Writing Skill: Play with a triolet

The triolet is a fabulously compact repeating poem form, where the first two lines make up most of the poem. If you've got two good opening lines, why not make the most of them?! Part of the fun, too, is seeing how much you can shift their meaning around each time they're repeated, by using words with two meanings, or with the different lines that lead in, or by punctuating them in different places. That said, the lines can also be repeated for the sheer force of repetition, the insistence of it.

FIRST LINE	a
SECOND LINE	b
new line, rhymes with first line	a
FIRST LINE	a
new line, rhymes with first line	a
new line, rhymes with second line	b
FIRST LINE	a
SECOND LINE	b

The rhyme scheme is a-b-a-a-a-b-a-b, but because of the repetition you actually only need 3 a-rhymes and 2 b-rhymes. For the metre, people often use iambic pentameter, but you don't have to.

As always with a new form, it's helpful to see an example, and also take it out for a few spins with doggerel, to get a feel of it. So here are three examples. The first is the very first one I wrote, taking it out for a spin with some doggerel, using what I had around me:

Afternoon wine at the Plough
in the chilly new warmth of the sun
and the first leap of laughter is now
afternoon wine at the Plough.
The canal parts, a narrowboat prow
pushes forward, and summer’s begun:
afternoon wine at the Plough
in the chilly new warmth of the sun.

Here's one I wrote in May 2020, which plays with the repeating lines more. You can see how I've changed up the punctuation on the repeating lines to play with the meanings:

We’re used to the daily death toll
now. The government is vague
on why, but we’re to blame – a role
we’re used to. The daily death toll
rises. Just show some self-control
and return to work despite the plague.
We’re used to the daily death toll
now the government is vague.

And as that's a glum note to end on, here's a cheerier one, of flirty birds in April, which plays with the repetition's meaning a little, but mostly uses it to echo the birds' repetitive movements:

A sudden flapping leap – the blackbirds part.
If one has flown too far, the game is done.
The branches bounce. A haughty tail – a dart –
a sudden flapping leap. The blackbirds part
and settle, back to back – by turns, restart
their line-dance, left then right. One takes a run –
a sudden flapping leap. The blackbirds part
and one has flown too far. The game is done.

If this is your first-ever triolet, absolutely take it for a spin with doggerel first, using whatever you've got around you as content: the weather, the view from the window, anything at all. The first go is just to get the hang of it. 

If you've written a triolet or similar repeating forms before, or you want to try another after your first go, think of things that repeat across your own life or days, and pick one of them to play with in a triolet. 

The triolet is also known as a French medieval rondeau, and it's part of a group of repeating forms that all have almost the same name and slightly different lengths and patterns: the rondeau, rondine, roundelay, roundel, rondeau redoublé...! So if you find repeating lines fun, there's a ton more out there to play with.

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Want to explore writing poems more? 30 Days of Writing lets you explore a huge variety of poems and/or flash fiction (very short stories), with guidance to explore different aspects of poetry and over 30 optional poem forms to play with. Try the first three days of 30 Days of Writing free.

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The live Meddling with Poetry course course explores a host of different poetry forms as well as the musicality of language, vivid imagery, and other facets that bring poems to life. It's 8 weeks long, one evening a week, and absolute beginners and experienced writers are equally welcome. It runs about every three years: you can read more details here.

Writing Skill: Play with a cinquain

The cinquain is a concise and wonderfully versatile little poem form. If you're new to writing poems, it's perfect for trying the notion out; if you're an experienced poet, it's a lovely way to hone your concision. It also has some delicious variations if you want to settle in for longer. ("Cinquain" is basically Frenchified poetry-speak for a "fivey".) It's super simple: no rhyme scheme, no set metre, just 5 lines which steadily increase in length, then abruptly jump back down:

Line 1: 2 syllables
Line 2: 4 syllables
Line 3: 6 syllables
Line 4: 8 syllables
Line 5: 2 syllables

For example...

I walk
the Erl-King's wood
of beechmast, berries, ripe
decay, and golden pools of sun
that lie.

It was invented by Adelaide Crapsey around the turn of the century. She used iambic metre (de-DUM) and my example does too, but you can use whatever metre suits you, or none.

Then you can also spin it through all sorts of fun variations, if you don't feel like stopping at just one. You can write a cinquain "chain", where the last line of one cinquain is reused as the first line of the next. You can also write a "cinquain swirl", which is a bunch of them linked together, sharing the two-syllable line as the last/first, and the two-syllable line is the same each time.

Here's a cinquain chain I wrote, from the prompt "falls to the soul" (a snippet from Pablo Neruda's poem, "Tonight I can write the saddest lines"). In each stanza, the last line becomes the first line of the next stanza. Right at the end, it ties in a circle by using the first line of the poem as the last line.

Frost-dark
falls. To the soul
tiny stabs of light are
constellations, a sparse dot-to-dot
promise.

Promise
five dots can make
the big dipper, nineteen
are somehow Orion, and that’s
the sword.

The sword
of Damocles,
hanging by a horse hair
above the throne, mocks what you wished
on stars.

On stars,
we pin such shapes,
wildly drawing contours
of beasts and gods, between dots, on
frost-dark.

And here's a cinquain swirl, showing how the same two-syllable line is used throughout. 

