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Tuesday 10 April 2012

Finding alternative words and the art of Acrostics

Where would I be without my Thesaurus?  Today it has been most essential as I've been writing an Acrostic poem with the added stipulation that there must be one other word in the line which starts with the same letter as the first letter in that line.  Do you follow?

This poem is now in it's fourth draft.  It began as an exercise with my name but quickly evolved into something else I rather liked so I felt I had to go with it and change the Acrostic letters to match the poem.  The second draft was rather cumbersome, some nice words or phrases but it didn't flow well.  The third draft began to take shape and I was able to expand on the last two lines which really began to come together. The fourth draft, done with the aid of the Thesaurus,  is about there.  I need to leave it to marinate for a short time and then see if it still works.

Using the Thesaurus was much easier than using a dictionary for this and when I either can't find the right word or need another/better option this book comes into its own.  In this case it really helped me to tease out meaning, losing that rather disjointed use of words to something that began to flow.  Anything that aids writing is a useful tool.

If you want to have a go at an Acrostic think of word and then write it vertically down the page like so:

P
L
U
T
O

Here's a first line:

Pluto was a planet once
L


Okay, off you go!

Here is another example, rather good, I think, but not mine unfortunately!



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