PoeWar » Education

Get Ready for 10 Days of Character Building

J.C. Hewitt — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 21:13:16 +0000

The audience has spoken. Our next group project will be 10 Days of Character Building. The project will officially start on October 20th and run through October 30th. This means that it will be completed in time for anyone who wants to join in the fun and excitement of National Novel Writing Month to have their characters ready.

The 10 Days of Character Building project will consist of daily articles about different ways to develop characters for stories. The general way to participate will to be to craft a different character with each method and post your results.

If you want to take part in this project as it moves along I suggest that you:

Decide on a single story (novel, play, screenplay or other work) that you will develop characters for.
Spend some time thinking about the genre, plot and other aspects of your story so that you know what you are working toward.
Think in general about what characters you will want for your story.

Ideally, the methods we will discuss will help you flesh out your characters, but they aren’t designed to have you create a character from scratch. As we go along, it will be helpful if you post your work so that others can see how you approached each method. As a way of getting started, feel free to use the comments here to discuss your general story idea.

Note: The more people we get to work together on this, the more useful it will be, so I encourage to tell your writer friends!

Here are some of my older articles to help get you get in the mood:

Update:

Here are links to the ten character building articles:

30 Poems in 30 Days Index

J.C. Hewitt — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 16:28:36 +0000

Below is an index to our 30 Poems in 30 Days Project.

30 Poems in 30 Days: Collaboration

J.C. Hewitt — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 20:41:49 +0000

This is Day 30! of 30 Poems in 30 Days

All Good Things

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Groucho Marx

We’ve reached the final day of our little poetry project. It has been quite a journey, at least for me, and I really appreciate those of you who took the time to post your poetry. I wasn’t sure, when I started this, whether or not I would get any participants and I was happy that a few of you chose to come along. It would have been a much harder journey without your poems and comments.

This will be the final day of the poetry project, but it won’t be my final post on the topic. When we started, I promised to discuss publishing options, especially low cost ones, and I will be writing about that over the next few days. Today, however, will be the final day of assignments.

The people who have chosen to write their poems and to comment on the poems of others have demonstrated my final lesson, the value of collaboration. Working with other poets is a good thing. Creating a community is a good thing. As I said, this would have been a much more difficult and longer month without the contributions of others. Reading other poet’s work has been invigorating. Reading other poet’s comments has been instructive. Having an audience of peers to discuss poetry with has helped me improve as a poet, and I hope it has helped others.

If you have the chance to work with, or just make friends with other poets. Take that chance. They will help keep your focus on poetry and on writing, which over the long haul can be more valuable than any criticism or praise.

Please tell me what you thought of the project. I would like to keep the energy. I am considering at least a weekly poetry post, complete with assignment, but I am open to other ideas. Please tell me what you think.

Today’s Poetry Assignment

I feel like ending with something technical but random. Don’t include any word with a single “A” in it, but do include at least one word with two “A”s in it.

Today’s Featured Poet

In keeping with our attempt to bring in international flavor for the final days, I am including Daniel Ladinsky. Ladinsky is an American poet but has lived in India and the Middle East for many years now. His work includes translations of the 14th century Persian poet, Hafez, who wrote in the ghazal form. Ladinsky is a somewhat controversial figure because many of his translations are not considered literal, and are thought to me more like responses to the original poems.

Books

Poems

30 Poems in 30 Days: A Little Advice

J.C. Hewitt — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 02:29:26 +0000

This is Day 29 of 30 Poems in 30 Days

Six Quick Tips

We are almost to the end of our 30 day journey through the world of poetry. I still have several poems left to write and I am determined to do it, so I am not going to delve too deep tonight. Instead I am going to leave you with six quick tips to take forward with you.

