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Making Your Own Style - Syllables Manipulation



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Fri Oct 09, 2015 9:16 am
Lightsong says...



In poetry, we have heard and read about its many stylistic devices like metaphor, personification, assonance, and many more. However, these are established devices - they are styles for you to use to make your poem effective and heartfelt. Reading the title of this post, this is obviously is not the case. I am here to tell you how you can make your own style by manipulating one of the basic structures of words - syllables!

Before that, I'm going to introduce my own style, so if you use it obviously you're not making your own style. However, you can refer to it to make your own! Syllables, after all, are many in amounts.

Anyway, the first syllables manipulation is making a constant number of syllables in each line. I have shown this through my poem, let's get drown, in which each line has the exact three syllabes.

[start of light]

face ready
with a frown
and a curled
downward mouth

drown it in
a tube full
of many
active ants

neon lights
in the tube
burn and blind
open eyes

suck it in;
all of it.
freedom's fade
hope has gone

[end of light]


See, what I was trying to create here was a steady atmosphere, giving the reader a sense of uniformity in her reading. Each stanza is just enough to make a sentence, with the last one being broken into two sentences. It's fun! Now, you don't have to stick with three syllables, obviously, but a minimum amount of syllables for me is easy to stick to when you're reaching for a constant number of syllables.

And that is it for the first style - it is quite short and might not be effective or impactful for some of you amazing poets. u.u

Now, for the second one. It is trickier, and demands a careful observation. Instead of achieving a steady number of syllables in each line, this one has decreasing number of syllables in each stanza. You have to be careful with this because you need to make sure each stanza has the same number of lines, and that they are constantly decreasing in syllables. The poem I have used for this manipulation is dying (which I strongly recommend you to read, like and review xD).

many boulders her shoulders
carried - there was a sigh;
insignificant,
heard by no one

her loud voice diminished
to a weak whisper
in an ocean
of all eyes -

those of society
burdened her life -
took her one
light life

it was dimming
she had known -
a slow
end


The way this manipulation works is that the first line of the first stanza starts with the most number of syllables - seven. Then it decreases to six, five, and four, for each line that follows it. For the second stanza, the first line starts with six number of syllables, one lesser than the first line in the first stanza, and the process continues - the syllables decrease to five, four, and three for each line that follows it. And on and on.

As you can see, each stanza has four lines, so the tricky part is to get the last syllable right. Here, I was lucky to exactly end the fourth line of my last stanza with one syllable, ending the syllable manipulation. If, say, I start with eight syllables, I would not be able to end it correctly with one at the last line! So, plan your manipulation before writing your idea off!

The idea here is to create a fading moment, a decreasing volume. In the case of dying, what I wanted to portray was how the character's voice faded, thus the decreasing number of syllables. To sum it up, it was to show to process of having something gone - or decreased, or descended, anything that included minusing and subtracting. You can use this in the opposite way to show the increasing atmosphere - or ascended, anything that included putting more and more.

And that is all! Tell me if you have your own syllables manipulation! Share with us! As a famous me says, "Poetry has no boundary"! :D
"Writing, though, belongs first to the writer, and then to the reader, to the world.

The subject is a catalyst, a character, but our responsibility is, has to be, to the work."

- David L. Ulin
  








We're all stories in the end.
— 11th Doctor