Fic form
This is interesting: having thoughts on Avatar, I started to write. Yet I rarely finish fic, and my thoughts were disjointed.
I need a limit, I thought, on words I can use. Then I could finish. And I could link ideas: non-linear but joined. So I wrote drabbles, but amidst drabbling . . . haiku. Drabbles are okay, but I'd other things to say. I couldn't stick to the form.
I can vary it, I thought, using other forms. Sometimes poetry, other times: flash fiction forms. So I looked up kinds of prose. Well, as it turns out, prose doesn't really have form. Duh: form's poetry. The only kinds of prose forms seem to be types of drabbles. There's the fifty-five, also the 69er. They're just word limits. Nothing about the rhythm, shapesoundcadence of the thing.
So, my only choice in seeking limiting forms seemed to be poems. I thought I could look up types, modifying them for prose. But lots of poems have restrictions about rhyme: limericks and things. Sestinas seem too rigid, and sonnets are so overdone. More than anything, I needed poetic form that could be prose-like. Something without lots of rules, but is about shape and feel.
Well, it's Avatar, and I'd done the haiku fest. Why not Japan's forms? So I went online in search of Japanese poetry.
Lots of Japan's verse seem to be variations on a theme: haiku. Forms I found originate with renga and go from there. In particular, there's a form which combines prose with poems: haibun. “This is what I want!” I said. “Wish I'd heard of it before.”
Wikipedia says haibun and tanka prose are new in English-newly popular, at least. It's just recently caught on. The seventeeth c. was when old guys like Basho were writing haibun, but poetry mixed with prose is less common in the West. I guess so, I said, but this prose and poetry was something I'd done drabbling about Avatar. It seems a natural thing.
I'm still not so sure haibun is really for me. Those I've read don't suit-haiku and prose complement, but don't really integrate. The form I most want is some kind of way to play with the prose itself. Will that make it poetry? What defines prose, anyway?
For instance, this post. Basically, it's all haikai, repeating over. I've formatted it like prose and maybe bent some small rules. Is it poetry? I've been so busy counting, I cannot quite tell. Nor is it haibun, not from what I understand: first, there's no haiku. Well, at least none you can see-the haiku isn't set off. Also, there's the prose. Prose in haibun should be spare and image heavy. This? Meta heavy. So is this just prose? Wordsworth is meta heavy. Hey, who is to say?
Would stories written this way evoke what haiku evokes? Would it be choppy? Would it be strange-Or pointless? Maybe it could work. Experimenting, it seems, is the only way to go.
And then there's fanfic. You see this lots in fandom: form in fanfiction. I read and liked this. It has a specific form: word and response. I imagine fans building off such things, going on and on. There could be a comm: mass wiki poetry fic, disjointed but linked. Responses to each other, both dialogue and poems. Fans could name a form, comments build or are in kind, new things invented! For example, when I heard of 69s, I modified it. Each sentence was just three words-or a multiple of three. We could challenge each other to make such forms and use them in fic!
Some Japanese forms are for collaborations. We could use this too. Fans already build from fans, just as they do from canon. Fifty lines of Mai is an example of such. And works in progress: writers use comments to write. Kink memes, challenges, word fests. Fans challenge fans to write to specifications, or limit themselves. Maybe we're all just writing mass poetry together.
Sometimes I do think
The world is just one poem.
Written? . . . Or waiting?
This entry was originally posted to Dreamwidth. Read Comments | Reply