion.

When reading and reviewing poetry I keep all these things in mind before I start forming an opinion. A flaw in itself may be ugly, but a fault in a poem that stresses that which is broken can be, in its own way, brilliantly beautiful.

Shape
Along with placement, shape makes for an important ingredient when it comes to presenting a poem. The two are closely linked. What is the effect of writing a poem, or parts of a poem, in ALL CAPS? What does it add to put something in bold, or italics? Is there significance in making words a certain colour?

I think there is. The way a poem is presented sets the tone before a reader ever gets a chance to read it. Some things will immediately stand out, and will be reinforced because of this. The shape you give the words in your poem (including font type and size, as already pointed out under Placement  ) can be used to convey a certain mood beyond the actual words you have chosen.

For example, a poem entirely in italics feels more dream-like and surreal to me. It adds a certain wistful quality beyond the content of the poem. It can take reality and then move a step back, set it aside and paint a slightly different picture of what was, what will be, or what might have been. A poet can choose to format an entire poem this way, or only parts of the poem. This may represent an intruding thought or voice, or a conflicting idea. It can stress a point or be used to confuse readers, depending on the purpose of the poet.

Isn't this a powerful tool?
Or is it too unconventional?


Closing piece tomorrow: Style.
 

Rhythm
Another important aspect of poetry is rhythm. It is helped into being by poetic form, types of rhyme and meter, but despite all that it is sometimes difficult to determine whether or not a poem has rhythm just by seeing it written down. Whenever I can’t figure out a poem's rhythm, I resort to good old-fashioned reading the poem aloud. Often I discover that the poem has a better flow than I first thought, and that it works much better than I would initially have given it credit for.

Sometimes even reading a poem aloud isn’t enough- sometimes you have to hear it being read, ideally by the poet. I had a little trouble reading Dylan Thomas’s poem Do not go gentle into that good night for myself, but many are the blessings of the Internet, for soon I found a sound clip of Dylan Thomas reading it  . I was quietly amazed.

Rhythm helps a poem to stay alive beyond the convention of form or rhyme. It makes the piece flow, brings a narrative to life. This can be achieved through blank verse (in English poetry usually in iambic pentameter) or a different type of meter. As seen in the more traditional ballads, it can even be achieved by using different kinds of meter within the same poem.

Ultimately, rhythm relies on patterns. These patterns can be made clearer by use of things like rhyme and meter, and like any other pattern it sometimes works best if it is occasionally broken. Very few, if any, poets write poetry in iambic pentameter with fully perfect iambic feet, and those who may manage this admirable feat might not necessarily be the most interesting ones to read.


Penultimate topic, at a WDC blog outlet near you tomorrow: Shape.
 

Rhyme
Geoffrey Chaucer is said to have despised of alliteration and favoured rhyme of the final syllable(s). Alliteration had gone somewhat out of fashion along with the oral tradition once literacy started becoming a symbol of status. This makes sense in an era where mnemonic devices weren’t as necessary because everything could be written down, and Chaucer’s desire to be distinguished as a literate poet rather than one of the oral tradition is not entirely incomprehensible.

Someone once told me that a poem wasn’t a poem if it didn’t rhyme. I’m not sure where this idea originated (with Chaucer, perhaps?), but anyone who knows a little more poetry than the odd snippet of nursery rhyme would know that this definition of poetry doesn’t do the genre any justice- it certainly isn’t true!

What about, say, blank verse? Or the haiku? Do those suddenly no longer count in the world of poetry? That doesn’t really seem fair. Poetry is about the arranging of words, but there are no real rules about how they should be arranged. The sheer number of forms of poetry should be ample evidence, as well as the many existing poetic devices a poet may employ within a poem.

Rhyme is more than just similar-sounding syllables at the end of a line. While the most recognised form of rhyme remains tail rhyme, there are many other forms of rhyme around. Rhyme, earlier spelling rime, finds its origins in Old Frankish *rīm, meaning as much as series or sequence. In a broader sense, it denotes a (recurring) pattern.

