Here’s my first haiku. Well okay, it’s really my second because I learned how to write them at school. But I will count it as my first for this particular learning process.
Life is fickle
A small moment so fleeting
Never truly there
If you’ve been following my journey of writing so far, you’ll know that I don’t simply want to write fiction vs. non-fiction. I also want to experiment with different types of content.
I want to experiment with non-fictional pieces such as listicles, articles, essays, research papers, presentations, social media posts and reports. And I want to work on fictional pieces such as book excerpts, short stories, poems, and more. I want to improve my writing by being able to use any type of style. I believe that knowing more about different forms of writing will allow me to tap into them to tighten up other forms.
I liked writing this haiku because it took a little bit of time to work out which words would best fit with the rules. But also because I wanted those words to have meaning. I always found it difficult to write poetry as a child at school. I never truly understood the meaning behind it. I never really immersed myself in it.
As an adult, I never even picked up any poetry. I used to read Edgar Alan Poe when I was a teenager. I read it because I thought it was sophisticated to know his work. It wasn’t because I was trying to understand the meaning behind it, or because I even liked it.
But now that I’ve begun my writing journey, I’m finding different forms of content much more fascinating. Likely because of what I said above. Different forms of writing can influence each other and make your overall writing style stronger.
Even as I am sitting here, writing down my thoughts about poetry and writing in general, I’m considering how to tighten things up. I’m very conscious of the long sentences I’ve created. I’m aware of the over-explaining. And again it makes me wonder about things I learned at school.
We were always taught to explain everything because the reader couldn’t see. The reader couldn’t understand the thoughts in your mind. But there is a fine line to be walked between explaining and over-explaining. And I believe I need to work on pulling my content back from over-explaining and pushing it into clarity.
What I like most about this process so far is how much thought I’m starting to put into editing my content. I said it in a previous post, I never used to put any thought into that part of the process. But now? I read a piece of content multiple times before hitting that publish button. It’s never perfect, but I hope it’s getting better.
-Yvie
