A Sonnet

I have been very impressed by how you have wrestled and fought with iambic pentameter over the past couple of tasks. I think it is proving a little harder than some of you anticipated, but you are making real headway nonetheless. Iambic pentameter is the crucial building block, obviously - but so many of you have either cracked this now, or, if you haven't then you have ALMOST done so.

However, I am not convinced you are reading each other's attempts fully - and, even more importantly, each other's COMMENTS. It is from the moderators' comments and suggestions that you will learn the most - and they are making lots of extremely useful points every time. Have you tried out all their suggested ideas and strategies? Are you confident you are doing your best to learn from what they say? Please make the most of this valuable resource.

Best of all, however, some of you are managing to do so without sacrificing the power of your poetry itself. This is the real challenge: a synthesis of CONTENT (choice of language and what it is about) and FORM (rhyme, rhythm etc.). In fact, you can look at it mathematically:

powerful CONTENT + disciplined FORM = effective POETRY

Now for this week's task - and it's a DIFFICULT one. Your first, complete SONNET.

These are the rules of the English (or Shakespearean) SONNET:

1. It must be written in IAMBIC PENTAMETER (i.e. x5 dee-DUMs)
2. It will be 14 lines long, and consist of x3 quatrains (4 lines) and x1 final couplet (2 lines)
3. It will have a strict rhyme scheme (abab cdcd efef gg) - please see me if you are not completely clear what this means.

The challenge is putting all these things TOGETHER!

And what should your sonnet be about? Well, I know I'm a couple of weeks late, but what better topic than to do as Shakespeare did, and write about LOVE?

So, good luck! And please make sure your attempts are online by midnight next Sunday 13th March.

Here's my attempt at a 'Valentine's Day' sonnet. See if you can find the one iambic error:

I'm ten years old when first I fall in love
And Jennifer is my beloved's name.
An angel who has tumbled from above,
She kindles in my heart a burning flame.
And when she asks to be my Valentine,
I can't believe what I am being told.
She offers me her heart; I give her mine,
Together with a chain of fakest gold.
But later, when she gives my love the sack,
Repudiating every vain embrace,
I make it clear I want the trinket back
And, tearful, Jenny throws it in my face.
Misunderstood and unrequited too,
My love found none deserving until you.

Task 7

Only Sydney appears to have got close to mastering these tricky iambs, so I am going to wait before setting you your first sonnet, and use Task 7 as another exercise in iambic verse instead.

I would like you all to do the following things:

1. Read carefully EACH student's Task 6 attempt;
2. Read carefully BOTH comments on each student's Task 6 attempt;
3. Practise reworking EACH student's Task 6 attempt into something which is perfectly iambic.

ONLY when you have done all these things should you proceed to the main task, which is as follows...

Write a short poem, consisting of 8 lines, each in iambic pentameter, with a rhyming scheme of ababcdcd. Your topic should be emotion (it is up to you to choose which one). And PLEASE make sure you check and recheck it before posting, so that you make it is accurate as possible.

Some people find it easier to practise their iambic verse on MICROSOFT EXCEL. It might seem bizarre, but if you shade columns alternately (i.e. white/grey/white/grey etc.) and then make sure you only put one syllable in each column, you can manipulate your poetry so that only the stressed syllables fall in the grey boxes. Worth a try, perhaps?

Your Task 7 poem should be posted and live by midnight on Sunday 13th February. Good Luck!

In the meantime, here is my, somewhat rushed attempt...

Sadness

Forgive me if I cry; I do not mean

To make you sad; I tried to cauterise

The pain, to dry the tears, but you have seen

With how much force this brine assails my eyes.

Or how about I whimper, soundless, keep

It hidden? Undisturbed, you can pretend

I do not feel this pain and do not weep.

Such hurt I fear you cannot comprehend.

Keep smiling! :)

englishguru

Task 6: Iambic Meter

You all know what RHYME is - and it will be one of the first things you encountered when reading poetry as a young child. "Twinkle twinkle little BAT, How I wonder where you're AT" etc. However, as you are going to find, it is very difficult to use rhyme effectively when writing poems of your own. Too often, the quest to find a word that rhymes ends up changing the meaning of the poem altogether - like points on a railtrack switching the train to a totally different course. However, it is a challenge that is well worth pursuing - i.e. how to find a rhyme whilst not diverting the tracks of your meaning at the same time. And it is a challenge I am setting you this week too.