That pattern may just as well be alliteration, or assonance, or consonance. It can be half rhyme, forced rhyme, internal rhyme, imperfect rhyme, or even eye rhyme. It doesn’t need to sound alike, it may only look alike. (There are a good number of examples of this to be found in Early Modern English poetry, although at the time they were written they may well have sounded alike.)

So, when someone goes and says that poetry has to rhyme, the fairest question to ask them may well be: what kind?


Tomorrow's topic: Rhythm.
 

Punctuation
Someone recently commented on one of my poems: I think you should add punctuation. As someone who takes advice from fellow writers very seriously, this made me look at the poem again and consider. In the end, I decided against it.

The tricky part about punctuation is that there is no 100% right or wrong in it. Never mind what your English teacher once tried to convince you of, there is no true consensus among linguists about how to punctuate correctly. What is taught in schools is part convention and part personal preference.

Punctuation is tricky enough for normal texts, but once it gets to poetry it goes into a certain grey area that may as well be described as entirely optional. Some poets punctuate each line as carefully as they would a sentence in a story, others seem not to be aware of the existence of something such as a full stop at all.

For me, punctuation is a poetic device. It can be employed much the same way as one might employ a certain form, rhyme scheme or meter. It can be consciously employed to create a rhythm or break it (consider the use of the comma to mark a caesura, for instance). In the same way, it can be consciously left out.

I have used punctuation before in a pattern not unlike a rhyme scheme, most notably in "There is a road" . At the same time, "In Dreams"  has no more punctuation than a capital letter at the start of each stanza. In both cases the decision to punctuate a certain way was entirely deliberate.

Personally I will rarely, if ever, comment on punctuation in poetry, unless I have the impression that the poet might not have intended the poem to look a certain way. If I do choose to comment, I’m more inclined to ask about the intention than anything else.

It is difficult to judge a poet’s use of punctuation based on a single poem. The presence of a pattern in several poems can tell you a lot about the poet’s preferred style, but the absence of a pattern to link all the poems can tell you more about the individual poems, and sometimes adds another layer of meaning.


Tomorrow's topic: Rhyme.
 

A little past midnight today... oh well, better luck tonight I suppose.


Placement
This may not be something many poets really consider, but a poem’s placement on a page (digital or physical) can be as important as the actual choice of words. In this same way, the position of individual words within a poem can underline (or undermine) the message a poet might be trying to convey.

If that first paragraph sounded like confusing gibberish, try Googling the Flemish poet Paul van Ostaijen. His poetry might not be written in a language most people here are familiar with (I’m not aware of any Dutch language people here at WDC), but even if the words don’t mean much, the look of his poems has a lot to say.

Unfortunately his poems work better in print than online, because the Internet doesn’t offer too many options for that kind of placement. Browsers and programming languages are a little too rigid for it, so the only real way to show a poem like that is in image form.

Van Ostaijen used a lot of interesting devices in his poetry: different font types, different font sizes, and placement beyond a standard type of stanza. In some cases, he breaks up words into individual letters that cascade down the page, or words are printed diagonally. Never even mind his use of punctuation.

It might seem a little too contrived for some people, but it does add a certain impact to a poem. Consider an onomatopoeic word like boom, and then ask yourself what would be the most effective way of displaying this word.

BOOM

or the perhaps more comic book approach of

BOOM

The latter has a certain way of underlining the onomatopoeic quality of the word and stresses its meaning.

While I'm not the greatest fan of Van Ostaijen's work, it did get me thinking about how I display my own poetry, and it's made me play around with words in a way that I may otherwise never have considered. "There is a road"  and Danse Macabre, the introductory poem to "Maison Diable" , both have a little bit of this playfulness worked into them.
 

Meaning
Perhaps the most tricky aspect of poetry is meaning. I’ve already covered "Author vs. Narrator"  in an earlier blog post so I will not go into that, but there is plenty of ground still to cover.

So if we take away the personal aspect from this topic, what are we left with to consider? Layers of meaning, direct references, allusions, and choice of words. Metaphors and similes play a large role in this: they can flower up and prettify a poem, but they can as easily add a whole new layer of meaning (or two, or three) to the poem. Metaphysical poets like John Donne and George Herbert have a lot of interesting examples to offer.

