Changing focus

My writing focus has been changing over the last few weeks. Rather than putting my energy into my blogs, I have found I have spent a lot of time writing poetry. These are rhyming narrative-type poems, typically about 600 words long. After sharing a couple I had written years ago, with the new writing group I am part of, I have got fresh inspiration to continue along this vein. The main inspiration comes from positive feedback, people actually liking what I have written. These, I have read aloud to the group. It might be a different story if people actually read them themselves, because whilst narrating, I can pause and lengthen lines when need be, however, the readers may find my metre jumps around a bit.

Years ago, I wrote a lot of poetry. When I was at school, this type of poem flowed naturally for me. I also wrote a lot of non-rhyming ones. I had a huge collection of poetry books by the contemporary poets of the time, which I loved. Then abruptly, the writing stopped. My poems and poetry books were lost amongst the shifts I made over the years.

I love writing, I always have, that’s why I have enjoyed writing my blogs when nothing else has been on the go. It keeps one’s hand in.  It was back in the mid-1990s when I tentatively started my hobby again, by paying for a writing course, covering the basics of writing articles that sell. I followed this up with my journalist training in 2001/2 followed by seven years working for newspapers. Ill-health forced that stoppage, but I kept my hand in by writing my two books, and most recently my children’s book.

Now I have an intention to write enough poems to put out a book of these. I will continue in this particular style for now. I need to research exactly how many poems or number of pages constitutes a book so that I can work towards that.

Writing these poems is actually quite difficult and takes a lot more time than a similar number of words in a blog, for example. With each poem, I get the skeleton down, working out what needs to be said in each verse. I don’t enjoy this part much, but I do the next stage, where I start fine-tuning each verse and the rhymes within these. Usually at the beginning, I want to abandon the poems because they seem pathetic, but by the time I am finished, I am generally happy with them.

Once I have a collection of these, I might start the freestyle ones, as I used to write. These are generally much deeper, for me anyway. It is a while since I wrote these, and I have toughened up, secured more of a shell around myself so I am less vulnerable and open than I once was – a side effect of life and its occurrences, I guess. It would be nice to give a voice to that same inner depth like I once did. We shall see.