• Mood: hopeful

Is the urge to write slowly returning?

An LJ friend just posted some different poetry forms relating to an exercise she plans to set her students. One of the forms was a haiku and it encouraged me to attempt one of my own on the same topic, namely "smoking".

The smoker

hunched in a doorway
breathing smoke at passers-by
white ash falling

And yes, I know that the last line is only 4 syllables, but when I was on a haiku email mailing list, it was generally accepted that 5, 7, 5 is a maximum, not a precise target. Having said that, some people carried it to extreme and posted haiku that went something like:

frog
pond
splash

And everyone praised them to the skies, but in my view it only meant something to the writer! :)

But I am intrigued that during my attempts to provide moments of enchantment and now prompted by seeing someone else's haiku, I felt moved to write. Albeit something very small, but I think it's the first signs that the writing circuits that I apparently burnt out doing too much critiquing as a creative writing tutor are beginning to come online again. Just in time for NaNoWriMo. Not that I'll attempt a full NaNo, nor even a half NaNo, but I might make my target, "Write a bit of fiction" during November.

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