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What is iambic pentameter?

Welcome to the first lesson in my live blog of Stephen Fry’s, The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within. How does one live blog a book, you ask? — Well good question!  The Ode Less Travelled happens to be more textbook than easy reading book and comes divided into lessons and exercises — so I’ll share a summary of the lesson and my resulting attempts at the exercises. I welcome your feedback on my practice in the comments!

The first lesson in The Ode Less Travelled has to do with meter in poetry and introduces the iamb and it’s classic form, iambic pentameter.

What is an iamb?

Simply put, an iamb is a pair of syllables that sound like “da dum“.

In poetry, such a unit is called a “foot”, and it can be thought of as akin to a measure in music — the basic repeated unit of rhythm in the verse:

In music we have: and one and two and three and four

And in poetry it becomes: da dum da dum da dum da dum

So that’s the iamb: a simple metrical unit (or foot) that goes “da dum“.

Introducing iambic pentameter

What about iambic pentameter? We’ll we’ve met the iamb and pentameter means just what it sounds like — “penta” being five and “meter” being measure. So a pentameter is merely a measure of five, and in this case we measure five iambs:

da dum da dum da dum da dum da dum

It’s a classic metrical line in English poetry, used by everyone from Chaucer to Shakespeare, to Byron and beyond.

Here’s an example from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night:

If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall

That strain again! it had a dying fall

And another, from Milton’s Paradise Lost:

Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the World, and all our woe

Brought death into the World, and all our woe

Got it? Good.

Let’s move on to the exercise

Stephen Fry gives a great number of rules for this exercise, the most important of which I shall summarize in brief:

  1. Write 20 lines of iambic pentameter
  2. Write single lines and pairs of lines
  3. Do not use rhyme (I failed at this — oops!)
  4. Do not polish or strive for any effect beyond the metrical
  5. Use a variety of world lengths
  6. Write in contemporary English

Here are the lines I came up with:

I want to go, to where I do not know.

My mind was shattered there like broken glass.

I ran away and in my running lay
A longing need, a desperate escape.

It truly was a staggering of snow
I stayed at home and watched it, blow by blow

I yearn to go to bed and restlessly
to sleep, I am so tired I might weep.

Now wish me well; I shall return, I swear.

I tried to light a merry blaze, a fire.

My roommates are so noisy late at night
I cannot sleep in peace without a fight.

I wish to think alone, not fast or slow.

The door it creaks on hinges now so old.

The table is of fine and oaken wood.

I ate an egg for breakfast, overdone.

The day is young and I long to run and play
the way that children did back in my day.

What do you think? Catch any places my meter slipped?

Let me know in the comments. And feel free to try your hand at iambic pentameter, too!

Disclaimer: This post contains Amazon affiliate links. I make a (very) small referral commission from purchases made using my links. This does not affect your price.

How I find time to write

How I find time to writeDo you struggle to find time to write? I know I do. One of my resolutions for the New Year was “to write until I finally feel like a ‘real’ writer” — so with that goal set for 2015, I’ve been taking a hard look at how I spend my time.

Because the fact that I had to make this a goal means that I clearly haven’t been focusing enough on finding time to write.

Plus, it’s not just writing, is it? It’s everything. It seems like everywhere you look these days there’s someone with a time problem. You don’t even have to throw a stone anymore to find someone whinging on about all the things they’d do if only they had the time…. Our national time crisis is so bad the Economist bothered to publish an article about it.

So in the face of such time-scarcity, what’s a writer to do? The bad news is that sometimes desperate times call for drastic measures. The good news is that you probably already have more time than you think you do.

Here are seven strategies I use to find time to write:

Hint: These strategies won’t just help you find time to write! They’re relevant for anything project you’ve been struggling to find the time for.

1. Get up early. 

This is a habit I’ve only just started it this past week, but so far it’s going great and I’m actually really enjoying it — I haven’t been up this early since college and I’d forgotten how quiet the world is before sunrise. Getting up early is a bold move and one I’ve been pondering for at least a year, but it wasn’t until my new resolution got me focused and I stumbled across this highly motivating blog post that I finally decided the time had come. As of this week my alarm goes off at 5 am, and I’m writing by 5:30 am. This gives me an hour of distraction-free writing time before I have to get up and go about my day. It’s early days yet, but so far the results have been remarkable.