But, not one to keep things TOO simple, I am also setting you another challenge - and that is to do with METER. Meter is the term to describe the rhythm of a poem - and how that rhythm is created through the number and order of all the syllables in any one line. Those of you who listen to music will know how all music has a BEAT of some sort; some music has a strong and regular beat, other music has a less clear rhythm (and so would be very hard to dance to too!) This week, you are going to be writing poetry with a very regular beat. Here is how...

The simplest type of beat (or, as it is called in poetry, FOOT) is one that goes 'dee-dum' - i.e. made up of TWO syllables, where the SECOND syllable is stressed. This type of foot is called an IAMB; and this type of meter is called IAMBIC. Here is an example of iambic verse:

I cannot write iambic verse.
My poem goes from bad to worse.

See how each line is written in TWO-SYLLABLE beats, with the stress (or emphasis) on the second in each pair. Try reading it with a hand clap on each stressed syllable:

i CANnot WRITE iAMbic VERSE
my POem GOES from BAD to WORSE.

This is simple, iambic meter.

Notice also how many feet (or beats) there are in each line. Four. We call these lines tetrameters:

• 5 feet = pentameter
• 4 feet = tetrameter
• 3 feet = trimeter etc.

Now look (or rather LISTEN) to how easily the regular rhythm can be broken. What if I had written 'can't' instead of 'cannot'; or 'poetry' instead of 'poem'? This would have totally changed and disrupted the rhythm of each line:

I can't write iambic verse
My poetry goes from bad to worse.

In the first line, there is one syllable MISSING:

I can't [***] write iambic verse.

Whereas, in the second line, there is one syllable too MANY.

My poeTRY goes from bad to worse.

Right. Now for your challenge. NEXT week we are going to try to produce some SONNETS. But, in preparation, this week we are just going to play with rhyme and meter.

You have TWO poems to write.

Poem One

I would like you to write a poem which:

• uses ONLY iambic meter;
• is 10 lines long;
• begins with two 5-feet lines (i.e. pentameters)
• then has two 4-feet lines, two 3-feet lines, two 2-feet lines and, finally, two 1-foot lines.
• rhymes each pair of lines.

Your poem should be about a place (city/country) that you know particularly well.

To help you, here is a quick example:

United Kingdom

Inept, disorganised and bad at sport,
Unable to forget the wars it fought,
Too often marred by skies of grey,
And trapped by debts it cannot pay,
My motherland is tired
And rather uninspired;
Acutely sick
With Dave and Nick
At large,
In charge.

See what you can do, and remember:

• Lines 1-2 = rhyming, iambic pentameters
• Lines 3-4 = rhyming, iambic tetrameters
• Lines 5-6 = rhyming, iambic trimeters
• Lines 7-8 = rhyming, iambic dimeters
• Lines 9-10 = rhyming, iambic monometers.

All on a powerful place of your choice.

Poem Two

Once you have completed your first poem, I would like from you all:

1. a four-line poem (otherwise known as a quatrain)
2. with an a-b-a-b rhyme scheme (i.e. Lines 1 and 3 rhyme, as do lines 2 and 4);
3. written in iambic (i.e. dee-DUM) pentameters (i.e. 5 feet/beats/stressed);
4. about an ANIMAL of your choice.

Here is my attempt...

Orang Utan

A flash of rusty fur flies through the air;
A branch breaks off and crashes to the ground;
I squint to catch a glimpse of orange hair:
This fiery beast refuses to be found.

See what you can come up with, and remember:

• quatrain
• a-b-a-b
• 5 beats
• dee-DUM
  

Have fun, and good luck!

BOTH TASKS BY MIDNIGHT ON MONDAY 24TH JANUARY PLEASE.

Task 5: Opening Lines

From Task 6 onwards, we will work through a number of different genres, with each task challenging you to embrace another genre but to do so with panache, flair and originality. Every submission should be between 200-300 words (any shorter and you will not be able to develop your skills to the full; any longer and not only will it become harder to moderate, but you will also be in danger of waffling).

But first for Task 5...

I shall email you all a .zip file which contains 10 OPENINGS to different novels. Unzip the file (let me know if you need guidance on how to do this) and read the openings carefully several times. Then your Task 5 consists of two parts:

1. Decide which opening you like the most and regard to be the most effective. Once you have done so, in one paragraph (approx 100 words) explain/justify precisely why you have made that choice. This part of the task is VERY important, as it sets the perameters for the second part.
   
2. Now you must write your own OPENING to a novel. This should consist of 200-300 words which could begin your own piece of fiction. Your moderators, as well as discussing with you your choice for Part (1), will assess your own opening according to a) how well it meets your own criteria identified in Part (1); and b) how effective an opening it is according to their own opinion. As usual, they will comment on the main strengths and areas for development in your piece of writing.