Nobody said writing poetry was easy. If they did, they probably weren’t very good at it. Accept the challenge. Embrace the challenge.
Set aside time at least once a week to write poetry. It is easy to get out of the habit. I know.
Poetry is therapeutic. Poetry can be a great way of dealing with anger or sadness. It is good to write your way through something, whether the poem itself is good or not.
Buy at least one book of poetry a month. Try to support new poets and don’t be afraid to try someone you don’t like at first. You CAN learn from poets you don’t like.
Look for ways to do something unexpected in your poetry. It is good sometimes to take a poem someplace that the reader did not see coming.
Sometimes when you are stuck for something to write, it is because you are not doing enough things that are worth writing about. Take the time to live and embrace life, otherwise you may well run out of material.

Today’s Poetry Assignment

Write the final line of your poem first, then figure out a way to get there.

Today’s Recommended Poet

In my quest to add a little more international flair to the poets I am recommending, I went looking for someone from England to read today. I found a interesting poet with what I consider to be a similar style to mine (he isn’t that big on punctuating his poems either). I haven’t read a lot of his work yet but I think he is worth investigating. Take a look:

Poems

Books

30 Poems in 30 Days: Word Choice

J.C. Hewitt — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 00:25:31 +0000

This is Day 28 of 30 Poems in 30 Days

Choose Your Words Wisely

Some poets write what they feel and spend very little time thinking about which word to use. They rely on instinct. Other poets spend a considerable amount of time trying to choose exactly the right words. They analyze and consider every word. I’m not going to advocate one method over the other. In my opinion, it is up to the poet to determine their approach to word choice. I am certainly in the middle of the road with my approach. I care about word choice, and I will often consider the benefits of one word over another, but I would consider myself completely sidetracked if I spent more than a few minutes deciding on whether or not one word is more perfect over another.

There are six general ways to influence and analyze your choice of words. The type of poem you write can make a difference in your choices. A poem with a metered form is going to involve choices about rhythm. A visually structured poem will entail a greater emphasis on appearance. A persona poem will require an increased focus on style. Beyond form, there is the individual style of the poet, which leads to subconscious word choices. Below are the six methods that you can use to determine word choice.

Meaning: The meaning of a word can be important in several ways. Obviously you want a word with the correct definition, but there are other considerations. Sometimes you want to reflect on the alternate meanings of a word in addition to the contextual meaning of a word. For example, you can say “we were filming the movie” or “we were shooting the movie”. Both phrases are correct in context, but the word shooting brings in other images because it has alternate meanings. Filming is the more precise word, which may be what the poet wants, but shooting has connotations of both violence and achievement (shooting a gun, shooting for the stars) that filming does not. These differences can have an overall effect on the poem, especially if reinforced with other word choices elsewhere in the poem.

Style: Another consideration is style and usage. Some words are more formal than others. For example, “cannot” and “can’t” are essentially the same word, but cannot is the accepted formal usage and can’t, like all contractions, is considered informal. Even more informal usages, such as slang or colloquialisms like cain’t, create a much different effect.

Rhythm: The rhythm of a word is essentially its meter, which I have discussed in earlier posts. It is the general pattern of the word, stressed syllables versus unstressed syllables. Even if you aren’t attempting to write a poem with a formal meter, you may find that you want a particular rhythm, especially for words on the same line.

Sound: The way a word sounds is always a consideration in poetry. The following words all mean essentially (though not exactly) the same thing: apron, bib, smock, pinafore. Each of these words has a different sound. Apron and pinafore have softer and longer sounds compared with bib and smock. If the exact meaning of the word isn’t your primary concern, then you might choose one of the four because it fits your sound requirements. It may rhyme, be alliterative, be assonant or add any of a number of other qualities to your poem.

Length: The length of a word can have very definite effects on a poem. The eye and even the voice tend to move more quickly over short words than long, even if the total number of syllables per line is the same. Short words tend to present as more active than long words. Long words tend to present as more formal and intellectual than short words.

Appearance: The final consideration in word choice is how the word looks on the page. For some poets, especially those who work with visual structures, this can be important. The words “little” and “modest” have similar meanings, the same number of letters and the same stresses, but the letters of the word little are (overall) taller and narrower than the letters in modest. For a visually-oriented poet, this can determine which word gets used.

Today’s Poetry Assignment

Write a poem that either uses no words longer than five letters or no words shorter than five letters.