2. Find the time when you’re at your best. 

Sometimes you can’t increase quantity but you can increase quality — if you can’t find more time in your schedule, is there a way you can rearrange things to take advantage of your most creative time? For me, getting up at 5 am does this. I’m always exhausted when I get home from work and don’t have much creative mojo left in me. If you’re a night owl, maybe staying up late to write works best for you. Maybe your best hours are right after lunch. Find whatever works for you and rock it!

3. Lose the distractions.

It’s taken me just about two years to win this battle (bad habits die hard!), but I’m pretty much there these days. Distraction means different things to different people — for me the worst offenders were my Netflix subscription, a handful of TV shows I’d been watching for years, a rampant blog addiction fed by Feedly, and a bad habit of getting sucked down the black hole of Google. These days I’ve cancelled my Netflix subscription, I don’t watch a single TV show, and I’ve massively pruned back the number of blogs I subscribe to (via RSS or email) . The goal here is to keep the focus on quality, not quantity. 

Also, if you’re struggling to wean yourself off of distractions, do NOT keep them open in tabs in your browser. If you’re done with Facebook and it’s time to write, close it down. I also think disabling your wi-fi before turning your computer off for the night would work great for early morning writers (so far I haven’t needed to, but I’ll start if I have to).

4. Streamline anything and everything.

Aka, your slow cooker is your best friend. Cooking is something I like to do, but it can also be a huge time-sink. Between menu planning, grocery shopping, and food prep, cooking for the week ahead can pretty much kill an entire day of my weekend. This strategy is about finding ways to spend less time on the things you need to get done, without sacrificing the quality of the result, and the slow cooker is my best weapon — an easy way to make a week’s worth of nutritious meals, literally while I sleep.

5. Kill your social life.

I wish I jested — but I’m actually serious. Or at least I’m mostly serious. As writer Dani Shapiro so astutely points out life is the stuff of art, just as art is the stuff of life and so you can’t really have an art without a life. But these days there’s a lot of opportunities to waste your time in the company of people, and speaking personally, I’ve found that in my life there’s simply not a lot of room for both. Again, my best recommendation is to choose quality over quantity. Do the people you spend time with energize and nourish you or do you leave their presence feeling drained?

6. Leverage your commute (if you can).

This is my least favorite option and I rarely practice it. The reality is that I spend 10 hours a week on a bus and which is a lot of hours I could be using for writing. Unfortunately the reality is also that I get so self-conscious writing on the bus that I pretty much can’t string words together into meaningful sentences. The only way I’ve found to make it work is on my phone (the screen is too tiny for me to read — let alone the person sitting next to me!) — but writing on one’s phone, while possible (I’ve managed at least 2 pages/hour in times of desperation) is generally incredibly slow and frustrating. If you can write with someone sitting next to you and have the time to do so, then I wish you godspeed. Personally, I’ll stick to the company of my Kindle.

7. Take your writing on vacation.

This is an option I’m planning to try out this year, but which I haven’t done yet. It seems to me like planning a writing retreat for yourself would be a fun (and budget-friendly!) way to vacation. Whether that’s as part of a formal writer’s retreat, a rented cabin in the woods, or an AirBnB flat in the city of your choosing — I think it sounds like a pretty fantastic way to spend a week’s vacation!

That’s what I’ve got for now — If you have any other ideas, feel free to share them in the comments!

I’d love to know: How do you make time for the things you love?

Some thoughts on why I write

“I don’t think the right words exist already in your head, any more than the characters do. They exist somewhere else…” — Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

There’s an idea I’ve been playing with for a while now, ever since I first wrote this post on how meditation and writing might inform one another. Its an idea about where the words come from when we sit down and write our best work. It’s an idea that’s been coming up for me over and over again, both in my reading and in my writing practice, as each day I sit down and confront the blank page. It’s an answer to the question of why writers write.

