Writing Activities: 1 | 2 | 3 | Poetry LinksAbout Drawing

• Repeat lines, as in Dirty Dog Boogie, putting in lots of expression when you read them aloud:
  

  Don’t take them,
  don’t take them,
  DON’T take them... to the... laundromat.

  Or repeat, getting louder or softer,

  Always keep a bit of boogie going in your head,
  always keep a bit of boogie going in your head....
  always keep a bit of boogie going in your head....
• Find sounds that are really hard to say together and write a tangled-up tongue twister.
• Read a lot. Read what you like. This is another way of having new experiences.
• Splash, screech and crackle with the pleasures of onomatopoeia:

  plop splash bang boom pop pop pop
  quack squeak tweet moo meow
  clang whirr hiss purr buzzzzzz

  Other words too — sleeeeeeeepy, gloomy,
  fidgetfidgetfidgeting, flipflop
  dangerous, chi-chi-chi-chi-chilly

  And when you say the the words — sliiiiiimy... crisp — do so with the sounds that make the meanings obvious. Varying your voice is one of the easiest and most delightful ways of having fun with words.
• Read the good stuff. Reading Robert Service aloud, for example, is a great intro to rhythm and rhyme, story in verse:

  There are strange things done
  in the midnight sun
  By the men who moil for gold;
  The Arctic trails have their secret tales
  That would make your blood run cold;
  The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
  But the queerest they ever did see
  Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
  I cremated Sam McGee.

  from “The Cremation of Sam McGee” by Robert Service

  Look up Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” too.
• Grammar problems? This is a site I use often: webster.comment.edu/grammar/index2.htm

GOOD RHYMING...

• sounds natural, as if it’s normal talking written down with just a bit of a twist, wordplay, or a story
• has lots of energy (like kids)
• is fun to read more than once
• doesn’t have clunkers in rhythm, doesn’t have icky rhymes
• ends before it becomes too long

Writing Activities: 1 | 2 | 3 | Poetry LinksAbout Drawing

• Move the words around. Lines in poems don’t have to sound exactly like regular sentences. If you have a word which just doesn’t rhyme well, put it somewhere else in the line besides at the end.
  Example:
  Suppose your poem has a line in it
  We’ll go to the zoo on Wednesday...
  you could change it to
  Next Wednesday when we’re at the zoo...
  Of course, that changes the rhythm, but them's the breaks.
• Be willing to revise, fix, polish and shine your poem. Don’t get annoyed by it. The “first draft” isn’t supposed to be perfect yet, it hasn’t cooked enough. All writers go back over their work and calibrate their writing again and again. It’s the same as practicing throws in basketball, doing it over and over again. Except you don’t need a basketball.
• Keep an Idea Envelope, or Box, or Notebook — that’s where you can pop any notes, stories, lyrics or ideas you come up with. (If you don’t write ideas down, they can disappear in a flash.) Don’t use such a fancy notebook that you’re uncomfortable being messy in it.
• Use a thesaurus. This is a book with synonyms. I have a thesaurus program on my computer, so if I want other words that mean “grumpy,” for instance, I look it up and get annoyed… fuming… indignant… perturbed… aggravated… bugged… upset… and teed-off — and that’s only some of them! My favorite here is perturbed, it sounds like something Sylvester the cat would say if he was thoroughly annoyed.
• Notice how the end of one word slides smoothly into the start of the following one, or doesn’t. This means saying it over and over again. Try not to walk down the street talking to yourself, though. Here are is an example, a word connection that’s awkward to say and wouldn’t work well in a poem:

  ask Frank
  thought that
  Leaskdale

  Say it again, can you feel how it sticks?
  I’ll think of more examples to add later.