Writing a Children’s Poem: Getting Started (Poetry Seeds Part 1)

Hi, I thought I’d write some blog posts about poetry seeds: where to find them, how to grow them, and how to magic them out of thin air, if all else fails!

If you’re reading this, you probably already enjoy writing poetry for children or enjoy the idea of writing poetry for children. BUT we all know that it’s often not as simple as sitting down with a notebook, or an open laptop and writing actual words! So, today I’m going to talk about finding initial inspiration, and in blog posts to follow, I’ll look at Writing Using Prompts, Playing with Form, and Taking the Pressure Off.

Finding a Seed

Poet: I write poems.

Well-meaning human: Go on then. Write me a poem!

Poet: ...

Familiar? Talk to even the most prolifically published children’s poets, and they’ll tell you that poems don’t suddenly appear fully formed on the tips of their tongues, or in the end of their pens. So, when we feel that creative twitch, or a lit mag has newly opened for submissions, how can we get started?

· Everyday life. One of the most wonderful things about poetry, is that it helps you to look at ordinary things and notice the details. Look around your house – what can you see that might be a poetry seed? Is there a curious crack in the wall – how might it have got there? A souvenir from a far-off land? Has the bruised apple in the fruit bowl got a story to tell? (One of my favourite poems to write was ‘written’ by a banana!), What is your pet thinking/what does she do when you’re not around? Look at your cup of tea or coffee: what colour is it? what does it remind you of? Could you write a simile poem about the perfect shade of tea? (Mum’s ideal cuppa is as golden as a wheat field/as pale as a Rich Tea biscuit/as dark as treacle…). Truly, ANYTHING is a poem. EVERYTHING is a poem.

· Make stuff up! You could start with a poetry seed about a household object, but then it is perfectly acceptable to water it with IMAGINATION! There’s no right and wrong here – if you want your lost smelly sock to have walked on its own from the dusty deserts of the planet Zarf, then that is what you must write. Don’t worry about if it happened or it didn’t: some poetry is based entirely on real experience, some is utterly fictional, a lot is a bit of both (Yes, I was inspired by a single smelly sock in my house, NO it did not walk from the planet Zarf…you get the drift).

· Reading. I cannot say this enough. Reading anything at all for ideas is great, but especially reading poetry written by good, published poets. This is my go-to tactic if I’m lacking in inspiration to start a new poem. There will always be an idea or a form, shape, trick, delicious word combination, rhyming pattern or unexpected rhythm, which will spark something. I particularly enjoy Kate Wakeling’s poetry for this. Hers is often the poetry which makes me think, Oh, that is just so clever! or I’ve never seen a poem written quite like that!

Reading for information: I recently bought a children’s insect sticker book for myself (sorry, kids) because it is full of information at exactly the right level for some minibeast poems which I’d like to write. To help further, it is stuffed full of gorgeous illustrations. Yes, I’ll be heading out into the garden for some rock-lifting and peering into the insect hotel, too. I was also inspired to write after sharing a library book about dinosaurs, with my little one. Unusual facts make great poems!

Reading Fairy tales: Can you write as if you are a character from a fairy tale? What do things look like from the grandma's point of view, in Little Red Riding Hood? Or the cooking pot? What if the Hansel and Gretel sweet-covered cottage was upset about giving children cavities?! Laura Mucha and Carole Bromley have some super fairy tale poems.

Reading for ideas that you never would have thought of: The Mr Men books can be good for this – think of a character with a particular trait, and all of the things they may get up to. Think Mr Messy, Mr Clumsy, Mr Bounce. Make up your own, write that poem!

· Go for a walk. Sometimes, an idea will come which is directly related to your surroundings, other times you will find that words form to the rhythm of your feet, or your breathing, or simply that the act of getting up off your chair and away from the tasks waiting at home, frees your mind enough to allow creative thoughts to come.

Of course, this is just a handful of ideas; there are many, many other ways to find that poetry seed, but I must go and write a poem, now…

Next time: using prompts to write children’s poems.

