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.

[Cross-posted from Dreamwidth by way of a backup http://heleninwales.dreamwidth.org/68598.html. If you want to leave a comment, please use whichever site you find most convenient. Comments so far: .]

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