I’m kind of really really struggling with these sonnets and the haibums and I do not fully understand why? Not much of an intro today because i’ve got writing in my brain and mhm mhm but anyways. I started the sonnets, like, the day we got them (kind of?) I knew that I wanted a sonnet about like love language and wtv so I could already have it for my coffee house in a few weeks but then I’m faced with questions like “what is my love language?” or “how do I feel most loved?” which, obviously, will not be ever put Into the sonnet but.. like? And of course for a free-verse poem I could do that anyways, but I digress. Not the point of this. What I’m struggling with is the sonnets. I’ve tried to write them in the past, for either school assignments or the requirement to get into MSA or just on my own time, and I’ve only made ONE ever that I actually liked. I don’t like admitting that I feel like I’m a bad writer, or that im struggling with something, or those on and off days where I feel like I don’t even want to write anymore because I have a writers block or I feel like I’m not good enough, but structured poems REALLY just grab that and dangle it infront of my face and go “ha ha!!! You cant write me you cant write me!!” and if I could punch a sonnet I swear on the entire junior literary class that I would.
I do understand a little bit why sonnets are so hard for me. I look at, in the case of a shaksperian sonnet, the 7 syllable lines and the specific rhyme scheme and I do actually hate it. It stresses me out and I can’t be fully creative that way. When people who aren’t used to rhyming try to rhyme they end up, in most of what I’ve seen, forcing it. They have this original concept at the beginning of the poem, like the first two lines, but then comes the past where you have to rhyme and you cant use the word that you want so you have to find and substitute it for another, and trying to match that same rhyme scheme you end up putting another random string of words together that doesn’t make sense at all, all up until you lose the original plot of the poem all together and its just a mess. If I wasn’t writing this on my laptop then I would definitely plug the sonnet I used to apply to MSA, which is a perfect example of this in action, and is the specific sonnet that ruined all sonnets for me. I recently did an analysis of it and it actually made me want to hit things. Very violent. Like, The Romans level violent over these sonnets. Slash Jay.
I try to combat this with like, ignoring the ends of lines.. if that makes sense. Like, i try to carry the sentence over to the next line so I can SAY as much as I want and not feel like what I’m writing is blocky and closed off and a mess. I’ve been working on it, by ignoring the rules of sonnets (a little bit) and then cutting it up to fit sonnet style… I literally do not know. Being told that I have a certain amount of time, or a certain set of this a I have to do a certain thing is the quickest way to put me into a writers block. And I HATE being told ‘just write!!” and that’s all I’m given. It doesn’t help. My writers block comes from not having stimulating enough ideas and then not knowing the words to say this how I want to. If I “just write” it ends up looking like “Amy walked to the store. She needed milk and eggs for her cake.” And suddenly I’m turned into those writing problems that they test 1st graders with. No thank you.
Sometimes, to help with writers block, I pick an OC and I go “okay. What does this person like?” For my OC Halo, he does pottery and photography and a little bit a gardening. “How do these things connect?” Halo could, like, I don’t know, be walking out by a stream. He’s taking pictures by this creek and he finds a whole bunch of clay. He grabs all of the clay and goes home and makes a vase out of it for the flowers he gardens. There! I have a full little short story of an entire character and it’s just so cutesy and he’s getting his alone time. Then I like, double or triple or quadruple this to contain my full cast of characters (2 of which are a 2in1) and then, boom. Short story. Except I haven’t yet realized how to turn this into like an actual story with actual, real plot yet. Usually it’s just dilly dallying. Whatever. That’s the end of this blog about me complaining about not knowing how to write, little bit of venting, then trying to answer my own questions. This is really different from that I normally do, and I’m kind of super not happy with this but I’m so stressed it’s all I can manage. Do you guys have any actual writing tips? Or any ways to get out of writers block that I somehow haven’t stumbled across in my years on pinterest? Please, guys, I am DESPERATE.
