More about haiku

Well, I thought it might be interesting to reduce the quantity of tags I've got on this blog that only refer to one post. I'm not sure I'll finish the project or it will produce anything worthwhile, but it should give me plenty of things to write about. I decided to start this project with the topic of haiku.

For those of you who follow my creative writing blog (currently under the URL i-wrote-this.tumblr.com) I've been writing a haiku pretty much every day for a few months now. I've covered lots of strange topics usually supplied by my followers. I've written haiku about mac and cheese, broccoli, and orchids among a long list of oddities. It's a fun process and it isn't as easy as it sounds.

For those of you who don't know about haiku, here's the deal. Haiku were developed in Japan and they are a traditional poetic form in that country. They are short and sweet and the structure is pretty simple. First the haiku is only 3 lines long. There is no need to rhyme when you write. In fact, rhyming my be looked down on with this form. Next we worry about the length of each line. It all comes down to syllable. Line one has 5 syllables, line two has 7 syllables, and line three also has 5 syllables for a total of 17 syllables.

That's all there is to it, but it's not as easy as it sounds. You can't break a word with a dash to make your syllable count work. You're going to have to play around with word choice and word order to make it work out. I suppose you want some examples to help you on your way. Well, I've got some space so we can make that happen. Here are a few samples from my creative writing blog.

Lillies
on the water, in
a vase, growing in a field-
they are wonderful.

Smiles
A frown turned upside
down makes the world a brighter
place to those in need.

Travelling
Balloons in the sky,
planes, trains and automobiles,
let’s go on a trip.

Oh haiku

So, I have spread myself out quite a bit when it comes to blogging and writing. It all started when I was realizing I wasn't going to have a job in the fall after all my time at college and saw an article about a girl who took an ugly dress every day for a year and turn it into something she would wear. I'd also seen lots of other blogs like that and thought it would be fun to give something like that a try. I picked writing. I knew I couldn't turn out something worth reading every day, but opted for a short story, poem or play each week. I've had some success with it, but that was before I started this opinion blog which takes up some of my time too.

(This is a quick interruption for a shameless plug: http://storypoemplay-a-week.tumblr.com/ Here you will find lots of fun stuff including my series of poems based on Doctor Who, one for each Doctor. I'm currently working on #4)

Well today I had the brilliant idea to try out some Doctor Who haiku. What's a haiku you ask? Well, it's a traditional Japanese form of poetry that is very simple to understand, but hard to master. A haiku only has 3 line and just 17 syllables. The first line gets 5, the second 7 and the last 5. It can be very tricky to make a haiku work. More importantly, it is hard to produce a haiku that says something worth the effort.

Several years ago, I started a project to make a haiku every day for a year. By the time I got to the middle of February, I was out of ideas, and my haiku weren't worth anything. Then I looked back at the other haiku I'd written, and realized it was time to give up on that project. My first Doctor Who haiku is just a way to get started. Hopefully I will be able to develop some better ones as I go. It is a form I really enjoy, but I still need some work to get better at them.

And what about you?
Is there a haiku within
your soul looking out?