Thanks for reading,

Happy reading, writing and poeming,

Attie x

How I Wrote a Poem

First off, this is one of the ways that I write poems. This is not How to Write a Poem 101. This is not how I write all my poems. This is how I wrote this particular poem. And my, was it tricky to think about the process as I went along. Of course, I already knew that I get a lot of ideas, and that most days I write at least one poem, but thinking about every tweak that I made at speed, and trying to remember and explain it, made me realise that when I write, many things are happening all at the same time. Quickly! Doing this significantly slowed down my creative process, and although I like the finished poem, and this was an interesting exercise, writing it while thinking about writing it was not nearly as fun as how it all usually happens!

Anyway, this is the creative diary of a poem called…oh, wait, I haven’t actually got a title yet! So that’s another insight into how things work around here! *Re-reads poem*

This is the creative diary of a poem called Imagining Mercats. (Not meerkats. *Insert jolly illustration of a swimming mercat here*.)

Writing The Poem

I had an idea whilst doing something else. A mercat instead of a mermaid. The first line started to write itself, because that’s what was happening: Sometimes I think about mercats.

When I had my phone, before the idea disappeared, I wrote this:

I started to think about things that cats do, which I could then reflect in the life of a mercat. I thought about my cat sleeping on the sofa. In my house we call it a sofa, but because I wanted to use coral in the poem, I chose to write couch, for the alliteration. This alliteration then told me that curl would be a good first word for the following line. So, that’s two stanzas, first draft, done.

I then went back to the beginning and READ IT OUT LOUD. If there’s anything that this exercise has highlighted, it is just how often I do this. I do this A LOT. All the way through the process, not just at the end. So, I read it aloud to myself, and didn’t like how stanza one was scanning. Wonder felt like it had one syllable too many, and as usual, the word and was unnecessary. I’m sure if there was a clever app for this, it would discover that the word I cut most from my poems is AND. So, then I had this:

The rhyming words at the end of stanzas one and two decided themselves; I don’t often consciously think about if or how I’m going to use rhyme, when I start a poem. I suspect, because tea is one of those words which has many rhymes, that made it sort of happen naturally. Because of the chatty nature of the poem, and it’s loose-ish structure, I didn’t worry about rhyming patiently with tea. It sounded natural when I read it aloud (what I mean is, I didn’t feel the need to change it to be, flea, or pea).

So, stanza three. I had to think a bit more about this, because by now a pattern was emerging; the poem is asking questions: Do they chase mermice? Do they eat fish…? Do they watch merbirds…? I looked at the first line of each stanza:

1) Sometimes I think about mercats (followed by questions)

2) Do mercats sleep on coral couches?

In this kind of poem, I usually try to start each stanza with a different word, so I went with the questioning theme, and chose What for stanza three. Again, I thought about cat-things, and decided to write about names. I wrote the stanza, I READ IT OUT LOUD, then I edited it to sound better:

At some point in all this, I made a sort of Rhyme Spider. I do this a lot. I have stopped using RhymeZone online, which on bad days seems to think spanner rhymes with porridge. This way works for me. Sometimes I write down ALL the rhymes I can think of, other times I only write down the ones which I know will fit and won’t sound forced for the sake of rhyming.

I saw that me was on there, which I felt might be a useful word to finish with. In a children’s poem particularly, bringing it back to me often works well, and in this case reminds us of the ‘poet’ saying at the beginning that they’re ‘thinking about mercats’.

I jotted this down:

For the final stanza, I chose another ‘question word’, Would, and thought about cats playing. The stanza pretty much wrote itself, but I chose the line breaks to highlight the rhyme within the stanza, of paw and or. This also causes me to pause briefly during reading, which gives a little punch to the final two lines.