Grinning,
arrange the toys
(yes, we have toys) holding
birthday gifts, all excited, all
grinning:
people thought I’d
outgrow my silliness
or gift it to kids, but I’m still
grinning,
carefree, kid-free,
seeing lichen, pebbles,
moss-forests, how the ripples are
grinning
at the sun, all
the grass-blades’ chatter, their
stems squeaking when tugged: my world is
grinning
with things that I’m
supposed to have lost and
only glimpse again through children
grinning.

For something to write about, I suggest trying it out for the first time with a descriptive poem: simply describing what's around you or what you've seen today, as I did in my first example, using that day's walk. If you want to take description further, describe an artwork. (That's called ekphrasis, in poetry.) Minimalism seems a good fit for a five-liner, so this article on Minimalism from the Tate could be useful for inspiration.   

Start with a cinquain or five, try it out, see how it feels, and then chain or swirl to your heart's content!

Note: To respect copyright, my blog posts only use my own poems as examples. On taught courses, I'm licensed to give my students copyright material, so you'll see lots of other people's work.

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Want to explore writing poems more? 30 Days of Writing lets you explore a huge variety of poems and/or flash fiction (very short stories), with guidance to explore different aspects of poetry and over 30 optional poem forms to play with. Try the first three days of 30 Days of Writing free.

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The live Meddling with Poetry course course explores a host of different poetry forms as well as the musicality of language, vivid imagery, and other facets that bring poems to life. It's 8 weeks long, one evening a week, and absolute beginners and experienced writers are equally welcome. It runs about every three years: you can read more details here.

Quietly Life-Changing

Writing poems regularly is quietly life-changing, in a way that goes beyond any other kind of writing. I’ve always been a journaler / notebook scribbler, I did “morning pages” for years, I’ve been writing fiction consistently since 2006, and from age 13 on, I’d write poems when they struck.

But when I started writing poems regularly (daily, in fact), it transformed me. And my poetry, and all my writing, but the biggest sea-change was how I lived in the world and in myself.

Why is writing poems so different? Journaling provides the same self-reflection, morning pages the same catharsis, stories the same sense of creative achievement. Writing poems regularly is more than the sum of those parts, though.

Something in the nature of poems lets us explore our feelings without getting stuck in them. The shape of a poem becomes a container, so we can reach into the feeling and still stand outside it: finding the exact image or shade of an emotion, while another objective self is also counting syllables, working out how to start the next line with a “p”, or planning to end this line with the word “exist”. And as I said in You Are Not Ark-Fleet B, afterwards, “where the emotion is, there’s also a poem.” The thing you’ve made continues to hold the feelings.

If writing stories is getting characters to act out our ideas, writing poems is finding imagery to speak them: so at the moment that we’re most focused on an emotion or thought, we’re also thinking intensely about things we can feel, smell, see, touch, hear. It becomes both mindfulness and sensory grounding. We’re not just wrapped in our feelings: we’re alive in our bodies.

We don’t always want to write about our feelings – so we can write about the whole world of marvellous and curious things. We reach out into the world, to write a poem about spores, and the world reaches back with an insight about hope and creativity. We write about clockwork machines and discover our own feelings about having a complicated body, and a way to navigate that.

Those are the poems that resonate, from writing poems regularly, but the beauty of writing them regularly is that you don’t know when that will happen. You’re not sitting down with a knotted throat and a tissue box, ready for the poem like for a counselling session. Some of them are just playing with words, or a strong opinion about a fairytale, or describing a painting you love, or grumping about Ian McEwan’s opinions on sci-fi, or a joke in rhyme, or trying out a technique. Even the resonant quietly transformative poems don’t always seem like it, at the time: I really thought one poem was just about spores, until I typed it up two weeks later. Now its final line shines for me in dark places like the light of Eärendil.

Writing poems regularly means you discover the joyful, light-hearted poems too. When we only reach to poems in moments of urgent need, that need is usually about heartbreak, loss, grief. Poems make excellent containers and carriers for those. But our lives are also full of delight, wit, fun, good food: all of those get to be in poems, too, and they live in our sense of self all the more vibrantly for being written about. Grinning at some bluebells in spring becomes a roundelay of joy that lives on year-round. One perfect June afternoon on the green is framed as a timeless part of your life in its sestina. A hasty haiku is forever your cousins laughing in the firelight. The sheer regularity of writing poems regardless invites our wholeness in, including our happiness.

Writing poems regularly definitely improved my writing. My poetry vaulted in quality and at last was regularly, near-routinely accepted by journals and magazines. My fiction brightened with musicality and more powerful word choices, and sharpened with my newfound concision. But those are fringe benefits, compared to the quietly life-changing process and practice of simply writing poems, regularly.

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Want to explore writing poems more? 30 Days of Writing lets you explore a huge variety of poems and/or flash fiction (very short stories), with guidance to explore different aspects of poetry and over 30 optional poem forms to play with. Try the first three days of 30 Days of Writing free.

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The live Meddling with Poetry course course explores a host of different poetry forms as well as the musicality of language, vivid imagery, and other facets that bring poems to life. It's 8 weeks long, one evening a week, and absolute beginners and experienced writers are equally welcome. It runs about every three years: you can read more details here.

Writing Skill: Awe and Ah

If you fancy doing a bit of writing but you're not sure what about, or you want to dabble the way an artist might play with mixing colours / making marks, this is the perfect Writing Skill for you: the magic of writing where you discover what it's about, instead of deciding in advance, and some very special creative constraints that'll shape it in surprising ways for you.