The deadline for your submissions (which must be LABELLED, and must also have a TITLE of your own choosing) is midnight on Thursday 9th December.

Good luck! I am really looking forward to reading your submissions, as I know the moderators will be too.

________________________________________

N.B. ADDITIONAL, 'OPTIONAL' TASK:

If you want an extra challenge, you may also email me the following list (do NOT post it on the blog):

• Identify each of the novels from which each of the 10 openings is taken, together with their respective authors, in order of how effective you think the opening is (from the best down to the worst).

Task 4

Firstly - and most importantly - welcome to the blog to our new WORDVOODOO MODERATORS. All of our Danube bloggers should now have TWO moderators, dedicated to commenting specifically on your attempts each fortnight, and giving you suggestions for improvement.

Please feel free to respond to their comments, and enter into a dialogue about your work too if you can: this will be a fantastic way to improve your writing even further.

Now for Task 4. This is the last PROSE task for the time being. Next time we begin the difficult journey towards writing effective, skilled poetry. But, for now, one more exercise in PROSE FICTION.

For this week's task, I would like you to experiment with a cyclical narrative structure (i.e. one which starts precisely the same as it ends.)

Below is a (very) short story I wrote for a G10 class a couple of years ago. As you can see, one of the rules I set myself was that I was going to begin and end with the same few sentences; as for how I tried to achieve this (effectively and originally), well that was the challenge.

Your task is to write a short narrative which does exactly that. It must begin and end in the same (or ALMOST the same) way. And to make it easier, I am going to give you your opening (and therefore your conclusion too). The rest is up to you...

The clouds hovered like evil angels, something malevolent in the red from the rising sun. I'm no sailor, but the adage holds firm: red sky at morning...

And to help you some more, here is the piece I wrote myself:

I’m not waving goodbye to anybody. There isn’t any point. They aren’t interested in me really anyway; they are here for themselves.

Why did she have to go? How could she leave us behind? What did she think I was going to do without her? That’s all that is going through their heads; not a thought for me.

They never really liked me, to tell the truth. Nothing violent, just a cold, simmering antipathy which trickled between us whenever I was around. They never said as much. Oh, no, that would have been too honest. Why tell someone what you feel when you can insinuate as much through a look, a sigh, a casual avoidance? Their bodies said, “Please steer clear of us. There’s something about you that’s not normal. ‘Not normal’ scares us. So leave us alone.”

Of course, when I told anyone about this, they thought I was mad. Paranoia; that’s what my teachers said. “That girl, she thinks the whole world is against her, when no one’s done anything!” “I’m tired of telling her this.” “Why can’t she just get on top of life, rather than almost asking life to get on top of her?” They grew tired of the girl who they heard crying wolf, even though, all the time, the wolf’s teeth were gnawing away at her soul.

Look: there are the girls themselves. One of them is even crying. Real tears chasing down her icy cheeks. I don’t feel sorry for her. I know you’ll think me just as cold, but I don’t. You didn’t see her with her heel on my forehead, or my torn hair in her claws. It wasn’t her crying then, I can assure you.

The pipes were stronger than I thought. I’d studied them for weeks, but still a part of me wasn’t sure. They will snap. The changing rooms will flood. The teachers will come running. And paranoia will be scooped up again. What on earth do you think you were playing at? What were you thinking? You could have killed yourself!

There was no flood, though. Metal proved more reliable than flesh and bone; and stronger too. It was my neck that snapped. A clean break. Quick too. I swear I could hear it, but maybe I’m wrong.

So I’m not waving goodbye to anybody. There isn’t any point. They aren’t interested in me really anyway; they are here for themselves.

Any questions, or if you are unsure in ANY way about how to excel in this task, just email me and I will explain.

In the meantime, I shall EXPECT you all to be demonstrating that you are learning from all the comments being posted on your work. After all, if you continue doing exactly the same things, despite the feedback you are being given, the process becomes pointless. Above all, please take some risks - with language, grammar, syntax (sentence structure) and narrative. Do things differently! Try out new techniques! Write in different ways to how you are used to doing! (And have some fun!)

Good luck!

Your deadline, as promised, is midnight on Tuesday 23rd November.

englishguru

Task 3 Exemplar

Stroke Victim

Still and unstirred, like a silent oak, the rings of time carved into the bark of her face, she watched nothing. A miniature seed of spittle swayed imperceptibly in the corner of her mouth, the ghost of a smile lingering from some joke not even she could remember; and, if you listened carefully, you could hear the sibilant scrape of her breath. Her eyes held a conviction of wonder, a cloudy cataract of joy at who knows what, when or where.

