If you’re having trouble picking a subject, it can be helpful to pick someone close to you like a member of your family or a best friend.
Haiku are often inspired by a particularly poignant moment or experience. Effective haiku condense a lot of sentiment and information in very few words.
Some websites online can form a digital word cloud for you, if you’re having trouble doing it on your own. You can input text from some of your favorite correspondence into the word-cloud engine to see what words crop up frequently. [3] X Research source
If you want to write about why your sister is so courageous, for example, make a list of words and ideas around the theme of courage. So for your sister you might write down, “Joan of Arc,” “strength,” “facing her fears,” and “leap of faith. ”[4] X Research source
Don’t be too critical of yourself at this point in the process. Your ideas aren’t fully formed just yet. It won’t all sound like poetry yet! If you’re searching for some central point around which to focus your poem, look at all your sentences. Are they all about hiking together or playing at the beach? It can help to group similarly themed ideas together. There’s no need to count syllables yet. You will work on that later in the process.
For example, think about the sentiment behind your sentences. Behind, “your eyes are blue like a swimming pool,” you’re really trying to say that your recipient’s eyes remind you of water. A more poetic and succinct way to say that would be, “Your eyes, a vast sea. ” Use this technique to create three thematically related lines of poetry; don’t worry about the syllables just yet.
If you have trouble counting syllables, place your hand under your chin. Read a given line. Your mouth will generally drop with every syllable. So every time your mouth drops and hits your hand, count that as one syllable. It may be helpful to write the number of syllables you currently have in each line at the end of the line. If you need to trim words to get to the right syllables count, try cutting articles and adverbs, which can weigh down poetry. If you need to inflate the number of syllables, adding a descriptive adjective can help. [6] X Research source For example, “Your eyes, a vast sea,” could become “Your eyes, a vast turquoise sea. ” The adjective turquoise helps the line reach seven syllables and adds meaning. For example, “Swimming quickly is a joy,” can be cut down to five syllables easily by removing the adverb quickly, which is not adding much meaning.
If your haiku doesn’t accomplish your objective yet, don’t panic! Just go back to tinkering with your syllables. Perhaps you can swap out a word or two to make your message clearer. Haiku are short, so even changing one word can have a big impact on the final poem.