Today’s Recommended Poet

Jenny Mueller’s first book of poetry, Bonneville, shows a great ability to create rhythm in free verse using repeated words, sounds and phrases. I can’t find too many examples of her work on the web, so be sure to take advantage of Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature to get a better look at what she can do.

Poems By Jenny Mueller

Allegory
Love Poem

30 Poems in 30 Days: Finding New Ways To Stay Inspired

J.C. Hewitt — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 23:46:01 +0000

This is Day 27 of 30 Poems in 30 Days

The Search for Inspiration

Sometimes I get stuck for ideas to write about. It is easy to get stuck in a rut as a poet. Staring at a blank page or a blank screen can be intimidating. Here are a few ways, presented in the tried and true list style, which can help you get started.

Call a friend and talk about old times
Collaborate with another poet
Exercise
Give yourself a deadline
Give yourself permission to write badly
Go someplace new
Interview yourself
Just start writing anything that comes to mind as fast as you can
Listen to your favorite music
Look at old photographs
Meditate
Read a magazine or a newspaper
Read someone else’s poetry
Read your own poetry
Review your old work
Start with a title
Take a swim, bath or a shower
Take a walk
Try another medium such as drawing or painting
Try something new

Today’s Poetry Assignment

Use one of the methods from the list above as inspiration for your poem. if you post your poem, be sure to write down which method you chose.

Today’s Poetry Assignment

If you truly want to get the poetry world all riled up, write a book of prose poems. If you don’t believe me, just read some of the reviews of Karen Volkman’s work. Better yet, go read the work yourself and see if YOU get riled up.

Interview with Karen Volkman
Karen Volkman: Poetry’s Latest Punchline
Karen Volkman – Vacancy’s Ambassador

Poems

[I have a friend. My friend is a sky.]
There Was a Stare
When Kiss Spells Contradiction

Books
Spar
Crash’s Law

30 Poems in 30 Days: Free Verse

J.C. Hewitt — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 00:25:52 +0000

This is Day 26 of 30 Poems in 30 Days

Trading Safety for Freedom

I’ve touched on the subject of free verse before, most notably in the article about the pros and cons of meter. Free verse is poetry that does not use a regular meter or rhyme. While poetry without rhyme dates back many centuries, the practice of using neither meter nor rhyme was a poetic movement that began in French and Europe during the 1800s. The first popular American poet to write in free verse was Walt Whitman.

Free verse does not mean that there are no patterns or rhythms at all. Instead, the rhyme is determined, sometimes subconsciously, by the poet. The lines come in the form of thought patterns, breath patterns, visual patterns, and syntactic patterns. More to the point, the form tends to mirror the voice of the poet.

While in some ways, free verse does not require the discipline of metered and rhymed poetry, it creates new requirements. The poet must determine, without the crutch of form, when the line ends and what makes for the best line. They must find a way to make the poem still feel poetic without relying on some of the most accepted tools. With free verse, you cannot defend the use of a word or phrase simply because it fits the meter. You must determine where to end the line because there is no set length to fall back on. Even the length of the poem is now completely up to you. So, while you have less limitations and restrictions, you have more responsibility.

While free verse is ultimately freeing, it is not for the lazy of for those who think it will be easier than writing metered or rhymed poetry. There is no safety net without form. There is no literary excuse for a mistake, because you have all the power. If you choose to write in free verse, you sill have to learn to be confident in your own voice, because that is what you will be relying on.

Today’s Poetry Assignment

Write the first draft of your poem in paragraph form and then change it into a free verse poem. Don’t be surprised if you have to change lines, words and phrases. That will probably be a part of the process.

Today’s Recommended Poet

Bruce Bond is a highly respected poet, teacher and the poetry editor for the American Literary Review. In this interview, he explains part of his poetic philosophy. “white space is one way of suggesting a kind of silent listening, an openness to the strange and what the language longs to accommodate, how words are taken to their limits. I like poems with silence in them, both the formal resonance of literal silence, and silence as a metaphor for the unknowable, the erotic, the sublime.”

