Being sick sucks. Writing sometimes feels pretty good. · 10:45am Aug 10th, 2014
Smart people will lie in bed and rest when sick. It helps them recover faster and not feel like shit for days at a time. Me, not being a very smart person, start writing little drabbles because I'm bored.
I'm not trying to toot my own horn here, but I wanted to share this one with you people, since it's one I'm very happy with (and because it made me forget about being sick for a few precious moments)
Dreams.
Beware my little pony, of the ghosts that slip through the open window at night.
The spectres of desire, pleasure, and delight.
Among many things they will make promises to you.
Promises of wealth, and riches, and your hearts desires, too.
Beware my little pony, of their laughter, their touch, and their smiles.
And do not fall for their wicked wiles.
Be aware my little pony, of the dark mistress of dreams.
Who isn’t nearly as kind as she seems.
She will promise to make all of your dreams come true.
But will not mention that nightmares are dreams, too.
I hope you enjoyed it, and if not... well at least it made me feel a little better when I wrote it. If you did like it, check out 'In Celebration of a Hundred where I have more stories of similar length.
This is obviously a bit of poetry, but it doesn't scan very well. There's a lot of excess words in there which throw off the metrical character of the poetry when I read it out loud. While I do understand that it is a drabble (and, ergo, exactly one hundred words), as a poem it doesn't flow quite right.
This is why poetry is hard to write; the real problem isn't getting the rhyming scheme right, but getting the meter to flow. And the trouble with rhyme schemes is that they really make you want to hear a consistent meter; non-rhyming poetry can be looser (though it depends on the nature of the poem there as well; some non-rhyming poetry has very strict meter).
I think there's a decent enough poem in there, which could be brought out, but it would require cutting a bunch of words and reworking a few lines.
Also, the final "Be aware" really doesn't work right. Repeating "beware" three times is more effective, I think.
I hope you feel better soon!
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I doubt I'll ever be any good a poetry. I lack any basic understanding about how they work other than the rhyming, but I make do with what I have. If it wasn't for the fact that this is going into a story compilation centered around stories of a hundred words, I might have considered cutting some words but I'm happy with it as is.
In closing, thanks.
I think I'll behave like a smart person and lie down for now.
2358203
Poetry, fundamentally, is about rhythm or flow. There are many set forms of poetry with established rhythms which just "sound good", but it is possible to go off the beaten track and set up your own rhythm, it is just much harder to do so and not have it sound terrible. If you're really crazy, you can go the modernist poetry route, where you do weird things and somehow get it to flow, which can sometimes result in something great, but usually results in something truly dire which the only merciful thing to do is to take it out behind the shed and shoot it.
Personally, I think poetry is ultimately about sounding "pretty", but that can vary wildly. The Conqueror Worm, for instance, has a very regular rhyming scheme, but the line lengths vary considerably; some are as short as six syllables, while others are as long as nine, and yet, somehow, the whole thing works and flows very beautifully if you read it out loud. Ozymandias, on the other hand, is written in iambic pentameter, and has a very scattered rhyming scheme which nonetheless works Stopping by Woods On A Snowy Evening has a very regular AABA rhyming scheme and is written in iambic tetrameter, though the final verse is instead AAAA and employs repetition (and thus "cheats") to make the final two lines rhyme... and make it pretty much one of the most famous poems ever.
The trouble is that while it is easy to read good poems, it is much harder to actually construct them; while you can follow rhyming schemes and regular meters, those alone are not enough to make a great poem. There's a sort of flow to them which goes beyond the meter and comes down to the individual words and, thus, sounds chosen. Indeed, it has been noted that songs like Elanor Rigby and Lose Yourself are where all the good poets have gone these days - they don't write poems anymore, they write songs. Lose Yourself has a truly ridiculous rhyming scheme, which is why it sounds so rhythmic.
I'm not really sure how to learn how to write poems well, seeing as I'm not a very good poet myself. I have the highest rated poetry collection on FIMFiction, but I don't delude myself into thinking I'm not a terrible hack, as, let's face it, I wrote a bunch of silly poems about rocks and had them read in Maud Pie's voice. I mean, some of them rhyme ground with ground. How profound! Though there are a couple poems in there which actually scan not entirely horribly. How that happened I will never know.
I can tell when a poem is dire (see also: pretty much every poem I've ever written) and when a poem is good, but I have no idea how to build one. Any moments of actual good poetry from me are the result of chance and happenstance, happy accidents which just come together without any real conscious understanding on my part. I can construct a metered poem with a regular rhyme scheme, but they end up pretty soulless most of the time.
I liked that! I thought it was clever, and particularly liked the last line.
Being sick DOES suck. Get well soon!