As you probably know, as part of my month-by-month goals for 2011, I signed up to Sage Cohen’s Poem A Day Challenge at her Path of Possibility site. I hoped I’d get back into the spirit of using “beautiful words” in my fiction writing, and generally start the year off with a bit of fun, some different kind of writing and something I could relatively easily do (quite why I thought writing a poem every day for 31 days would be relatively easy is a mystery to me, or perhaps only explained by New Year’s Eve champagne?).
In any case, I have to say that my experience with the Poem A Day Challenge exceeded my expectations by far. I really got heaps out of it, including:
- I definitely did get back my affinity for beautiful words. When you are writing a poem it seems incredibly important to pick exactly the right word. I certainly used a thesaurus a lot more often, or just stopped to think about words. I want to remember to do this for my regular fiction writing as well – why should the words be any less important just because there are more of them?
- I discovered all kinds of interesting themes that I would like to write more about. The highly varying prompts which Sage used meant I wrote on many different topics and a lot of them I could imagine expanding into at least short story form or incorporating them into a novel. I can also imagine using poetry writing in the future as a kind of brainstorming process for my fiction writing, to explore ideas a bit more thoroughly in a form that seems to give rise to all kinds of extra creativity.
- I remembered that writing as part of a group can be really rewarding. Although the format of the challenge meant that none of us had much time to provide feedback on each other’s work, even the short comments I received were very encouraging, and just the fact that I knew other people would be reading my poem (and possibly – although they probably weren’t – waiting to see that I actually wrote one every day) gave me both the motivation to do it and to make it half-decent.
- And I confirmed my suspicion that I can concentrate well for a month at a time on one thing – but probably not a whole year. Which means my 2011 plans might just make for my most successful writing year yet.
So, thanks heaps Sage, I really did get a lot out of this month! In case you’re inspired I just saw that she has scheduled the class again for April – it’s too cheap at $50 – so I highly recommend it for a creative kick-start – and you certainly don’t have to be a poet to join in, because I’m not, and I loved it. (And I don’t get paid anything to say this!).
If you’re still reading, well, as promised earlier this month, I will share a couple of the slightly-less-than-atrocious poems I wrote in response to some of the prompts.
Read the rest of this entry »