What if our best writing comes from Wordlessness?

In her book Finding Your Way in a Wild New World, Martha Beck defines Wordlessness to be “a core aspect of your true nature. It connects your consciousness with the deep peace and presence that is the essential you.”

It is my growing belief that it is from Wordlessness that the very best writing comes. That it is only when we let go of rational thought and feel our way into our characters that the magic happens. That it is only when we pause and make space for  the language to flow through us rather than trying to marshal the words from some limited place within us that we manage to write things that are so true they manage to surprise us.

It is for those moments of crystalline presence that I find myself returning to the pen, returning to the empty page. It is for those moments of clarity and breathless grace that I keep seeking — reaching for the edges of something that seems to be nearly infinite.

Because it is in those moments of stillness that I return once more to myself, shedding the weight of worlds and the worries of the day. It is in those moments that I pick up the pen and write.

To quote Anne Lamott once more:

“This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small bordered worlds. When this happens everything feels more spacious.”

How does this goal impact what we write?

It’s a question I’ve been grappling with — especially as I’ve turned my attention more fully from poetry to stories in recent weeks.

For me, poetry is easy — it’s painting with words and it doesn’t have to have a why (although, admittedly, it often does). To my mind poetry is a bit like a literary attempt at flying — exhilarating and terrifying and over too soon — it leaves you feeling breathless and wonderful.

But stories are different, stories have to do more than dazzle the reader with a moment of brilliance. Stories have to connect and compel and propel us forward across pages and pages of words — they have to grab the reader by the hand and pull them forward until the reader laughs and cries and yields and feels giddy with the thrill of it.

It’s a thing that’s not easily done and something I’ve been forced to confront as I’ve begun to work toward what it means to write a really good story.

Which means that though I’ve turned my attention to stories — I find I’m still struggling a bit with the why.

Now it’s your turn! Why do you write? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!

 

Disclaimer: This post contains Amazon affiliate links. I make a (very) small referral commission from purchases made using my links. This does not affect your price.

A poem for beginnings

Welcome to 2015! I’ve been sheltered away in my dreaming cave for the past few days, thinking about what I want my 2015 to hold. And, naturally, I want the coming year to hold many things, some of them more probable than others, but most of all I want 2015 to hold time and space for writing. And, of course, to get to share that writing with you. 🙂

Here’s my wish for you (and me!) in the new year

 

MAY WE

 

In honor of this wish, I’ve written a poem. Happy (somewhat belated) New Year, everyone!

 

A poem for beginnings

I begin.

I begin with a breath, with a cough, with a scream.

I begin cold and naked and shivering, thrust into a future I could never have dreamed of.

—

As a child I began to babble, to crawl, to stand.

As a child I first lay and then sat and then danced on my tippy toes, held securely in my father’s hands.

As a child I dared to stand alone and I crowed with achievement.

As a child I stood and then fell and I wailed to have failed so unexpectedly.

I grew taller and I hit the ground harder whenever I first leapt and then fell.

I collected small failures in the shape of bumps and bruises from where my growing edges had knocked against door jambs and chair backs and counter corners.

I collected larger failures in the shape of cracked teeth and sprained ankles and near-misses with cars.

As a child I was small and fragile and I didn’t always understand that life could be dangerous.

But I knew that falling was a necessary part of standing and that a few bumps and bruises were survivable.

As a child I knew how to cry and wipe my tears and stand back up again.

—

As a teenager I learned a different kind of lesson.

A lesson about not-crying and not-falling and not-trying.

A lesson about grades and how sometimes just trying isn’t good enough.

A lesson about the importance of being right instead of being brave.

I learned that doing it differently is dangerous and that to be myself was both risky and dangerous.

I learned that different was often lonely and my heart ached with the weight of that realization, of that emptiness.

I learned that most of the time people look without seeing and that when people looked at me they saw not-me but rather my list of achievements, of accomplishments, of activities.

I learned to let these things define me, until I became not-me, until I became them-instead.

And so I buried that little girl with her daring and her dreams and her failing and I learned to do what other people expected.

I learned to be bland. I learned to be boring.

