There are so many ways to procrastinate! My brother sent me an internet post on Punography yesterday. I pulled out a few that might be related to reading or writing.
I'm reading a book about anti-gravity. I can't put it down.
Broken pencils are pointless.
What do you call a dinosaur with an extensive vocabulary?
A thesaurus
I love these, but I can’t let it keep me from writing, and being creative myself. I’ve been working on a Halloween poetry collection. I started it ages ago, and really want to get it to the place where I would be happy seeing my name on the book’s cover. That means that I’m happy with each and every poem in the book. Here’s my present day plan.
Plan: Have a theme that connects the poems in my book to each other.
Pulling it off: Identify my theme—does it work? Will readers ‘get’ it? Or do my poems seem random? How would I identify my theme on paper, in one or two sentences?
I look at the list of poems that I have so far and try to see how it will flow, from beginning to end. I want to make it start on Halloween, just before trick-or-treating begins, and end when it’s all over at the end of the night. I think I’ve got that, but I’ll be running it past my critique groups to see if they see the same way that I do.
Plan: Have a consistent tone in all of the poems in my collection.
Pulling it off: Re-read my collection, from beginning to end. Do the poems all have the same tone? Are they light or serious? I want them to be lively and fun—not too spooky, or dark.
After doing this I found that a few of my poems were longer, and seemed ‘older’, or not as much fun as the others. So I took those out. That meant that I would have to replace those with others! More work! But definitely worth the effort.
Plan: I want to have three more poems finished before sending this manuscript out again. (Yes, I did send it out a few times already, thinking it was ready. After the rejections, and with some feedback, I can see that I was wrong about that).
Pulling it off: I’m a list person. So I made lists. (I even made a list of my lists!)
List 1: I made a list of things related to Halloween, including characters and anything about trick-or-treating or spooky things. This is my Idea List.
List 2: I listed my finished poems, putting the character or topic of each poem along side of it. This way I know what I’ve already touched on, and can eliminate things from my first list.
I chose a topic for my new poem (using my lists) and thought about what kind of rhythm would work best for that topic. I get so many songs and poems running through my head when I’m doing this! I’ll be glad when I’m finished so I can sleep at night.
Doing the writing—this is the hardest part, of course, because I want the rhyme and rhythm to work so well that you won’t really think about it when reading the poem. So I make lists—of rhyming words, of words that mean the same thing but are more fun to say, of different ways to end my poem—I want the last line or two to have a ‘punch’ so that you’ll remember it.
So I have been busily writing Halloween poems, in January. Some are good, some not so good. The puns in Punography inspire me, because I love the play on words. I hope they made you smile—and inspired you, too! Now go and write!