What I Learned Writing a Haiku Every Day for 100 Days

Courtney Symons
The Open Notebook
Published in
9 min readJul 22, 2015

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WTF’s a haiku?

I’ve heard some variation of this question many times over the past couple of months. You likely know that a haiku is a form of poetry; you might even know that it’s composed of three lines — the first containing five syllables, the second with seven, and the third with five.

But even I didn’t know that it’s considered a “mood poem” and that similes and metaphors aren’t technically allowed, according to some sources. Well, I messed that part up, but we’ll get to that.

The reason why my brain has been so haiku happy is because I took part in the 100 Day Project, spearheared by Elle Luna and The Great Discontent. She challenged anyone and everyone to do something, anything, every day for 100 days straight. My friend Cassie was the one who planted the seed — she planned to do 100 days of lettering (and you should take a look at her awesome results here). I’m not a designer, however. And I like to doodle, but I wasn’t sure I’d make time for it every day for 100 days.

I do pride myself on being a writer though. When I was a community and then a business journalist, I wrote every day. And…

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Courtney Symons
The Open Notebook

Courtney Symons is Editor in Chief at Shopify. She lives in a log cabin in the woods of Ottawa, Canada. Writer, poet, practicing haikuist.