I learned to be invisible.

—

And so I’ve come to here, to this moment, with a blank page before me and a brand new beginning and the only thing I know is that I’ve never been more scared of falling.

I’ve never been more scared of failing.

I’ve never been more scared of becoming, once more, that little girl.

The one who dared to dream of the impossible

The one who wasn’t afraid to fall down, cry, and still keep on trying.

 

What are your dreams for 2015? Let me know in the comments below!

December 2014 Book Reviews

We’re a few days into January 2015 already — and I’m having a hard time believing it! Welcome to the new year when everyone fumbles dates for months and sometimes that pesky “2014” creeps in even as late as June or July. I hope you had a wonderful holiday season and are geared up and ready to tackle a brand new year.

Here are December’s book reviews. Once again it’s a smaller month than usual (although I’m part-way through several books) so the page count comes to 1232.

Disclaimer: This post contains Amazon affiliate links. I make a (very) small referral commission from purchases made using my links. This does not affect your price.

 

The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

As a scientist, I’m leery of speaking on topics religious, but I kind of think I’m on to something writing-related that’s potentially fascinating…

Months ago, I wrote this blog post on how meditation might inform one’s writing practice. And then I didn’t ever follow up on that — but I’ve been pondering it in the wings ever since and I really think there’s something to it. Something that has to do with how to connect with your very best writing, your own most powerful poetry. In light of this tantalizing realization I’ve been doing some reading on meditation and enlightenment.

The basic thesis of Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment is that the way to enlightenment is through harnessing the power of Being in the Now. It’s not a revolutionary thesis — that one should focus on the present, not worry about bad things until they actually happen, or allow painful remembrances to taint the enjoyment of present bounty. It all sounds like rather common sense.

And then Tolle takes things a step further. The state of complete presence in the Now (Being — his word for God), is sought to dissolve attachment to the unalterable past, to the unavoidable future, and to the egoic consciousness itself (that thinking “me” voice that lives inside your head).

I’m not going to tell to you read this book — do if it tantalizes you, don’t if it doesn’t. But I think Tolle’s state of Being, is perhaps not so different from what happens on the really great writing days(just on a different scale). Call it what you will — the Power of Art, perhaps?

 

In Paradise by Peter Matthiessen

This might be the most interesting book I’ve read this year.  In Paradise: A Novel by Peter Matthiessen is a short novel and a quiet one. It’s the story of Clements Olin an American academic (of Polish extraction) who attends a meditation retreat at Auschwitz, a gathering of souls from around the world “to bear witness” — to what the assembled group is there to bear witness to, Clements Olin is not so sure.

The gathering of this disparate group of witness-bearers is itself witnessed from the perspective of Olin, a man remarkable perhaps only in his unremarkableness. And yet as Olin comes to terms with the history of the place and the ways in which it penetrates his own personal history, he cannot remain unchanged.

One part history, two parts poetry, and one part mysticism — this is a bittersweet book that I might just return to again some day.

 

The Desire Map by Danielle Laporte

My pick for reading in preparation for the new year was The Desire Map: A Guide to Creating Goals with Soul by Danielle Laporte. Along the line’s of some of Martha Beck’s advice on setting goals, Danielle Laporte’s position is that instead of thinking about what we want to achieve, we should first concentrate on how we want to feel. By first getting really clear on what she calls the “core desired feelings” (the way you in particular most want to feel), this allows us to focus on creating intentions which will create these core desired feelings.

In theory this approach circumvents common problems with goal setting:

  • The mid-goal meltdown. By setting feeling-driven intentions and working toward our goals in a way that honors our core desired feelings we try to avoid the problem of quitting when the goal-seeking going gets tough.
  • The post-goal let down. By clarifying core desired feelings first we try to eliminate the problem of setting goals that don’t turn out to be everything you thought they would be.

As someone who’s done a lot of New Year’s resolutions in the past and actually achieved a grand total of — er — none of them, I’m hoping that by setting “goals with soul” in 2015 I might actually have a hope of making just a few of my dreams come true.

Let me know in the comments below — what are your dreams for 2015?