Her hands rested, statuesque, on her knees, the thumb of each hand tapping the seconds out with metronomic precision, a rhythm hypnotic in its persistency. I walked over, edging closer, terrified I would wake her from what seemed to be such a perfect state – alive and yet enraptured, totally detached from this ugly world. I touched her cheek, but she didn’t register. I held her hand, gently – and I was disturbed by the brief hiatus in her digital beats, as if I had stopped her music.

I stepped back; regarded her again. And then I saw it. A briny diamond creeping down her left cheek, like a distant cry from a child buried deep within this ageing casket. Sadness distilled, too potent to contemplate. I knelt down, dropped my head on her lap and my own tears dripped on to her fingers, which did not stop tapping.

Task 3: MORE Music to Words

Read this VERY carefully. This task is SIMILAR to Task 2 but it is NOT the SAME.

With Task 2, you had to use a piece of music to inspire a narrative - a self-contained extract from a story. Atmosphere, plot, tension etc. were all important, and all had to be extracted from the music itself.

Task 3 is purely DESCRIPTION. Whilst what you write could appear in a much longer piece of fiction, it will work on its own as a single description - of a place, a (fictional) person or an object.

As with the best writing recently, I am looking for description which:

• makes creative but careful use of sonic devices such as rhyme and alliteration
• embraces the potential of figurative language (similes and metaphors) and personification to bring an image to life
• avoids cliche and pursues originality - of lexis (vocabulary) and syntax (sentence structure)
• is structured carefully and consistently, with a clear opening and a deliberate finish

I will post an exemplar shortly.

As before, please listen carefully (and several times) to ALL 20 extracts - before you select the one which most powerfully makes you imagine the person/place/thing you will describe. Please tell me if you would like me to email them to you again. And make sure you choose a DIFFERENT one from last time.

The deadline for this task midnight on Tuesday 9th November.

Good luck!

Task 2 Exemplar

I know some of struggled with Task 2; so I thought I would share with you my own attempt.

I chose Track 2, and put it on my headphones really loud on a continuous loop with my eyes closed until I found myself imagining a scenario, a location, the germ of a story. The music took me somewhere, and I found the story unravelling in my imagination, and all I then had to do was write it down.

I had considered Track 9, whilst listening to which I could see a father and daughter in small sailing boat, gliding wordlessly across an azure sheet of water. Then I considered Track 8, and could picture a teenage girl, surrounded by rough, dangerous-looking boys, under a bridge on the canalside, as she takes a tablet foisted on her by one of them. But, in the end, it had to be Track 2 for me...

The ward was white – everything bleach bloodless: the air a pallid sheet, the tiny, plastic beds like cocoons, and the nurses floating around like so many ghosts. He hadn’t been able to go in at first: all he had heard outside were the screams Maggie had made before the blood fled her body, like rats from a sunken ship, screams which played a violent loop in his mind, almost accusatory in their anger, the panic and the pain demanding some relief. But he had been able to provide none. A better man might have managed to rescue her – or so he told himself – but the truth was far more final.

He could not recall the silence before the screams; and then he had suddenly remembered how Maggie had used to talk about hiccups or mouth ulcers or itching sunburn: she used to say that, when any of these things struck, it quickly became impossible to remember what life was like without them, even moments before. Briefly riding the wave of this trivial memory, he had pushed the doors and drifted into the ward.

And now, stood here statuesque in his stillness, he could no longer hear the screams. They had been wiped away like the blood which had caked the baby’s body. All he could hear was the gentle, fragile gasp of the respirator, as the baby’s chest shivered each exigent breath. But, stark amid this sea of white, a smudge of colour was appearing on her cheeks, and he knew, beyond contradiction or danger, that she was going to be all right. Together, in perfect harmony, they both exhaled.

Music to Words

Congratulations again on your great attempts at Task 1. A totally different approach to prose fiction this week.

Sometimes, when it is difficult to find the MUSE, a writer needs to seek a specific source of inspiration in order to unblock the creative process and get the ideas flowing again. That inspiration might come from something visual - a photo, a painting, a piece of architecture, for example; it might come from a memory - accidentally triggered or deliberately recalled; it might even come from some other sort of sensual trigger - a smell, perhaps, or even a particular taste.