So give yourself the gift of a cuppa and ten minutes, grab your notebook and pen, and set off on a mini writing adventure into the unknown. And in the spirit of the unknown, I'm going to ask you to trust me for a bit and not scroll down to read the whole Skill before you start. It works better that way and you'll be able to brainstorm more freely. So do Part One, then I'll explain the rationale, then do Part Two.

Part One

For half your time (five mins if you want to keep this a ten-minuter), brainstorm all the words you can think of with "aw" and "ah" sounds. For example: aw: baulk, caught, Lord, etc. ah: mark, party, harsh, etc. Do that before you scroll further.

Here come the don't-scroll greenery:

🌿 Don't 

🍃 keep 

🌱 reading 

🌳 till 

💚 you've 

🌲 done 

🌳 that 

☘️ bit 

Why you're doing this

The first thing we all learn in linguistics is that words don't inherently mean anything: there's no reason why a pen is called a "pen", and so on. And that's why languages are different. BUT there are some exceptions to this. Certain vowel sounds have instinctive meaning for us, which runs across languages. Awe and Ah sounds, in particular, have associations of things being slow, large, and heavy. So if you use heaps of those sounds in a passage or a poem, it'll create a mood of slowness, largeness, and weight. Even if that's not the meaning of the words you write. Nifty, huh?

Part Two 

Now, for the rest of the time you've got, draw on your collection of slow, large, and weighty feeling words, to write either a poem or a passage of description. Cramming as many of those in as you can will decide your subject matter for you, and also what you say about it. And whatever you're writing about, the words will set the mood for you. So let the words take the lead, write to find out what they end up saying, and have fun!

Want to play with this more?

• For a companion piece of small light sounds, use the vowels /I/ and /i:/ - the vowel sounds in ick and eek.
• And for an interesting exploration, try the same brainstorm-then-write approach with words beginning with "gl". (This one only works in English, but it's super fun to discover.)

Enjoy!

Why this Skill?

Writing to discover new approaches, angles, and even thoughts can be wonderfully illuminating. We get to find things out through the process of writing, rather than deciding in advance with what we already know. Adding creative constraints is a great way to do that: through a group of words we're fitting in, like this, or through another nifty patterns like using specific letters, rhythms, etc. And creative constraints are always great for inspiration.

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Want to explore writing poems more? 30 Days of Writing lets you explore a huge variety of poems and/or flash fiction (very short stories), with guidance to explore different aspects of poetry and over 30 optional poem forms to play with. Try the first three days of 30 Days of Writing free.

---

The live Meddling with Poetry course course explores a host of different poetry forms as well as the musicality of language, vivid imagery, and other facets that bring poems to life. It's 8 weeks long, one evening a week, and absolute beginners and experienced writers are equally welcome. It runs about every three years: you can read more details here.

Writing Skill: Tell It Slant

Emily Dickinson wrote “Tell all the truth but tell it slant — Success in Circuit lies.” The same is true in writing, especially when we’re including a more familiar or tropic element. A slant-wise description helps you dart around any sense of cliche. It’s also very handy to have up your sleeve when you want to avoid repetition, whether within a scene or when you need to describe the same space repeatedly and there’s only so many words to say “bare wood”.

So for this slantwise exercise, you’re going to describe light: two types of light, five minutes each. The first is wincingly bright glaring light – from an angel descended in all its eye-stinging glory, or a beach at midday, or a very brightly lit room, up to you. The second is darkness – near darkness, total darkness, or underground pitch black, and whether it’s in the woods, in caves, at home, in an unfamiliar room, in a spaceship drifting through darkness, whatever, is also up to you.

But here’s the catch: in the first description, you’re not allowed to mention the light. That means also no words like “glare”, “dazzle”, etc. In the second, you’re not allowed to mention the dark. That means also no words like “shadow”, “pitch black”, etc. So in each case, you have to go in slantwise. (Top tip: in both cases, it’ll help to have a character in the scene whose point of view you’re writing from.)

So grab your notebook, pen, and a cuppa, spend five minutes on each half, then have a lovely time rereading them, gloating, and praising yourself for all the clever strategies you found! If you’re doing this with a writing group / buddy or they’re doing it too, share your writing with each other to identify the different strategies you each found.

Why this Skill?

Slant-wise description is one of those poetry techniques that hugely improves our fiction writing as well. Perhaps because we so often want to write poems about things that have been described a thousand times – heartache, new love, grief, lust – and we want to express it the way we’re experiencing it: as if for the first time ever. Then, when familiar things crop up in our stories, we find we’ve already honed the skills to do exactly that.

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Want to explore writing poems more? 30 Days of Writing lets you explore a huge variety of poems and/or flash fiction (very short stories), with guidance to explore different aspects of poetry and over 30 optional poem forms to play with. Try the first three days of 30 Days of Writing free.

---

The live Meddling with Poetry course course explores a host of different poetry forms as well as the musicality of language, vivid imagery, and other facets that bring poems to life. It's 8 weeks long, one evening a week, and absolute beginners and experienced writers are equally welcome. It runs about every three years: you can read more details here.

Writing Skill: Implicit Colour

Berries in the snow.
Chocolate flecked with hazlenut.
Lavendar crowded with bumblebees.
Daisies on the lawn.

In each of those, I don't need to tell you the colours for them to leap into your mind's eye: they each create vivid colour palettes, just through the things themselves. And there are heaps of things that will do that for us.

That's what we're going to play with in this Writing Skill: making your writing burst with implicit colour. So give yourself the gift of ten minutes' writing time, grab your pen, notebook, and something to sip, and let's start.

