Long-necked geese fly low (what)
Over bumpy lines of kelp (where)
Cold sun on grey waves. (when)
The structure of the Haiku is based on the fact that one can say 17 syllables in one breath. When you look at a sunset across the water and the mauves and reds light fire in the west, you try to breathe it in. You fill your chest with the magnificence of the sight and try to inhale the beauty. This is an attempt to capture the ‘aweness’ of the spectacle. That spectacle can be a beautiful sight, a thrill, a new sensation or the sudden appreciation of a previously unnoticed sensation. It is a moment of wonder in your life.
This is what the Haiku tries to capture, that moment of wonder, that sense of awe that is so fleeting. The North American application of the Haiku is less rigid and we often do not use natural subjects as the Japanese do.
Yellow flowers wilt
In the people-filled office
After four o’clock.
Look around and see something that is awesome. Write it down in lists or a cluster. As in all poetry you keep to the nouns as much as possible, omitting as many transitions, adverbs and adjectives as you can. Choose the best and follow the form of the poem.
Capturing the awesome experience is also the basis of a journal or a blog; capturing the wonder of your life. And the horrible and the ugly and the huge pains, sorrows and griefs are as much a part of the wonder of life as the sunsets and the celebrations.
Ultimately, you want to use the ability to expand or condense your writing to precisely suit the occasion. You need this interchangeable flexibility, and this skill is very satisfying.
Look at “the speech was tiresome.”
What made it so?
Was it the stuffy hall, the vagueness of the speech, the monotonous tone of the speaker, the recycled content?
When we are very small, a tree is a blocky circle on top of two parallel lines.
As we get older, we notice the difference between an evergreen tree and other trees, and the element of comparison is introduced.
Then as we get older still, we learn about more types of trees, the cedar trees that give one a rash, the deciduous trees that lose their leaves in the winter like the chestnut tree, the pine tree that costs more at Christmas, the monkey tree in Granma’s yard that is impossible to climb. And later at university we study the environmental hazards to the plant systems: the various insects that attack certain trees, the fertilizer requirements of the different species and so on.
The learning process is one of noticing increasingly the particulars in our environment, the details of greater knowledge. So also does the writer/artist.
Show not Tell
Instead of saying, “I was cranky and miserable”, try pinning down exactly what you did that was cranky.
“I yelled at Gerald not to slam the door when he came in from school. ‘I didn’t slam the door,’ he replied, and then I gave him a tirade about how he had slammed the door. Actually he shuts the door with the same bang every day but today it annoyed me.”
Here we can see the cranky person. This is good. And the crankiness of an older person will be clearly different than the cranky behavior of a child.
Try to observe the specifics. Instead of writing
“I walked the urban street and smelled various food cooking.”
Write
“I walked the Montreal street, following my nose past the walk-up flats and low rent rooming houses, and smelled the cabbage rolls cooking from the flat below the street level, then the beef and onions next door, and the Italian sauce simmering behind another ragged curtained window.”
So to make the writing sparkle, we must show what we observe.
Use specific actions for generalities.
“I didn’t feel safe in the places where I stayed.”
becomes,
“I haven’t had one accommodation with a deadbolt lock so far, so I put all the movable furniture, the little couch that sloped forward, the homemade side table and the two aluminum kitchen chairs against the door at night.”
The key is to make your writing as visual as possible. But don’t overdo it. There can be too many details that don’t add to the writing. Be selective. Art is about selecting only the right details.
Rewriting and Proofreading
Tighten, tighten, tighten those sentences.
Vary the paragraphs from short to shorter.
Nobody really wants to read dense prose.
The more the writing looks like pictures, the more people will read.
Write on an angle maybe, if your program can do this
(InDesign).
Write in different colors.
Change up the fonts and the capital letters.
How often do you look at a magazine or a newspaper and the only thing you read are the captions to the pictures?
Suggested Exercises
1.Name something and write a list about it non-stop for a time period, 8-10 minutes. Some days lots of material will surface, others not so much. If nothing comes, write your name over and over until words come.
dogs
best friends
coffee
social drinking
literature
sore feet, back?
cars
hair styles
Do one of these every day for a week. Notice how your thoughts start to complete themselves in the time frame after the first few days.
2.Write a cluster of words of things that bug you. We all have the words for annoying things like appliances