But, this week, I would like us to explore how we can use music to provide the inspiration for a piece of creative writing. I would like you to follow these instructions very carefully indeed:

1. Find somewhere quiet and, if possible, dark (or, at the very least, close or cover your eyes)
2. Listen to each of the pieces I have emailed you all today in turn ONCE
3. Now listen to each of them a second time, but with your eyes open and pen and paper in your hands
4. While you listen, you should try to describe, in rough notes, what you 'see' in your mind when you hear it. Do you picture a particular place? Is something happening? Who exactly is involved?
5. Now choose which of the pieces of music provided you with the most vivid and interesting pictures. Which one gave you material which would be easiest to turn into the beginning of a short story?
6. Once you have selected your piece of music, listen to it several times more, making notes all the time until you have lots of material with which to work.
7. Now use those notes to write the first few paragraphs of a short story, inspired by the music you have chosen.

As with any creative writing task, I am looking for:

• how ORIGINAL it is (so avoid cliche, melodrama or, indeed, anything derivative)
• how ENGAGING it is (from the outset and throughout, using tension and hooks to keep us enthralled)
• how ADEPT it is (i.e. how cleverly and deliberately and diversely does it use the tools of language and punctuation of which you need to become master - from unusual syntax to fresh metaphor)
• how CREATIVE it is (e.g. you do not have to take the piece of music LITERALLY, just let it set fire to your imagination, or act as a catalyst to the chemicals of the right side of your brain)
  

You should write between 250-400 words.

Good luck!

The deadline is midnight on Sunday 24th October.

Roxanne

Roxanne

A mannequin stares out my front window, her arm raised indeterminately towards the street. This evening, she wears a dress – a thigh-shy sequined shift which turns her torso into a crimson constellation. Passers-by all see stars; even the traffic lights go red.

I had always dreamed of a room with a view – until she moved in. Now I want for nothing. When I touch her, she does not reciprocate; but nor does she complain.

My friends do not understand; they linger outside, like customers, when they leave. I close the curtains and then we are alone. Love is simpler like this.

Welcome to Wordvoodoo!

Dan Rhodes is one Britain's most innovative young writers (although, given that he was born two years before me, I guess I am flattering myself to call him "young"!). Anyway, you can read more about him on contemporary writers here, and his own website can be found here.

And you can read some other interesting articles about and interviews with him here:

• 2003 interview with 3:AM Magazine
• 2007 interview with 3:AM Magazine
• Interview with Stet Press
• Interview with Spike Magazine

Between 1997-8, whilst spending his days fruit-picking on a farm, he wrote a collection of short stories called Anthropology.

The bold and interesting thing about this collection was not that it consisted of lots of short stories - many writers have done the same. The difference was that each and every one of these stories was written in precisely 101 words.

[You can read some of the stories here; and you can even view a series of short films inspired by some of them here.]

Many POETIC forms make incredible demands of the poet, demanding they write something PROFOUND, DURABLE, IMAGINATIVE, BRAVE and EXPERIMENTAL whilst also strictly obeying a strict set of rules - whether it be a HAIKU, a SONNET or whatever (and we will be attempting some of these on this blog in the coming weeks and months).

But it is more rare for a PROSE writer to work within such confines - and Rhodes' Anthropology tales are, therefore, a unique experiment in balancing the restrictions of form with the potential of imaginative language and content.

Done well, therefore, these 101-word stories should be able to achieve all that a longer story could do, but with greater impact and power due to its distilled, concentrated form: kind of like boiling the essence of a good story down into its purest form.

What makes a good story? In short...

• A tight structure, with a strategic start and end and use of tension in between.
• A reliance on metaphor over literality (i.e. show not tell).
• A rejection of cliche and overused vocabulary in favour of something bolder and braver.
  
• An engagement and 'hooking' of the reader into the story's world.

And to achieve these three things in 101 words is one hell of a feat! In fact, more than in any other piece of writing, the writer needs to consider each and every ONE of these 101 words with interminable care and discretion: any wastage or poor choice is a missed opportunity.

As you have probably guessed by now, your first task on this blog is to write your own story in 101 words.

To be honest, I do not mind what you choose as your title - so be creative and original. But your THEME should be something along the lines of RELATIONSHIPS.

What I want to see is an ambitious, meticulous approach to narrative distillation: a perfect story which makes no compromises due to its brevity, and achieves all I have mentioned above regardless.

A lazy blogger could rush this task off in a few minutes. But, in truth, I believe that, done properly, this task is actually very DIFFICULT and TIME-CONSUMING.

The deadline for your first task is MIDNIGHT on Sunday 10th October.

So good luck! And I will post my own attempt shortly...

P.S. NONE of you should be making any CARELESS spelling/punctuation/grammar mistakes - so make sure you don't post anything which hasn't been checked thoroughly first...

Good luck!

englishguru