For colour inspiration, we're using the handy resource, Hex-Hub. Originally designed to give you the hex-codes of colours for websites, it has fantastic colour names. It divides them into five palettes: neutrals, warms, greens, blues, and purples. Ignore the neutrals and just focus on the four colour palettes.

On some paper or in your notebook, devote a page to each colour palette. (If you want to keep it a ten-minuter, allow 2.5 minutes per palette as well.) Then click on a palette and scroll through the colour names, jotting down all the names of things that catch your eye. For example, under warms, I swiftly get snow, rose, salmon, coral... Make sure you only write down names of things, not fancy colour words like "azure". Go through all four colour palettes like that, gleaning things with implicit colour.

The newly heightened awareness from just doing that exercise is enough, if you're using this as a warm-up and hankering to dive back into your work-in-progress. If you want to play with it further, then I suggest writing a poem or a short passage of description inspired by your favourites things you've gleaned, letting their inherent colours fill the page without an adjective in sight.

One side note: In my examples at the top, you almost definitely saw red berries, even though berries also come in white, orange, and black. Likewise, "apples" usually suggests green, despite all the other colours available. But some imaginings will vary. I can't control whether you saw pale English lavender or deep purple French lavender. I'm more likely to picture a big white daisy with a yellow centre (the ones I grew up with) than the little white-and-pale-pink ones more common in England. I saw dark chocolate; you might have seen milk chocolate. That's okay. Part of letting things come alive in the reader's mind is giving space for them to imagine it, not controlling every! last! detail! lest they inadvertently stray from our vision. We want to give them just enough detail that the rest can come alive in their mind, not constrain them to ours.

Have fun!

Want more Writing Skills? As a member of The Writers' Greenhouse Community, you'll get a new Writing Skill every week: quick fun activities to develop your writing across plot, character, description, style, genres, and poems.

Plus you'll get expert advice on tap, a friendly supportive writing community, and help sending your writing out.

Find out more and join here.  

Writing for Wellbeing

Writing is a quiet wonder for mental health. There’s a reason so many teenagers dive into writing journals, diaries, and poems, during those years of so much hormone-and-identity upheaval. As we emerge into adulthood, though, we mostly ditch that. We forget what a wonderful help it can be, and we think everything we do has to be “good”.

Here’s a secret: writing can be good and good for us. Sometimes turn by turn; sometimes at the same time. Sometimes just good for us and we turn it into something good later.

I’ve written here before about how much writing can help our wellbeing. In The Wheelchair and the Cushion of Art, I described how it’s helped me navigate heartache, depression, and living with a chronic illness. In The Joy is in the Doing, I wrote about how process-focus brings back the joy (and the productivity!) and how I wrote myself back to health from a massive stress crisis. You Are Not Ark Fleet B explored how during the pandemic, everyone took refuge and respite in the arts – the films, TV, books, music, that helped us hold on: ”We can call it respite. We can call it mental health. We can look to the physical health benefits of easing stress, and how much that heals, how much it wards off. We can look to the societal benefits of not going berserk with cabin fever…” And why “even if no-one ever reads what you write, society is better for you writing.”

That’s because writing is amazing for wellbeing.

• Writing gives us respite. Whatever we’re dealing with – stress, heartache, grief, anxiety, illness, crisis, or even high-octane brain-fizzing excitement – we need a break, so we can be strong again tomorrow.
• Play, creativity, and flow-states protect us against stress. They literally physically protect our brains, and help us grow new neural connections, so we can respond more flexibly.
• Writing helps us process things. Instead of staying stuck, writing can hep us move through the emotions and thoughts, and emerge from it.
• Making something supports our sense of self. Crying on the sofa because you’re in so much pain that you can’t even put a ready-meal in the oven sucks. Writing a poem about it doesn’t get the ready-meal in the oven, but now you’re someone crying on the sofa and someone who’s written a pretty spiffing poem. And where the emotion is, there’s also a poem or story there now, as a container to help hold the emotion.
• Writing offers us free self-expression. Our full, varied, and wild selves can emerge on the page. That’s especially useful when our inner self feels constrained by work, by public face, by caring for others first, all the things that adulthood requires of us. From the page, it can even creep more into the world: a freer more playful sense of self.

All of this is good for us, and good for those around us. We’re not being selfish or indulgent by taking time to write. How much better, for our partners, families, friends, colleagues, even people who cut us off in traffic, if we’re rested, unstressed, flexible, able to process our feelings, and whole in our selves? (And it’s easier to ask for help with the ready-meal if you’re not a snapping resentful ball of rage. IME.)

Writing’s not a cure-all or a replacement for all mental-health support. After years of writing a poem a day, when “the blue curtain” kept cropping up, I finally booked therapy for my medical PTSD. Six sessions of EMDR therapy sorted that out, but its presence on my notebook pages took it from the shadows to booking an appointment.

Writing is an amazing power tool in our tool box. So here are my best tips for writing for wellbeing, from an amalgam of research, my experience, and my students’ experiences.

