Fic form

[lettered]

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?

Comments

[fulselden]

Wow! I am honoured: that you enjoyed my Mai piece; that it helped this post. It’s so suggestive about what it means to write online. I guess the net is really a return of sorts to linked-up writing; the world of Renga and other chain-link forms.

A thought: visually, the internet is full of constriction, structure. Everything in boxes: perhaps one reason why it lends itself to play with form?

And there’s hypertext, receding, linking on through, clicking back and forth. Which can be paralysing – so big a playing field.

So structure, limits, concision, all useful tools when writing online. When access to information is this easy, shaping it is so important. Experimenting is perhaps what fan culture does best, as a whole?

Man, this is harder than it looks, though I do enjoy the rhythm. This all makes me feel we live in interesting times: oh internet!

[lettered]

Still no computer, so it's hard to interact, formulate replies. (I wrote the post on an old laptop that cannot connect.)

But I want to say that I'm so glad I met you! Okay, more later.

[fulselden]

Thank you! (and argh, tech): fic is new territory I’m exploring now; it’s good to see people thinking on where it might lead.

[stultiloquentia]

Tankas! You may have noticed I cheated on your white_lotus haiku post, sneaking in a couple of those.

This is about as far from Japan as it's possible to get, but I bet you'd get a kick out of Old English forms. They're what springs to mind when I think, "Halfway between poetry and prose." Or what about blank verse, like quinara's Spikeid?

Here's a collaborative thing that would be a hoot to knock around (though moreso if we were all in the same time zone): a "tenson" is a wonderful kind of poem that works the same way as passing notes back and forth in class. Medieval French troubadour dude writes a stanza (usually 6-8 lines), sends it to his girlfriend, she writes a response, and they keep adding until they've hashed out an argument to their satisfaction. It's very flirtatious, and often very snarky.

Hey, have you read Ursula K. Le Guin's essay on language patterns in Tolkien? She went hunting for poetry disguised as prose—did extensive syllable/beat counts—expecting to find swathes of it, consistent patterns, because his prose feels so darn poetic. She found...nothing, with the brief exception of Tom Bombadil. At least in terms of rhythm and rhyme. What she did find—I love this so much—was a book perfectly suited to reading out loud. Tolkien's sentences flow effortlessly off the tongue; there's always a breath exactly when you need one. Tolkien, of course, was a scholar of oral traditions, so this was not exactly coincidental.

She also found different kinds of patterns more related to storytelling than syllable-herding: alternations between light and dark imagery, from scene to scene, and, on a larger scale, a perfectly consistent danger/rest flip-flop, both of which give the novel a feeling of temporal movement, as well as keeping the reader engaged, but not exhausted.

I feel like you managed something like that—control without the white knuckles—in "Blood Types".

Oh, crap; it's 5:30; I have a potluck to get to. I want to come back and think about other ways, similar to Tolkien's, to impose limitations on prose that aren't related to rhythm. It's a great question, and one I'd benefit from, too. I do best with strict limits myself, as you may have noticed from the fact that I've written more damned sestinas than any other type of poem.

[fulselden]

Wow, that Le Guin essay is fantastic: the danger/rest flip-flop is absolutely my favourite thing about Tolkien (it's even there in his Father Christmas Letters!), and she articulates it perfectly.

[seraphcelene]

My brain is dingy and tired. I wish that it were shiny again.

IOW, I will re-read and post appropriately later. Possibly after I've recovered from only getting three hours of sleep last night. Although, with my schedule that may not happen until sometime next month. Maybe.