A lot of poetry features direct references of some sort to other poetry or the world beyond poetry. Some poets reference other poets, but this only works well if the poet or poem referred to is well-known enough for the new piece to be understandable. Just about anyone would recognise the reference if a poet used Shall I compare thee... somehow, but not every poem is that well-remembered.

Consider Sir Walter Raleigh’s poem The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd. While not a bad or uninteresting poem on its own, it loses half its purpose without the poem it is meant to reply to: Christopher Marlowe’s The Passionate Shepherd to His Love. Raleigh’s poem worked well enough at the time, but how many people now are still familiar with Marlowe’s work and would recognise Raleigh’s reference without someone pointing it out to them?

This is important to remember when working in, say, pop culture references to add more layers of meaning. Not everything lasts, and while Batman and 9/11 are things people will likely still be familiar with two decades from now, there are plenty of things that are huge now but might well be forgotten in a few years. If a reference is likely to become obscure, how useful is it as a poetic device?

Biblical and classical references are a little safer for a poet, although even those are slowly becoming more obscure. Plenty of people will still hear a bell ringing at the mention of the name Jesus, but Cain and Abel are a little further away in terms of familiarity. And when it comes to the classics, how many people are still familiar with, say, the Rape of Persephone?

Perhaps I just like being difficult, but I really enjoy making references. Dropping names is a pretty efficient and direct way of doing this (Judas Iscariot in "Love Song for Judas" , for instance), but I can also have a lot of fun with more indirect allusions, like the hunter and the laurel tree in "The Laurel Tree" . For those who really pay close attention to allusions, there’s food for thought in the phrase And you, my Brutus (Love Song for Judas), because it refers to several things at once- two people, one event, and a famous quote. All that in four words!

But choice of words can be more than just a reference or allusion. It can be a choice of word for the sake of a word. When running into words or terms that seem out of place, consider not just their contemporary or most common meaning, but the full meaning of the word. That means the full contemporary definition, but also more obscure but still extant meanings of the word, or even meanings of the word that have become all but extinct outside of etymological dictionaries.

Something that seems like gibberish may well make a lot of sense, and you don’t need to look for big or complex words to find ambiguity. The word sinister has a few diverse meanings (originally marked with differing pronunciation), but even the word nice is not what it seems! Suddenly the possibilities are endless... is it any wonder that people in literature classes have difficulty agreeing on the topic of meaning?

My own poem "Goodbye"  features a very conscious paradox based on the meaning of words. While it is by no means the only one I’ve used, it is perhaps the most interesting to consider. What does light year literally mean?
 

I've been meaning to do this for some time, but circumstance got in the way. I'll be posting a sort of essay on poetry here in a series of 8 topics. I'm starting tonight and I'll be adding a part every night until the work is complete. It's mostly observations I've made throughout my studies, but also things I've noticed by browsing through the work of fellow writers in online writing communities. I hope that in sharing this, I might impart some of my knowledge to others and provide them with valuable insights that might help their own writing. At the very least, I hope that people feel inspired, and encouraged to read the works of people they might never have read otherwise. If nothing else, I hope it may give people some insight into my own approach to poetry- how I read it, and how I write it.

So, introducing the first topic in the series:

Form
Forms of poetry can be both immensely confining and incredibly liberating. Sitting down to write a sonnet may at first seem limiting, but the form has more wriggle room than one might think. A poet is not restricted to the sonnet as made famous by Italian poet Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch), nor even to the form immortalised by William Shakespeare. Consider the works of Edmund Spencer, Sir Philip Sidney, or even Dante Alighieri. There is plenty of wriggle room when it comes to rhyme scheme, division of stanzas, and meter.

The choice of a particular type of poem does tend to fence in the topic of a poem. Sonnets are often about love, while haikus traditionally involve some kind of seasonal reference. A pre-existing form dictates adherence to a certain rule set to really make it work as intended. Deviating from an existing pattern can offer a fresh new perspective, or create something entirely satirical. How seriously does one take a ballad about a deceased hamster?

There is also deviation within a poem to consider. If a poem is written entirely in tercets or quatrains, then the appearance of for instance a heroic couplet might seem a little out of place. This can be a useful way of drawing attention to that particular part of a poem; breaking the pattern can be used as a means to show that something about the poem’s topic is fundamentally broken.