• Write by hand if you can. This has so many benefits that I’ve written a separate blog post about it.
• Don’t wait to feel okay – do it anyway. The same way we don’t wait for a headache to pass before we take a painkiller, you can sit down to write joyfully, grumpily, relaxed, or stressed. It still works.
• Make it a little treat. You don't want to drag a notebook onto a table cluttered with breakfast dishes or open another document straight after work for yet another chore to tick off: treat yourself a little. Sit somewhere you like, make your favourite drink, maybe put some music on. Take yourself out for coffee in a café or pub garden, if writing outside your home helps. Whatever modest effort makes it nicer, even if that's just putting the dishes behind you where you can't see them!
• Drop your standards. This is always true for writing: we need to let ourselves write badly and go for quantity over quality, not so we churn out rubbish, but so we let ourselves experiment. You can still develop as a writer, try new techniques, and write amazing stuff that way. You’re more likely to, if you’re not rigidly demanding perfection from every word. It’s even more important to drop your standards when you’re writing for wellbeing. In that stress-state, I literally muttered “Doesn’t matter if it’s shit,” on repeat while I wrote. The measure of good writing time, here, is time spent writing. Stun your inner critic with “Doesn’t matter if it’s shit,” and just write. That’s where the flow lives. It might turn out good later, but let it be rubbish now.
• For fiction, don’t write about you. The more clear blue water between you and the main character, the easier it is to step through the magic doorway into writing-land, as I wrote about in The Characters That Let Your Stories Fly. Try out new characters, new genres, new approaches: variety breeds joy and creativity. It will always be self-expression, because it’s still you writing, the self will out, but of a much freer kind.
• For poems, mix between you and not-you poems. Sometimes you need to blurt or to shape acidic little ditties about exactly what you’re experiencing and feeling: that’s healthy and good. Sometimes you need to take a break and write about spores: that’s also healthy and good. As with stories, the you still emerges; the self will out. My spore poem ended up actually being about my tenuous relationship with hope and a disappointment I feared. It was a stronger poem for being ostensibly about spores, and when the disappointment came, I had the exact poem I needed.
• Try poems with formal constraints: syllable counts, rhymes, metre, specific end words, a refrain to work in, and so forth. Something marvellous happens when you’re excavating a grief but also counting syllables: new objectivity, a you inside and outside the feeling.

In early 2020, I was planning a series of thirty daily Poem Skills to coincide with national poetry writing month (NaPoWriMo) in April. When the pandemic hit in March, I redesigned it to support mental wellbeing, to help people find respite in calm absorbed flow, and ran it on the blog for free. I took all my experience of writing for wellbeing and made sure every topic offered people somewhere interesting, relaxing, or uplifting to put their minds. (The other things we need to express will emerge when they need to – like spores.) I alternated between poems with formal constraints and free verse (with optional forms), for the best of both worlds. I got so many lovely private messages from people who were finding, as I did, how much writing helped. In 2023, I ran it again, inside the Writers’ Greenhouse Community, this time adding flash-fiction (very short story) options in the same spirit of discovery, fun, and mental wellbeing.

And I’m thrilled to offer it to you now: reworked, spruced up, and expanded, as 30 Days of Writing. Whether that’s 30 days in a row, or every few days, or whatever works for you. It’ll teach you loads about poems and stories, because it’s me who made it (I’m a teacher: the self will out), but the sunlight flooding it all is writing for wellbeing. Because writing can be good, and good for us, and a joy.

So if you’re looking for something to write, or an added regular practice, and especially if you want to write for wellbeing, you can start here and try the first three days for free.

I hope it brings you joy, peace, and delight.

Writing Skill: Surprising Fact

Creativity loves novelty, the element of surprise, and what could be more novel and surprising than those lists of Surprising Facts that do the rounds? They're always tempting to scroll, but somehow we end up just threading them through our eyeballs, then forgetting them. Creativity 0, Ennui 1. It's definitely not generating the inspiration we want. 

But those surprising facts can take on exciting life and spark creativity. A couple of years ago, one Sunday morning, I was putting away the supermarket delivery with Radio 4 on in the background. It was Sunday Worship; I was about to change stations, but the priest's Scottish accent, his voice, and the music were so lovely that I left it on. At one point, he started speaking about seals and said, memorably, "They always come if you sing." 

The Story Elements class had just come up with a story about seelies, so immediately my mind leapt with the fact. I should tell them that, I thought. And what a beautiful overlap between seals and mermaids, which seelies are halfway between, that they come if you sing. And weren't tales of mermaids sometimes attributed to a particular type of seal that looks extraordinarily human? And how could that be used in the story...? 

As soon as there's a story for a fact to land in, it comes alive. But sometimes we need to find a story, and we can't always rely on life and random Radio-4-listening to hand us exciting facts: we need to seek them and make stories from them. Through that, we sensitise ourselves more to noticing them. Then, even if the particular facts we seek out and take for a tiny story-spin go nowhere, we're honing our alertness for other surprising facts, sources of stimulus, creative food. 

So for this Writing Skill, the idea is not just to read through surprising facts, like munching popcorn, but to pick a few that you can really imagine and integrate. The fact itself is just the spur for creativity: the creative boost comes when we use it.

To find your surprising facts, here's a really lovely list of genuinely delightful information. It's helpfully arranged into categories: Animals, History, Travel, Music, Sports, Human, Funny, and Miscellaneous. You can pick your favourite category or choose a cross-section. However you approach it, pick three facts and write them down.

Then, for each of your three, write one of these, whichever suits the fact or you best:

• A brief snippet of it happening, like an excerpt from a story or a scene
• A 2-3 line story teaser or blurb (think Dramatic Hollywood Voice)
• A tiny poem – perhaps an elevenie?

