06-25-2017, 04:38 AM
Over the years I've seen/ heard many people excusing their bad word choices or stilted grammar by saying that "the form doesn't allow for anything else".
1. You chose the form in the first place. Nobody is forcing you to use it.
2. There are around 170,000 official words in English. This is growing all the time and of course, there are innumerable proper nouns, vernacular terms, portmanteaux and just plain made-up words. If you can't fill 14 lines (that's just 140 syllables of iambic pentameter) then either you need to expand your vocabulary or you need to stop categorising words as "poetic" and "not poetic".
3. If you can't find a word to rhyme, choose a different word to rhyme with. Poets do this all the time. It might be a little frustrating when you thought you had the perfect line and need to change it, but it's much better than destroying it altogether by rhyming it with something that makes zero sense.
4. For most of the common forms, there are exercises in the Poetry Practice forum. You may post within the already existing threads for feedback on your technique and adherence to form.
5. If you genuinely want to write with a certain form, then take people's criticism and work with it. If you don't, just stop posting that form in the workshops because after a while, it's basically spam.
1. You chose the form in the first place. Nobody is forcing you to use it.
2. There are around 170,000 official words in English. This is growing all the time and of course, there are innumerable proper nouns, vernacular terms, portmanteaux and just plain made-up words. If you can't fill 14 lines (that's just 140 syllables of iambic pentameter) then either you need to expand your vocabulary or you need to stop categorising words as "poetic" and "not poetic".
3. If you can't find a word to rhyme, choose a different word to rhyme with. Poets do this all the time. It might be a little frustrating when you thought you had the perfect line and need to change it, but it's much better than destroying it altogether by rhyming it with something that makes zero sense.
4. For most of the common forms, there are exercises in the Poetry Practice forum. You may post within the already existing threads for feedback on your technique and adherence to form.
5. If you genuinely want to write with a certain form, then take people's criticism and work with it. If you don't, just stop posting that form in the workshops because after a while, it's basically spam.
It could be worse