When the ideas aren’t coming too fast
I had written several poems, as I wrote last time, throughout the course of a week; I was happy about how these villanelles turned out. But, as I started writing a different poem (also based on a Japanese tale), I got stuck. I couldn’t decide what form I wanted to do, I couldn’t really decide what it was about the tale that I wanted to respond to….the list goes on. So, I thought I’d put what I had written about away for a little while and come back to it. I have looked over it several times since then, but I still haven’t figured out where I want to go with that one. I decided that I’d try a few things to get over my writer’s block.
The tale that I was writing about was about a husband and wife who do not see each other for a long time, and when the husband finally comes home (after years of being gone in search of silk and work), he sees the ghost of his wife, still suffering from their separation. I think that getting started on writing poems for particular projects can be hard for a few reasons. You don’t just want to voice back what the story is about. You sometimes have to let the story sit with you a while. In my case, I realized that I needed to write to work through my writer’s block (sort of ironic or contradictory, I guess). So, I started writing down whatever came to my mind about the story…images, things that the characters might be thinking or doing. And while I didn’t finish the initial poem, I ended up with a new poem, which I decided to write in the form of a sonnet. It also helped me to read information about the surrounding ideas of the tales. For instance, this last poem I wrote included an image of a flower that blooms at night, and while I’ve seen such flowers, I looked up more information about them, and looking up this information led me to other possible images and words.
I will often get frustrated when the ideas or words don’t seem to be coming, but sometimes it means taking a day off from trying to write (or even looking at the poem that won’t seem to finish), or doing a quick writing exercise to just get some ideas down.