And just as the surprising facts come alive when you use them, so do the Writing Skills. So give yourself the gift of ten minutes, curl up with a cuppa, your notebook, and a pen, and take three facts for a quick writerly whirl. 

Have fun with your facts, and enjoy the week ahead of increased alertness and creative sparkles!

Want more Writing Skills? As a member of The Writers' Greenhouse Community, you'll get a new Writing Skill every week: quick fun activities to develop your writing across plot, character, description, style, genres, and poems.

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A Poem for Every Moment

For years, I waited for poems to come to me. I'd coax their arrival with long walks; I'd catch fragments and phrases, and wait patiently for them to build. When it came to writing stories and novels, I'd long since learnt not to wait for inspiration, but I firmly believed poems were different. They were mystical, magical, elusive. If I had an evening to myself, I'd make a Special Occasion of it: light candles, put on music, pull out my notebook and pen, and Await Poems. They often didn't arrive.

It's not that I didn't take my poetry as seriously as my fiction. I took it very seriously. I spent hours editing my poems; I faithfully entered and re-entered the few I had to competitions; I attended poetry events; I painstakingly assembled a chapbook and submitted it to a few publishers; I got a paid critique from a very experienced and kind poet.

I wish I could say my poems were better for that near-religious respect and all that work, but they weren't. They were stiff and stilted. Their imagery, so painstakingly sought, was dull. While my fiction leapt from strength to strength, my poetry languished behind.

In retrospect, I was like a lonely person hungering for company while keeping myself locked indoors away from people, never so much as picking up my phone. I genuinely didn't know that I could step out, in every weather, to go and meet some poems. 

Then one year I tried the April Poem-a-Day challenge. That was the year that everything changed. Every day, I wrote a poem, regardless, and it turned out all the poems were there, waiting for me, all along. Suddenly my stiff stilted over-worked little oeuvre was swept aside by this bright new tide of lively vivid poems, bursting with surprising imagery and unexpected thoughts. I learnt to stop Taking Poems Seriously and get to know them playfully, instead, trying out new forms with doggerel, seeing what happened if I set myself a particular challenge, letting the words themselves decide where things went. And my poems vaulted in quality.

I continued writing a poem a day for 32 months. Rather than poems being tremulous fragile things that I had to create the perfect moment for, I discovered types of poems for every possible moment. Whatever I wanted to do, there was a poem for that. So here, for whatever moment you're in, is a poem that's waiting for you.

Are you in love? If it’s yearning and secret, try a tanka or katauta. To go more in depth, a sonnet of any kind. (There are many kinds beyond the Shakespearean sonnet.) If it’s obsessive, lustful, or tantalising, the drumming repetitions of villanelles, pantoums, and triolets await. If it’s joyful, go wild with the repetition in a roundelay.

If you’re grieving, haiku are there to hold the frozen moments. The ghazal is ready to be added to as long as you need it.

If you want to write a poem for someone else, try a chant, a charm, an ode, or a shape poem. If you want to write about a place, a haibun, a pastoral, an Old English poem or a Pleiades all fit perfectly. If you want to tell a story, you want a ballad, a terza rima, or anything in anapest. If you’re in the mood for something funny, try common measure, Skeltonic verse, a rubliw, or monotetra – though monotetra’s also quite happy to turn creepy, if you want it to.

If you want to explore an idea that’s clearly outlined in your mind, try a list poem, a fold poem, a sonnet, a cinquain chain, or a quatern. If you just have the starting point of an idea and want to write to discover, see what you find out by writing an  Old English poem, a chain poem, a rondeau redoublé, a golden shovel, a Pleiades, a terzanelle, a treochair – and if you really want to explore it in depth, a sestina.

If you have no idea what to write about or you’d rather rub chilli in your eyes than spend time with your thoughts right now, there are heaps of poems that will still let you write, which only need a word, a phrase, an artwork, or a short extract, none of which need be yours, to kick them off: ekphrasis, a coupling poem, a golden shovel, a Pleiades, an acrostic poem, a glosa, or a Venn poem.

If you’re determined to write a poem but you only have a few minutes, no problem. Dash off an elevenie, a haiku, a lai, a katauta, a nonet, a tanka, a lune, a rubliw, or a cinquain. If you want to spend hours on an absurd poetic challenge, try an acrostic wreathed sestina. (I've only written one. It nearly broke my brain.) And if you just want to write a poem about drinking wine in the evening, there’s even one for that: an anacreontic!

You don’t need to know any of these types of poems, yet. Before I started the poem-a-day practice, I could probably have listed only sonnet, villanelle, and haiku, off the top of my head. You meet them by writing them. You don’t have to wait for them: they’re there, waiting for you.

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The Meddling with Poetry course explores a host of different poetry forms, as well as the musicality of language, poetic imagery, and other aspects of the poetic. Absolute beginners and experienced writers are equally welcome. You can read more details and book a place here.

Writing Like Yourself

Most of us, when we start writing, try to write like "a proper writer". And if we've been reading good writing, we often make a decent fist of it, at least for a while. Like ChatGPT, we turn out a passable collage of what constitutes good writing. Like ChatGPT, there's something curiously wrong about it: not quite uncanny valley, just... somehow a little pedestrian? And that's because, at that stage, we're not yet writing like ourselves.

The familiar clichéd similes – cold as ice, hot as fire, etc – are absolutely fine in first draft. You don't want to slam on the brakes in the middle of storming out a scene because you wrote "white as snow". And for very transparent prose, we do sometimes use those as well. But often you want a more original comparison, or one that reflects your character or your world better. So come the second draft of that scene, you're staring into the middle distance, wondering, What does my character think is really hot? What’s really hot in my world? What things are really hot?

