From PROBLEM to POEM in 7 steps
the Why, Where, When, What, Who, How & Wow of writing poetry
Ai Ni and Ronaldo made this book to help poor people in Haiti, to build a school and teach them the art of a happy life.
A warning upfront from the editor:...
[Setting = Time + Place + Conditions, for instance, the slums of 18th century London, today's street market in a Nigerian village, or the Arena in the future Hunger Games.]
Where to start?
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1. Choose the most comfortable place you can imagine.
I produce my best writing, floating in the pool, with a drink in one hand and a snack in the other, eyes closed, sunshine, birds singing, no worries. But I also write excellent lines while I'm travelling, washing the dishes or walking the dog.
2. Work with the best tools you can imagine.
Buy a fine notebook and a great pen. Install a Notes app on your smartphone that invites to work. Use a speech-to-text tool to grab ideas. Reserve a directory for your documents, on your computer or in the cloud. Work with a beautiful folder to organise your paperwork.
Visit a good car mechanic and admire how clean his workplace is, with a space on the wall for every tool. The man is an efficient professional, organised to work with pleasure and keep his clients happy. Being creative is the opposite of being sloppy.
3. Any time is a great time to write.
Writing is fun. You want your reserved weekly writing hour, but it's also important to make notes and work out an idea at the moment it pops up. Those notes fuel your planned writing moment. They avoid the silence of staring at blank pages that scream to be filled...
The setting is the best place you can imagine to make your characters and plot shine. Your poem is a film and you're the scriptwriter, the cast selector, the producer, the director, the sound engineer, the light architect, the background builder, the fashion designer, the banker who finances the entire project, and every actor on the credits.
