writing – The Bardic Project

I was recently in a Facebook Messenger chat where we were talking about different poetic verse forms, and someone started making a list of verse forms, and one of them kept getting misspelled due to autocorrect. In complaining about the autocorrect, they tried to say “bloody autocorrect”, but the autocorrect made it this: blood autocorrect. Then someone else asked if they read that form correctly: blood autocorrect? So I wrote this little poem:

Autocorrect
Written in blood
Written in bodily fluid flood
Hamsters in wheel
Ever they spin
Spinning the words that they find within
Weasels in mind
Such introspect
Making this verse of autocorrect
In blood
In blood

I looked at the structure, and realized that it could actually make a coherent verse-form. So I pieced out the rules of the form:

11 lines consisting of three triplets of 4-4-9 syllables, followed by a two-line repeat of variable length. The last word in the last triplet must be the same as the first word in the poem. The last two lines must echo the rhyme of the first triplet – preferably the same word(s), so may be between 1-4 syllables.

ABB
CDD
EAA
B
B

Once I figured out the rules, I decided to write a couple more poems to see if this form worked for them. It does. It’s actually a fun form to work with, and definitely not the easiest. It’s challenging coming up with words that work well with the repeating bits and can still make sense. I’m glad I did it, because I will be playing more with this form, and hope others do as well. So here are a couple of other poems in the Blood Autocorrect form:

Perilous form
Heed not its call
Lest it eat us up and doom us all
Forged in the twist
Word accident
Now by its teeth our minds shall be rent
We know this verse
Is not the norm
Speak not my words in perilous form
It calls
It calls

Clouds in the sky
Spiral and swirl
Tornado gale will dance and will twirl
Lightning will flash
Thunder will roar
And from the heavens rain and hail pour
Welcome the storm
Swift the winds fly
Dancing beneath the clouds in the sky
And swirl
And swirl

Two-ish years ago I re-started my Bardic Project blog – this thing you’re reading right now. And then I put it down and left it for a while. And here I am again with another reboot. It’s not that I don’t have anything to share with you. I do. It’s that my brain is filled with too many things, and I started writing and then had to do other things, and then….

And then. There’s always another ‘and then’. It takes discipline to write a blog, and I admit to playing hooky. I will ask your pardon, though, because a lot of the hooky was to write songs. But still, I want to apologize, because I really want to share being a bard / singer-songwriter with you.

So let’s talk about discipline. Discipline is what I have enough of to keep writing songs, but apparently what I thus far have lacked enough of when it comes to blog writing.

You’ll probably see and hear this over and over again, but there are a few keys to writing. The first one is to write. Don’t worry about it being “good”, and don’t even worry too much about it being part of your main project. Just writing every day helps. Write on paper, write in your head, or even record it spoken if you need to. Just make sure to create. Make time for that every day. That’s the discipline.

Writing every day helps keep out the mental cobwebs. It helps order your thoughts and generate ideas. It can help you come up with new ideas.

And really, don’t worry about whether what you write is good or not. Speaking from experience, most of what you write is going to be crap. You’ll take it out in a few months and stare at it like it’s some alien fungus that oozed out of your mind. Don’t worry about that. It’s normal. But still, don’t burn it or throw it out. You might find a good idea or a useful idea hidden in there.

So write. Write with abandon. Write with emotion. You can do it!

Hopefully so can I.

Tag: writing

Autocorrect

Reboot of the Reboot. Discipline.