WRITING TIP #3

Do you have a brother or a sister? If you do, try writing a poem about him or her. If you have more than one, write about all of them. If you don’t, then try writing about your friends and about their brothers and sisters. Ask your friends questions about them. If you have a dog or cat or other pet, write about it. I absolutely always advise beginning poets to start out by writing about what they know, and I think that you all know a lot about your siblings and your pets.

Also, a poem doesn’t have to be long. There’s nothing wrong with a long poem, but don’t make your poem long just for the sake of doing it. If those extra lines don’t add anything to what you want to say, take them out.

A long time ago I wrote a poem about oysters. In the poem I said in six words everything that I wanted to say about oysters. I suppose that I could have made the poem longer, but I don’t think that making it longer would have made it better. In fact I’m positive that making it longer would have made it worse.

Here’s the poem: image

 

Oysters

Oysters

are creatures

without

any features.

Years later I thought of more things to say about oysters and wrote a somewhat longer poem about them. It’s called “Do Oysters Sneeze?” Just because you’ve written one poem about something doesn’t mean you can’t write another poem or another dozen poems about the same subject. Maybe someday I’ll write another oyster poem, but I won’t write it if I don’t have something else to say about oysters that I haven’t said before. Try to think of new things to say about something you’ve written about previously. If you can’t think of anything new about that subject, then write about something else. I do it all the time. Here’s that other oyster poem: image

 

Do Oysters Sneeze?

Do oysters sneeze beneath the seas,

or wiggle to and fro,

or sulk, or smile, or dance awhile

…how can we ever know?

 

Do oysters yawn when roused at dawn,

and do they ever weep,

and can we tell, when, in its shell,

an oyster is asleep?