A poem about a word....

Well I had a go at a poem, my first proper poem in a long time. It's hardly very serious or literary, but it was fun to write and, I hope, fun to read too. It's about the word 'comestible':

I would like to introduce you to a word,
It’s quite likely you have never heard.
You’ll know many words, silly and sensible,
But how about the word comestible?

It is sometimes an adjective, other times a noun
But it is hardly a word of great renown.
As an adjective it describes something edible
But as a noun, it is something that is eatable.

As a small child it fooled my teacher,
Ha ha I thought, that’ll teach her
When my creative story she had heard
And said “comestible, that is not a word!”

So if you are ever deserted by your muse,
In search of a delicious culinary word to use,
Why not try comestible if you’re in the mood
For tasty, nourishing, yummy food.

I put the story on writing.com yesterday and so so far I've had several comments, all positive. One person however said it was 'extremely cute'. Not sure how to take that, but will take it as a compliment!

A mini course on starting a poem...

BBC Get Writing Mini Course: How to Start a Poem

This course starts off very arty sounding, the type of poems it is talking about the ones that I don't want to write. It got better though and has given me some useful pointers:

Write what you are interested in - commen sense really.
Relax before writing a poem, don't obsess over the language but make it flow.

The writer of this course suggested that poetry was about three 'breaths' and the way they interact:

Logical breath - the breath you take at the end of each sentence
Emotional breath - The breath you take where you finish a verse. Each verse should leave you thinking, feeling some emotion. Each verse usually changes the focus.
Musical breath - when you finish a line. Either it ends on a good, musical rhythm or it doesn't. Good poems always do.

Often these co-incide, so you might have a musical breath, a logical breath and an emotional breath all at once. The simplest poems do this - ballads in particular often do.

A couple of suggested exercises include trying to come up with a poem based on a word and writing a poem based on the 'visual residue' left by a scene in a film or tv programme. Presumably this is not just the visual residue but emotional residue too. The final suggestion is write a poem based on a memory, strong impressions, feelings and fragments of memory from the past.

To sum up, the 'tutor' quoted Sylvia Plath who wrote that in contrast to a novelist, a poet must be "an expert packer of suitcases", i.e. they've got to fit a lot into a small space and make every word count.

I think I'll have a go...

WEBSITE: BBC Get Writing

While browsing the internet looking for an online beginners guide to poetry I found this website:

BBC Get Writing

Now I have come across this website before, a few years ago when it was a fully fledged online writing community with people posting their writing regularly, with hundreds of discussion threads at any one time. I wasn't really much more than a passing visitor, and always intended to come back one day and devote some regular time to it - as with so many other things however, it passed entirely out of mind. These days it's like a ghost town, maybe one of those trading outposts which sprung up in California during the gold rush but later abandoned when the gold ran dry. The analogy probably quite an apt one - a few years ago the BBC had a big online budget and were getting involved in many areas of online life, but these days the online budget has been cut and Get Writing was left mostly abandoned.

Having said all that, while the online community has moved elsewhere, there are still some good resources on the site. There's a good selection of articles and mini courses, divided into 'beginners', 'intermediate' and 'advanced'. Taking a look around, I'm tempted by 'How to Start a Poem', 'Rhythm, Rhyme and other Techniques', 'How to Start a Short Story' and 'The Art of Reviewing'. OK, so they all sound interesting. With my shortage of time in the run up to Christmas (Christmas shopping, house buying, going to Christmas markets in Holland and various other matters demanding my attention) I'm at the moment going to just dabble with a bit of poetry, being as I am under the possibly false impresson that it's quicker and not as time demanding as other writing forms. We'll see.

BOOK REVIEW: Split Second - David Baldacci

Essential Details
Genre: Crime/thriller
Setting: Present day USA, East Coast.
No. of pages: 600
Standalone (subsequent books with same main characters)

Synopsis
Secret Service agent Sean King is momentarily distracted, and a Presidential candidate dies. Years later, a different Secret Service agent, Michelle Maxwell, makes a mistake and another Presidential Candidate is kidnapped. On the edge of losing her job and career, Michelle seeks out Sean King, drawn by the similarities in their downfall. Together they investigate both cases and are drawn into a complex and dangerous situation…

What I Liked
Baldacci’s writing is good quality, and I like his style. He pays a lot of attention to detail, draws a good plot and has likeable characters. The opening third of the book is particularly good.