And there is absolutely no reason why someone can’t go and put a new form together or write lines at will and see how they come together. Poetry is as diverse as a poet makes it. Crimson Roses, a poem I haven’t published at WDC, is one of my more experimental poems in terms of form: it starts with a quatrain, moves on to a tercet, passes through a couplet and ends in a single line.


Tomorrow's topic: Meaning.
 

So NaNoWriMo has come to an end and I didn't participate. I've thought about it, of course, and I've written a good number of words on various bits and bobs, but I just could not find the right kind of energy I need to dedicate myself to a single big project that NaNo dictates. How do I feel now that NaNo has come and gone? Strangely calm. I have other things on my mind. Perhaps, on an emotional level, I shouldn't try to commit to more things that will be emotionally taxing (and NaNo sure is!). There is such a thing as too much at once, and I suppose that this year at least NaNo would have been that one last straw that confounded the camel...

I hope to be looking back some time in October 2010 and feel that all this is behind me. Feel more at peace, or at least less distressed. Maybe then I will look ahead to November and think "hey, you know what? I can do this NaNo thing". And even if I fail, it won't be so bad, because I had the energy to do it.


And to all you NaNo winners- congrats! When you finish the infernal process of editing your NaNoSpawn, do post a bit and share the results. :)
 

I'm a perfectionist. I think I need an OFF switch. Am I the only person who can't read back her own stuff without cringing at her little typographical trip-ups and other such grammar-abusing oversights? Or the only person who thinks that punctuation is as good as sacred and that people should learn to, oh, use it?

I might be some kind of freak, but as a linguist I can't help going into Phase Red when I see people who are apparently oblivious to the fact that "its" is not the same as "it's" (and other such enlightened errors). At those times, I really need to learn to get away from my keyboard really quickly, and maybe not touch it again for half an hour or so.

Never even mind when my keyboard goes rogue on me and eats my own apostrophes, or when I pen things down so fast that entire words disappear- or are awkwardly linked together! It's so tempting to just chew on the paper and make all the evidence of being a complete scatterbrain just go away. I know better than that, dangit!


Breathe, Elv. Remember to breathe. :)
 

I really have the most epic conversations sometimes.

It makes me wish I had a story to put them into, because they're too good not to be used. Unfortunately the original context is usually hardly any kind of suitable for it (my conversations are often fast-paced, multi-topical and extremely random). Just because some of this is too good not to share, though, I thought I'd just post it here to share with the world for some cheap giggles.

Woman time!
Elv: I swear, I have a fat, flabby belly and a huge ass.
Liz: Hello?! Have you looked into the mirror lately?!
Elv: I have! That's how I know I have a fat, flabby belly and a huge ass!

Company email etiquette...
Elv: I had about 200 emails to go through when I came into the office this morning, and sadly none of it was spam. Most of it started with FYI, FYA, or FYR. I wanted to reply with just FY.


I'm sarcastic and cynical... but I like to think that makes me awesome. ;)
 

Maybe it's me, or my insufferable perfectionism, but WB has once again reared its ugly head. I've been working on "Great Arcana"  (The Hanged Man and The World), but I can't get more than half a page's worth of drivel in at any point to get my stuff going. I gave up on The Lovers after a whopping 3(!) lines and even The Tower has proved to be unyielding. Most vexing.

Perhaps I have a few too many ideas in my head all at once. Perhaps I'm trying too hard to avoid linking the stories too closely to The Ivory Tower, my unfinished and unpublished novel set in the same universe. I'd like to avoid the stories becoming incomprehensible without having read anything from the novel. I still want them to be short, stand-alone things.

Somehow, though, I can't help ideas popping up into my head about how I could work the 22 cards into a single narrative. It's frustrating and I'm ready to take my notebooks and use them for BBQ fuel. (Not that I ever eat anything remotely meaty but I'm sure my housemates wouldn't mind the free pyro-fodder.)



Suppose I should divert my attention to a different project for a while. "Maison Diable"  is a little neglected (publishing-wise anyway, I have in fact written on it) and I still owe Monsieur du Lac a poem. Food for thought?