Enter A Dictionary of Similes, by Frank J. Wilstach! First published in 1916, this is an incredibly comprehensive list of similes across literature, from all sorts of authors. We are not planning to nick other people’s similes, mind. Rather, seeing all the different things other people have used kicks off all sorts of ideas you might not have had otherwise: “hot as black pudding” suddenly suggests all sorts of other incredibly hot food; “hot as Hades” suggests other hells and places; “hot as a monkey” – wtf, Shakespeare? – suggests some kind of writer’s crisis. (You can't win 'em all. Even if you're Shakespeare.)

So, of these super-common things-we-need-idioms for, pick 3–5:

• hot
• cold
• white
• black
• good
• happy
• rich
• poor
• clever
• stubborn

Then, for each one you chose, look it up in A Dictionary of Similes and use those similes to help you think of your own original versions. Go for three or more similes for each of the words you chose: that's easier than just picking one, because you don't have to pick The One Perfect One.

How you approach this varies depending on what you're writing. If you have a story or novel in progress, think about what your own character would use, or what suits your own world. If you want to create a story or a bit of flash-fiction (a very short story), choose the more unusual similes that appeal to you or tickle you, and work outwards from there to get a sense of your character and/or world. If that simile is particular to your character, what does that tell you about them? Or if it's specific to a place or imaginary world, what does that tell you about the setting? If you're writing poems, push yourself to find the most unusual comparisons you can that still make intuitive sense to you. You can use them in the poem or take a more outlandish simile and explore it through a poem.

Why this skill?

Similes are where the familiar grain of our language is at its most obvious: the standard phrases we use because everyone else does, a communication shortcut. That's why the usual ones are often used in transparent prose, where we don't want to notice the prose, just the story it's telling. Because they're so familiar, though, they lack impact. We've heard "cold as ice" so many times that it doesn't instantly conjure up a visceral sense of cold. But how about "cold as frozen steel"? That makes me wince with cold. Playing with creating your own similes is a wonderfully fun way to make the language your own – and that's what finding, and honing, your style is all about: making the language your own.

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Want more Writing Skills? As a member of The Writers' Greenhouse Community, you'll get a new Writing Skill every week: quick fun activities to develop your writing across plot, character, description, style, genres, and poems.

Plus you'll get expert advice on tap, a friendly supportive writing community, and help sending your writing out.

Find out more and join here.  

15 tips for writing a poem a day

After years of eyeing up NaPoWriMo (the April poem-a-day challenge) when April was the busiest time of the year for me, I finally got the chance to try it in 2018 – and it was transformative. No amount of study or trying could ever teach me as much as the simple practice of writing a poem every single day, regardless. At the end of the month, I couldn't bear to stop, so I mentally signed up for another month. Then another. Then another. After seven months, I realised it may as well be a year – but then I'd be stopping just as the next April challenge started, so let's make it a year and a month. After a full year of writing a poem a day, and agog with excitement to start afresh, I wrote down the 15 best tips I'd learnt:

1. A poem a day doesn’t mean a great poem a day

It’s a chance to try out new forms with doggerel, experiment with technique, explore new ideas in free verse. If you try to write a great poem a day, you'll be trying to make it "good", which means sticking to what you know and not taking risks, which means you're not learning anything, just repeating your existing skills. Drop your standards! Write a rubbish poem practising a particular technique, trusting the results will show up in future poems. Write doggerel when you try out a new form, because you can only understand what the form does by taking it for a spin, and next time you use it, you'll have a feel for it. This is the strongest lesson I've learnt from writing a poem every day for a year - and every time I've tried to make them good, I've started stagnating. Every time I relax again, I improve. Permission to write rubbish granted.

2. Don't save a prompt or content idea to write a good one – have a go

It's so tempting to save an especially enticing prompt - but it'll do you and the prompt no good if you build it up in your mind as a Special Prompt, worthy of a Good Poem. That'll stymie every line, when you finally work yourself up to try it. Write it now. You can always have another go at it as another poem-a-day. You can use the same prompt every day for a week, if you want. Like the special soap, special cheese, special notebook: just use it.

3. Feel free to cannibalise your poems

Yesterday's poems aren't sacred or engraved in stone: you can remix and mash-up however you want. If yesterday's strict form stopped you from exploring the idea in the way you wanted, rewrite it as free verse. Or if today you're trying a form, cherry-pick the best bits from yesterday's free verse. Nab six lines from a previous poem to start you off on your first sestina. Nothing is sacred.

4. Try new forms

Writing a poem a day is a fantastic chance to learn heaps of new forms, each of which teach you something and challenge you in a different way. Tiny forms will teach you economy of language. Sestinas will teach you to go with the flow and let go of control. Rhyme-and-metre forms will teach you musicality of language. Even if you remain a free-verse poet afterwards, you'll learn heaps.

5. Switch between rhyme-and-metre forms and free verse

Writing with rhyme and metre is brilliant for your musicality; free verse is brilliant for poetic language and devices. Switching between the two regularly allows them to feed off each other, so you can bring more of that poetic density into your rhymed poems, more of that assonance, alliteration, internal rhyme, and rhythm into your free verse.