What I Didn’t Like
The final third of the book really went downhill in my opinion. There were four separate characters all working together like a committee, and when is a committee ever a good thing? After a masterfully plotted storyline the final third, and in particular the ending, was poor.

Plot
The build up of the plot was good. You really didn’t have much of a clue what was going on for a long time, there were two main plot strands and various sub-plots that I knew must all tie together, but couldn’t fathom out how.

Characters
The main character, Sean King, was quite well drawn. I was interested in what happened to him, and by the end of the book felt I knew quite a lot about him. I’d be happy to read another book with him as the main character. I didn’t feel any especially strong emotion or attachment towards the character however. The secondary character Michelle was also moderately well drawn, however the other characters were fairly two dimensional.


Language/Structure
The language was good, well written but easy and quick to read, with no swearing or bad language. Lots of short chapters quickened the pace of the book and made it easy to read.

Overall Impression
A fairly standard, run of the mill crime thriller. It started well, and had the potential to be really good, but the author let it slip in the latter stages. Of the three books of his I’ve read, this is certainly the worst.

Rating – 6/10

Poetry? Surely not!

I've never been one for poetry, I rarely find poems I really like but then I hardly ever read many. In high school I struggled through poetry lessons and didn't see the point in them. When I had to write a sonnet for an English assignment, my dad offered to help and ended up writing it. It ended up being published in a poetry anthology and performed at the annual school drama evening. I got book tokens for my poem being published, but didn't pass them on to my dad!

Anyway, my aversion to poetry largely continued after I left school. I occasionally came across poems I liked, but never wrote any. However reading and reviewing a few poems on writing.com has got me thinking about writing some myself. Two in particular set me on this line of thinking. One was a long poem and the history and legend of Saint George. It was an acrostic poem, using 'SAINT GEORGE PATRON SAINT OF ENGLAND' as its basis. For those of you that don't know, an acrostic poem is one where the first letter of each line of the poem spells out a word or phrase. So in this poem, the first line begins with the letter 'S', the second line with the letter 'A' etc. It wasn't so much the fact it was an acrostic poem which made me like it so much, but the fact that it told the story of a historical or mythological figure. I liked the fact that poems didn't need to be abstract, arty things but could tell a tale and teach the reader something.

The second poem I liked, was very different in style. It was short, with shorter lines and less verses. Also easier to read. It was about a word: its definition, usage, pronunciation and history. The word was ' Floccinaucinihilipilification' and the poem's title was 'Ode to a Word'. I loved the fact that the poem taught you something in such a simple but interesting and amusing way. So now I'm going to try my hand at a poem or two. Watch this space!

Article written and general update

Well I have now written an Article about my home town of Lancaster, a historic city in the north west of England. I've put it on writing.com (see link to my portfolio on the side if you want to read it) and had a few reviews and ratings. One person in particular gave a really good, detailed review. He rated it 3.5 out of 5, which I thought was fair, and suggested a number of areas for improvement. One of the main criticisms of it was that there was no unique twist, or even a clearly defined focus for my article. On the review's recommendation, I am going to re-write it and focus just on the Castle and the Priory, with a quick stop in the pub at the end! I am also going to try and write it for publication. I've got a couple of magazines in mind, so I will read them and try and fit my article in with their style. I need to do a fair bit of research in the local library on the history of the Castle and Priory too, so it may be a few weeks before it gets done.

In the meantime I'm working on a 100 word short story for a writing.com contest, the twist being you can't use the same word twice in the story, not even 'a' or 'the'. My wife's already had a go at this successfully, but it is really hard!

There are a few other contests that look interesting which I may enter, time permitting. However my next piece is going to be a short story I think. Now I haven't written one for a year or more, and there haven't been many I've been particularly happy with so I will have to see how it goes. I've got two Christmas stories to have a go at, but think I will have a go at a non-Christmas one first. It might end up being not much more than a warm up exercise, but it might turn into something yet.