And that’s that. A finished poem. Except I haven’t yet recorded myself reading it aloud, and so it may yet change further. Also, it is brand new, and sometimes poems need to be left to settle for a few days or weeks, before things which need tweaking float up to the surface; I need some distance from them, and them from me. When I go back to it, the first thing I will do is READ IT OUT LOUD.

I hope that this has been interesting, maybe useful, and not too dull! It has been really quite eye-opening to me, to examine all the many things I’m doing every time I write a poem in quite a short space of time. Thank you to the person who asked me to do this, and the rest of you who thought it might be interesting – I hope it has been.

Happy reading, writing, and poeming,

Attie x

UPDATE: In typing out the ‘finished’ poem for the blog, I changed two more things, for sense and meaning. And so it goes on!

Imagining Mercats (finished?)

Sometimes I think about mercats,

do they chase mermice

under the sea?

Or just *eat fish for their mercat tea? *catch

Do mercats sleep on coral couches,

curl up in shipwrecks,

watch merbirds

patiently?

What kind of names do mercats have?

Fluffy can’t be right

down there,

their fur all watery.

Would a mercat play with a mermaid’s tail?

Bat starfish with a paw? or

would he rather

*live at home, with me? *play

Imagining Mercats (almost certainly finished...)

Sometimes I think about mercats,

do they chase mermice

under the sea?

Or just catch fish for their mercat tea?

Do mercats sleep on coral couches,

curl up in shipwrecks,

watch merbirds

patiently?

What kind of names do mercats have?

Fluffy can’t be right

down there,

their fur all watery.

Would a mercat play with a mermaid’s tail?

Bat starfish with a paw? or

would he rather

play at home, with me?

Tips on Submitting Writing for Children to Magazines

1. Follow the magazines you’re interested in, on Twitter.

2. Put notifications on for ‘all tweets’ if you don’t want to miss a thing (sometimes an editor will tweet ‘I’m sending acceptance emails today’). Stay in the know!

3. Read past issues (yes, more than one) – you’ll get a feel of what they tend to publish (also see point 5).

4. Research… Is there a theme? Is there a word limit? How many pieces can you submit at a time? Can you submit a story and a poem? Do they allow you to submit the same pieces elsewhere, at the same time? (simultaneous submissions, or ‘sim subs’). Take note of the deadline date.

5. Get as clued up as you can. If they published a poem about swimming lessons in Issue 3, they are unlikely to publish the swimming lesson poem you send them for Issue 4.

6. Attach the document! (Or don’t, if they ask for the work in the body of the email), and on that note…

7. Read the submission guidelines carefully and stick to them. If you have any questions or difficulties, address them politely and professionally via email.

8. Double-check the intended target audience/age-range of the magazine, and of that particular submission call. For example, some magazines ask that you write with children 7+ in mind, some fall under the title #kidlit but are specifically for a YA (Young Adult) audience.

9. Consider following the editor if their Twitter timeline is bookish or writing related. Sometimes you can find extra snippets of info this way, and you’ll learn about what they like. Often editors are writers too, so be sure to read their work and support them (not to curry favour, but because you’re lovely, and that’s what we writers do!).

10. Include a short, polite covering note – not your life story or full writing CV (unless they ask for it, of course).

11. Send them your good stuff. ‘Magazine’ doesn’t mean not-as-good-as-a-book. The same goes for online publications, as opposed to print ones. There’s a lot of stiff competition out there – stand out.

12. If you're able, subscribe to a magazine (or two). Support them and spread the word. These magazines rely on the support of readers as well as writers, and we want them to succeed and flourish. More opportunities for writers, more wonderful creative writing for children!

13. Take it on the chin if you don’t get accepted this time. There are many reasons why it’s a no, not a yes. Editors receive huge numbers of pieces, and they curate each issue carefully. Your piece may not be a good fit with the other writing this time, or they may have received twenty other dog poems in that submission period. The ‘no’s are simply a part of this writing game, whether you’re a big name or a new starter ( I know, because big names have told me they still happen).

14. Enjoy it, and Good Luck!