Haiku

A valuable skill in fiction is compressing expressions to their fundamental parts. How can you say everything you need to say with as few words as possible?

In the pursuit of productivity (measured usually by word count), writers of prose fiction tend to create sprawling documents that must be pared down to the essentials.

What if you had fewer words to work with in the first place?

Poetry establishes constraints that are helpful for writers training to be more effective wordsmiths. When you have only ten or twenty words you can use, you tend to choose them carefully.

In this exercise, you will write haiku poems. Ostensibly, haiku is a Japanese form but the version you generally learn about in middle or high school is a watered-down version. Fortunately, it is suited to our purposes here.

Haiku in its simplest form consists of a three line poem with five syllables in the first line, seven syllables in the second, and five again in the third.

The woodpecker fell
And hit the ground with a thump.
Bad fumes from the dump.

The poem doesn't need to rhyme and usually it doesn't. Sometimes for a little extra challenge you can try for a rhyme, though.

Write two haiku using the words as a possible inspiration:

Yes, the words are randomly generated and might be very strange. Work with it.

Done?

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