Poems on the Web

Books of Poetry

30 Poems in 30 Days: Poetry Contests

J.C. Hewitt — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 20:27:30 +0000

This is Day 25 of 30 Poems in 30 Days

You May Already be a Winner

There is nothing wrong with entering poetry contests. It is one way of taking part in the larger world of poetry. It also gives you the motivation to write well and to keep writing. If you win a legitimate contest, it is a great honor. Unfortunately, many contests are not legitimate.

I’ve said it before and I will say it again. There is no quick or easy route to get rich as a poet. Even making a living as a poet is a difficult task. The masses do not buy books of poetry. Exceptions to this rule are rare, and generally involve someone who is famous for something other than poetry. Keep this in mind at all times, because there are people out there looking to take advantage of you.

Poetry contests are one of the methods that unscrupulous people use to take advantage of poets. They offer a substantial prize, $5,000, $10,000, $25,000, $100,000 to the winners of their poetry contests. All you have to do is submit your poems – along with a fee. Even if they don’t ask for an upfront fee, they still have ways of making you pay. In fact, if someone is offering you $100,000 for a contest you pay nothing to enter, you’d better be extra careful about entering.

Be prepared to become a finalist. An unscrupulous contest promoter’s goal will be to get you to attend a convention at which the winner will be named. The convention will probably be at some pretty locale that is easy to get so, such as Las Vegas or Miami. The fee for the convention won’t be too unreasonable, because they want you to come, but make no mistake; you are paying for a trip along with many, many other people they named as finalists. It may be a nice vacation, but you didn’t get there on talent. I don’t mean to say that you aren’t talented, just that talent is irrelevant to the contest promoters.

As a finalist, they will also publish you. Your poem will appear in a nice thick book along with a bunch of other poems. The book will be attractive, possibly leather-bound, but the poems will just be a collection of whoever sent something in. The book will cost you at least twenty dollars, maybe more. They’ll be counting on you to buy several so that your family and friends can see your “accomplishment”. They’ll probably also offer to sell you a nice plaque, perhaps one with your poem engraved on it. Whatever the case, they’ll keep trying to find a way to get your money.

There is nothing wrong with entering contests, but it pays to do a little research before you enter. Don’t be afraid to ask questions and don’t enter contests if the sponsors seem unwilling to share the details of how the contest works. Look for contests that are sponsored by schools, newspapers, magazines, major corporations and reputable publishers. Understand that any fee you pay to enter is going to be used to fund the prizes. If the fee seems excessive, don’t enter. Five dollars is one thing, but as the price grows so do the chances that you are getting ripped off. It is better to make a five dollar mistake than a hundred dollar mistake.

Never pay an additional fee once you have entered a contest. Don’t pay to have the poem published. Don’t pay for a plaque. Don’t pay for a trip. If you are the one paying them, then you are not a winner.

Sorry for this fairly cynical post, but people need to be warned.

Today’s Assignment

Write a poem that begins and ends with the same word.

Today’s Featured Poet

I wanted to take this chance today to formally promote Rosemary Nissen-Wade’s recommended Australian poets. I have already discussed John Kinsella, who I found much to my liking. I haven’t had time to delve as deeply into these three poets, and I would appreciate hearing other people’s opinions about them.

30 Poems in 30 Days: Say What You Want to Say

J.C. Hewitt — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 03:01:58 +0000

This is Day 24 of 30 Poems in 30 Days

Let the Reader Decide

On October 15th, 1995, when the Internet was first getting noticed, I sat down and wrote a list of tips for poets. This was long before poewar.com, when I had a little spot on a newspaper’s server and dial up access that went out whenever it rained. I don’t quite know what made me think I was qualified to give advice. I was five years out of college with a degree in Creative Writing and I guess I thought I knew a thing or two.

The funny thing was how popular that article got. It was soon after I wrote that little article that my site started getting noticed. When I transferred my pages to poewar.com, the article stayed popular. Just going by today’s stats, it is the fourth most popular page on my site, and that includes my homepage. It gets between one and two hundred hits a day, consistently. Every once in a while, StumbleUpon remembers that its there and I get about a thousand hits in a day. The shysters over at poetryamerica.com even went and published most of it as if it was their own.

