Tag Archives: fluency

Restrospective

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I’ve had a bad few days struggling with time management, fluency and my internal editor. I am now just going to sit down and write. This is post 2,300 so I really should have got the hang of it by now.

All that time ago, I intended to advertise the work of Quercus Community and to educate the world about aspects of nature. Eight hundred thousand words later it looks like I ended up writing about poetry and Cup a Soup. that was not how I envisaged the blog developing. Nor was it how I imagined my life unfolding.

Later…

Well, I nearly sat down and wrote. What actually happened was that Julia rang up wanting a lift back from the laundrette, we went to lunch at KFC, dropped in at the garden centre and had a drive round.  I can’t quite remember, but I think thi is our first outing since the autumn. Unless you count going to work as an outing. Even my social life isn’t so bad that I need to consider going to work as an outing. Not quite.

While we were out I noted the varieties of tree and flower blooming. I’m a poet, I need to know these things. The crocuses are gone, the daffodils are in full flower and the primroses just beginning to show. We did see a good clump of something that looked a lot like purple crocuses, but which turned out to be some sort of dead nettle – probably ground ivy but I’m a bit patchy on identifying dead nettles. They are all edible, so it doesn’t really matter if you are just wanting something to sprinkle on a salad.

With that number of words I could have written eight books. That would be more impressive as an answer when asked what I wrote. “Eight books”, even if they are about Cup a Soup , is a much more impressive answer than “a blog”. And even “a blog” is a more impressive answer than “haibun”. At least people have heard of blogs.

We’ve just had tea and banana cake. We are trying to make the cake last.

There we go, it’s nonsense, but at least it’s fluent nonsense.

I’m now feeling the urge to write about Cup a Soup.

Why I Started Blogging

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 I started blogging for two reasons. One was that I thought Quercus Community needed a profile on Social Media. That reason has passed, as there is no group now, and I really should change the name. I did say I was going to do this a year ago but I am famous for my inertia.

The second was that I needed more practice writing. I’d become slack and lazy and unproductive. I’m still slack and lazy, but it has made me more productive. I can, as I found yesterday, knock out a thousand words in an hour. I didn’t mean to time it but I had about an hour to fill and I did two posts in that time (one still to be published) which came to 970 words. In my world that’s near enough a thousand.

The reason I wanted to write more was that I enjoy it. I had also looked at something called “content writing” and thought it offered a way of making money. Not a fortune, but enough to keep us fed. Unfortunately, when I had a serious look at it the sites offering employment they all seemed to be full of American students offering to write for next to nothing.

My plan of writing to keep us supplied with groceries collapsed. That sort of money is only enough to buy biscuits and, to be honest, it’s easier just to give up biscuits and write things I enjoy but don’t get paid for.

At the moment I’m going through a bit of a slump with the blog and failing miserably at my self-inflicted target of a post a day.

It’s partly to do with time, partly to do with inclination and partly to do with equipment. I still haven’t had the laptop repaired and the netbook isn’t very inspiring. In other words, I only have myself to blame.

And that’s it. Just 300 words in twenty minutes today, because there’s not much more to say. However, it is interesting to note, as with poetry writing, that the more you do, the more fluent you get.

I’m avoiding the word “better” as I’m not convinced my writing is better than it was – just that there is more of it.

Another 100 Day Challenge – Haiku

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It’s Day 100 of the Haiku Challenge.

I now have over 1,000 haiku of indeterminate quality. Some of them aren’t haiku, some are senyru. Some are more like fragments, or notes. And many of them are merely bad.

Having taken all that into consideration, was it worth it?

Undoubtedly. I’ve learned a lot from the experience, including that in any 100 day challenge you are going to come to hate what you are doing. Whether this holds true for my new challenge remains to be seen.

I first came up with the idea from reading this this post whilst browsing the net for haiku-related posts. I then moved on to reading this article, which is a lot more ambitious.

My “rules”, garnered from the article, were simple. Ten haiku a day for 100 days, avoiding too much censorship and writing extra to catch up if I couldn’t manage ten one day. As the article admitted that experienced writers were only getting one good haiku out of ten or twenty attempts I felt justified in taking a laid back attitude.

So, what did I learn?

Well, I became more fluent in my writing and found ideas came more easily.

I became addicted to writing and couldn’t rest if I didn’t write at least ten a day. Apart from the days I needed a rest, because there were several days where I hated haiku so badly that I couldn’t write one. That did happen a couple of times, but I soon got over it after a day off.

I also ran out of nature several times. Despite becoming more observant and making better notes as time went on, I found I was struggling with enough nature observations to keep myself going. You don’t see much nature when you are just driving through town to work and back, and magpies and bare branches are simply not enough to feed a heavy haiku habit.

Towards the end of the time I noticed I was writing three line poems with the rhythms and vocabulary of haiku.

That last point is quite important. I started with a lot of long words and details which aren’t really needed in haiku. A three syllable word in a haiku, remember, is three thirteenths of the syllables needed for a modern haiku (seventeen is now considered old-fashioned). Three thirteenths of a sonnet is near enough three lines, so you can see how condensed a haiku is, and why you can’t waste a single syllable.

That was probably the most important thing I learned.

Now, it’s time to take Number Two Son to work.

Over the next few weeks I will do some rewriting and may show you a few poems.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Haiku Challenge – Day 66

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I’m two thirds of the way through the challenge and it wouldn’t bother me if I never saw a haiku again.

I’m still plodding on, because I don’t want to give up on it, but it’s becoming a chore.

On the other hand, when I had to write thirty last night to catch up on the last few days I managed it in an hour, so my fluency has definitely improved. This is a good thing, despite the accompanying negativity.

And that’s my post for the day. I’m two thirds of the way through the challenge and it wouldn’t bother me if I never wrote another report on the challenge again.