Young Writers Society

Inspo for NaPo

Every year April comes around and we always begin with a bang, cracking jokes and enjoying ourselves, then freak out because it's Poetry Month and we haven't started yet. Poetry Month or NaPo is a national/world wide challenge to poets and non-poets alike to write a poem a day for the month of April. It's like NaNo and Inktober but for poetry, much cooler.

This year, let's be prepared! Inspo for NaPo is going to be a month of prep for the madness that is April. We will be covering everything from how to get organized, to how to find stuff to organize during the course of March so that by the time April Fools Day hits, you have a plan to pursue through all of April.

Now, if your motto isn't "Always be Prepared" then sit back and relax for March, more power to you! When April hits and you're stuck on what to do, come check out some of our amazing journals and we'll help carry you through too!

That's right! This is the Poetry version of the Journal Making Challenge! We will be making journals for our poetry inspiration during March and filling them up throughout the month.

To begin with, let's go over what we're planning to cover. Poetry Crew and company will be covering some basic things we can prep before NaPo begins starting with how to plan our attack, where we can collect inspiration, what to do when planning a theme, how to look at and develop a style, and ending with how to create challenges for yourself.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to grab a spoon and dig in! Actually, without the metaphor, we'd like everyone to make a journal where they can keep their inspiration over the course of March as we prep for NaPo. The journals will be collected in this fancy club, so go ahead and make a new thread in the club which will be your journal!



Just to lay things out a little bit before we get to the first task, these will be posted with two things a week, meaning this and the first post will be posted this week, then next week we will post two more things to do/read/accomplish, and we'll round it out with the last week.

Index

Inspo For NaPo
Directing Your NaPo
Collecting Inspiration
Planning a Theme
Finding Your Style
Creating Challenges For Yourself
Inspo for NaPo Club

Onto the first task we lay before you! Directing Your NaPo.

Just like with any writing, NaPo has the chance for prewriting too, and like with any prewriting, planning is a big step in it. In this section we'll go over a couple things that you can plan for your NaPo adventure.

In order to be successful with NaPo your goal is to write 30 poems in 30 days. That can sound easy, one poem per day, but months are trickier than that.

To begin with, it's always best to be clear about your goal, so write one!

After you've written your goal, take into consideration any time off you may need while you're away from your computer, busy all day, or occupied with studying for school.

Next, figure out how you'll make up days you don't expect to miss. Are you going to front load your NaPo adventure or back load it? What time of month will be busiest for you?

Once that's done, create goals for yourself to reach as benchmarks along the way. Creating these benchmarks for whether you're being successful or not can help you create the best plan for success by the end of the month. If you're not successful one week, you can change your plans to be successful the next.

These first planning steps will give you a good idea of what your month will be like and give you goals to make sure you stay on track during NaPo.

What I Really Really Want

Laying out a clear description of your end goal is a great place to start, so open up your journal and write out your goal for the month! That might sound really basic and straightforward until you're faced with writing it, so here are some things you might want to consider.

• Do you want to write more than 30 poems? Less?
• Do you want to write a poem a day or multiple poems some days and no poems others?
• Do you want to improve on any aspect of your poetry in particular?
• Do you want to work on an idea or a theme? Create a collection of poems?
• What is the minimum you would be happy doing by the end of the month?

Over the course of Inspo, this goal might change, but it's a good idea to have a starting point to fall back on if you become too aspirational by the end of March. This will give you a baseline for success!

Once you're happy with the wording, submit your first journal entry.

Poets Just Wanna Have Fun

Now that you have a goal, let's go searching for the roadblocks! Take a look at your workload for the month of April and try to figure out how many days you probably won't be up for writing anything.

• Do you have a test in April? Two?
• When is the end of your next semester? [there will be tests and homework due before that]
• What is your homelife going to be doing during April? [Is there a plan for Easter? Earth Day? April Fools Day?]
• Are there any events you're going to or plans with friends that might keep you out late?
• How often are you on a computer to post poems?
• Will you write poems physically if you cannot write them on a computer one day?

You don't have to write down all of the time you'll be gone, or your expected time away, but make a personal note of it as we move forward. Once you know how often you'll be unavailable for the month of April we can develop a plan to make up the time!

Reach the Stars

One of the old adages that I really love is "the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry" which basically is the same thing as Murphy's Law. They mean that if it can go wrong, it will, so if your plan has a giant problem, it will rear it's head and surprise you. To fix that, we need to make sure we have a back up plan for when our first one goes wrong.

Remember how I asked you to tally how long you'd be away? Well, that's part of this planning around those times things. What I'd like you to write in your journal is a back up plan. Basically, create a plan for what you're going to do to make up poems if you don't write them when you expect to.