Twelve years later, I still pretty much stand by my advice. I was young and a little too sure of myself, but I was on target for the most part. I may have been a little too strident about unnamed poems (I still get angry comments about that) but overall I think the tips were helpful and I have reinterpreted a few of them for this project. One of the best pieces of advice that I gave was this:

Say what you want to say and let your readers decide what it means.

The advice was so good that I eventually turned it into a whole article. The essential point though, is that you can’t spend all of your time worrying about what the audience will think of your poem. They may love it or they may hate it. They may understand what you are saying or they may interpret it in an entirely different way. You need to accept that and let it happen.

You also need to respect your audience. Don’t waste precious lines by trying to make things obvious. Don’t be purposely vague, but don’t try to tell people what to think about what you write. If you do, be ready for them to disagree or worse, wonder why you thought they wouldn’t get it. A poem isn’t an essay or a manual; it is an attempt to capture a piece of the universe and save it on paper. That piece of the universe may be beautiful or ugly, amazing or mundane, but chances are it can’t be explained. If that sounds too philosophical, so be it.

Today’s Poetry Assignment

Include a verb in every line of your poem.

Today’s Recommended Poet

I was out wandering today (which is why today’s article is so late) and I came across a book of poems by Ginny MacKenzie called Skipstone. I’ve finished the first half of the book and I love her voice. She has a real gift for setting small scenes that echo with meaning.

Poems by Ginny MacKenzie

Skipstone
Ossabaw Island, Georgia, April 4th
Mary Magdalene at the House of Simon
Aunt Lena Is Committed to Bellefonte State Hospital
Retreat to the Country of Pure Drought

30 Poems in 30 Days: Confessional Poetry

J.C. Hewitt — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 14:09:20 +0000

This is Day 23 of 30 Poems in 30 Days

The Personal Postmodernist

The current era of poetry is commonly referred to as the Postmodern Era. Postmodern thought is a complex series of philosophical and literary responses to the post World War II changes in world view and the acceleration of society. It isn’t the sort of thing you can explain in a blog post. I’ve taken entire classes on postmodern thought and I still can’t really explain it. The important thing to remember though, is that postmodernism is greatly concerned with challenging the traditional conventions of thought and communication.

One of the poetic movements that rose to prominence in the Postmodern Era is confessional poetry. Confessional poetry is about the writer. The poetry is about the writer’s life and the world around them. While confessional poems often touch on universal themes, they do so from the personal perspective.

The concept of poets writing about their own lives is not a recent development. You can go back through the ages and find poets discussing elements of their lives. What changed in the Postmodern Era was their approach. The language became more direct. The subject matter became more personal and the limits to what poets were willing to discuss evaporated. If a human being does it, chances are there’s a poet out there writing about it. The boundaries of sexuality, drug use, violence and other morality issues were the first and most obvious to fall, but the movement extends far beyond that.

Poets were writing about their role in society. They were writing about all of the things that were changing around them. The rise of commercialism, technology, social awareness and discontent were all subject matter for the postmodern era. In confessional poetry, all of this was related from the personal point of view. Problems weren’t presented as being out in the world at large, they were presented in the way that everyday people faced their problems.

The key to confessional poetry is an honest assessment of the poet’s life and experiences. Confessional poetry is written in the first person. While it can still be poetic and beautiful, it is often more direct and common in its language. It presents the poet’s point of view and relates strongly to the realities of the poet’s world. In many cases, no conclusions are drawn and no philosophy is discussed. Instead, the poet conveys their point by presenting life as they experience it. In other cases, the poet lays their point out directly, telling the reader exactly what they want them to think about things.

Today’s Poetry Assignment

Write a poem that discusses a real moment in your life without discussing its larger meaning or attempting to lead the reader to a conclusion.

Today’s Recommended Poet

Terrance Hayes poetry is both personal and sociological. It comes wrapped in pop culture references and discussion of the world around him. He often mixes very real images with surreal touches.

Poems

Books