6. Some poems are just exercises – the results show up later

Again, you're not writing a great poem a day: but the other poems are valuable too. In my first NaPoWriMo, I spent one day writing doggerel around the idea of "one sound": heavy syllables only, so all one-syllable nouns, verbs, adjectives; as much rhyme, assonance, and alliteration as possible. It was fun to try and it produced a rubbish poem. A couple days later, the results turned up in another poem, dense with heavy syllables, which was exactly what the subject matter needed. I only made the connection when I typed them up at the end of the month. But if you don't let yourself write the "rubbish" poems as exercises, you don't reap the results.

7. Some poems are just to keep the habit

Some poems have no particular value except that you're keeping going. Yes, that was a boring mile of concrete highway you just drove down, but there are other interesting places to come, and if you'd stopped, you wouldn't get to those. Keeping momentum has its own value.

8. Find out what kind of poem you write when you’re knackered, fluey, tipsy, light-headed, stressed, hormonal…

All the usual conditons when you'd dismiss the idea of trying to write a poem? Now's your chance to try them out. Sometimes the poem will just be about how tired you are or fluey you are; that's fine, and it falls into one of the categories above. Sometimes, you'll be stunned that despite your state, you can still step through the magic door into poetry land, and come back with something that pleases and surprises you.

9. It’s fine to write a quickie

Some days you just don't have much time. That's fine. There are heaps of quickie forms and they have plenty to teach you. If you only have 5 or 10 minutes, dash down a haiku, an elevenie, a nonet, a cinquain... even a three-word poem.

10. It’s fine to crowdsource a poem from a group

If you're at a barbecue, a wedding reception, a family do, a pub night, and suddenly yelp "WAH! I haven't written my poem!" you can always crowdsource it. Get everyone joining in to help you. Pick a form they might know or which is easy to explain - limericks, haiku, and elevenies are all great for that. It still counts as a poem a day.

11. It’s fine to use a fresh double-page spread in your notebook

You don't have to decide in advance if this poem will be Worthy of a full clean double-spread. Let it have one. I often use one side for brainstorming rhymes and jotting phrases, if it doesn't run over two pages. And it's okay to leave a page empty: you can use empty pages to rewrite clean copies of poems you’ve reworked heavily.

12. Type up your poems at intervals, not immediately, not too rarely

It's useful to have a time-lapse before you type up your poems, as you get a fresh perspective on them. Often ones you felt were rubbish turn out stronger than expected, or problems you were wrestling with are suddenly easier to resolve. Typing up a whole month or more of poems can be overwhelming though: the task becomes a bit too big, but it can also be too much emotionally. About once a fortnight works well for me, which is also a chance to select which ones to show my fortnightly writers' group.

13. Write down & collect new forms, new prompt types, and ideas for poems

Often writing a poem will give you a bunch of fresh ideas or lines for the next day's poem, or things crop up during the day, and you think you'll remember... I never can. Jot ideas in the back of your notebook, and when you find prompts or ideas on websites or social media, save them. You can screengrab them, bookmark things, whatever's quick and easy for you.

14. Don’t share your poems with your friends / family as a matter of routine

If you have a willing audience, it's so exciting and tempting to read them every fresh poem hot off the press - but that quickly becomes an expectation, for you as much as for them, and each poem has that audience in mind. Not sharing a poem also becomes very marked. Leave yourself the freedom to write poems you might not want to share.

15. Have fun with it!

It's a challenge, not a chore. Have fun with it, take it seriously enough that you wrest the time from each day, don't take it so seriously that it stresses you. This is play, and you're in for a mad exhilirating delight.

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The Meddling with Poetry course explores a host of different poetry forms, as well as the musicality of language, poetic imagery, and other aspects of the poetic. Absolute beginners and experienced writers are equally welcome. You can read more details and book a place here.

Meddle with a san san poem

The san san is a lovely variation on the repeating forms - instead of repeating exact phrases or lines, it repeats the imagery, which can be reworded and reused however you please. Each image appears three times, in any order. With just eight lines, that's rapid repetition! It also has a rhyme scheme of abcabdcd. When I'm writing, I break that down into abc abd cd, to help me keep track, and sometimes write it with those line breaks as well. Later, when I type it up, I remove the extra line breaks. Here's an example san san:

Rosebay Willowherb

Arms overflowing with twirls of seed-head froth
as white as the hair of the man who stopped me, said,
“In the blitz, that purple grew in the rubble, throughout,”
arms overflowing with memory, voice like a moth,
“It grows in purple cones in summer – our dread
couldn’t survive the flowers.” November’s white
seeded the broken places, a growing shout
of purple and arms overflowing in white nights.

Here it is again with the imagery in bold and colour-coded, and the line breaks added to help you see the rhyme scheme:

Rosebay Willowherb

Arms overflowing with twirls of seed-head froth
as white as the hair of the man who stopped me, said,
“In the blitz, that purple grew in the rubble, throughout,”

arms overflowing with memory, voice like a moth,
“It grows in purple cones in summer – our dread
couldn’t survive the flowers.” November’s white

seeded the broken places, a growing shout
of purple and arms overflowing in white nights.

As you can see, you can repeat the words or not to repeat the image: "arms overflowing" is repeated exactly; "purple" interchanges with "purple cones"; and the white seeds are "seed-head froth of white", "white seeded" and "white nights".

Have fun with it!

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The Meddling with Poetry course explores a host of different poetry forms, as well as the musicality of language, poetic imagery, and other aspects of the poetic. Absolute beginners and experienced writers are equally welcome. You can read more details and book a place here.