There are at least two different ways we can go after this. There is front loading, meaning write a bunch of poems at the beginning and then when you miss one, you're already covered, or there is back loading, which means if you don't write a poem during a week, you make it up that weekend or whenever you have free time next. Let's look at pros and cons of those choices.

I would recommend you use both methods.

Front Loading

Front loading is a term particular to me, so don't google it and expect to see anything of value, but here's what I mean: Write before you miss.

Front loading is best when you know you're going to be gone soon. If you know this weekend you are going to be gone for 2 days straight, then write 2 poems to cover those days.

Back Loading

Again, this is my own term but here's what I mean: Write after you miss.

Back loading is one of the necessary tools you have to catch up with your NaPo if you miss days unexpectedly. Some people only use back loading when they're doing NaPo and never front load their adventure.

So now that you know a few ways to catch up, let's look at creating a plan for when and how you're going to find the time to grind out those poems!

When looking to write your catch up plan, be specific as specific as you can about when you want to write make up poems, whether that's before or after. If you know you'll have a weekend off here, or there, then plan on that being the weekend you check in with your overall goal and determine if you're on track or not. If you're not on track, maybe you need to do some back loading, if you are on track, maybe you know next week will be hard, so you should do some front loading. These are just tools to keep in mind when you're in the middle of NaPo.

Write a plan for when you're going to check in on your goal with specific times/dates and what you expect to see as your progress at those times.

Personally, I love to make mine the weekend because I used to not have a social life, so I could front load and back load as I needed to whenever the weekend hit. Here's an example of my goal:

Each Friday night I will check to make sure the date is the same number of poems I have between 9:00 and 10:00 PM. At any given weekend, I want at least two poems in case I go out and sleep over somewhere else. If I'm not on track, I'll write Cinquians, Nonets, Haiku or other structured poems until I catch up with my goals.

I've included time both as a time to write and a time to check, a goal for front loading including a reason for my backup solution in case it doesn't apply on any given weekend, and a plan for what to draw inspiration from in a pinch. These are things I can write quickly and with very little care about the subject, so they are my go-to for make up poems. If you don't have something like that, that's okay, just write something that has as many pieces of that as you can get!

Submit it!

All That Glitters is Gold

Did you get stuck on choosing when to check in? That could be because we didn't go over benchmarks yet! Let's go over those now because even if you didn't get stuck, there is a little bit to do with the subject.

First of all, a benchmark is taking an end goal and breaking it down into manageable parts. In my above example, my benchmark is "I will check to make sure the date is the same number of poems I have" so what do I mean by that?

Well, to put it simply, on the 7th, I want to have 7 poems written. On the 19th, I want 19 poems written. On day 30, I should have 30 poems written. That's because my goal is to write a poem a day!

What's your goal?

To help yourself achieve that goal, try breaking it down into smaller segments. For instance, if your goal is to write 60 poems in a month [NaPo asks for 30], how many ways can you break that down? You could do 12 poems in a week [60/5], or 15 poems if you count April as 4 weeks rather than 5, or you could do two poems in a day, or even 30 poems by the 15th!

The different ways you can break this up are eternally changing. It depends on when you'll have time, what your goal is, why you picked that goal, what restrictions your goal has, and finally, if you can come up with a good way to break it up.

For instance:

When I did NaPo last year, I split up my event into two segments, Badge Acquisition, and Structure Practice. I wanted to write the structures of the alphabet, and I really wanted to get the badges that were offered. Day 1 of April, I spent some time planning what I needed to do in order to get all of the badges and then I created a new plan around that. Originally I just had the plan to write a different structure type per day corresponding to the letters of the alphabet, so A was acrostic on the first, B was Ballad on the second, C was Cinquian on the third, etc. I decided to do both.

In the end, I dropped the structures in favor of fighting through the Badge Acquisition as I was running really far behind in it, and my earlier front loading of the structure practice actually helped me achieve my Badge Acquisition goals.

So, this is really a personal thing.

What do you want out of your NaPo?

As we move forward, you'll be challenged to come up with exactly what that is, so when you're done with everything we've prepped for your prepping month, come back to this question and revise your benchmarks according to your personal goals! If you want, you can answer the question "What do you want out of your NaPo" in your journal now and see if that changes. In the end, make sure you come back and answer the benchmarks question for real.

Post that in your journal.

Now that we've gone over the basics for what you can plan ahead of time, let's get into the meat of Inspo, the insp-[o]-ration [get it? inspiration? but with NaPo mixed in?]. The bulk of the journal will be all the things that inspire you!

You are inspired when you have something that gets the wheels turning and allows you to begin the process of writing a poem. While you are not allowed to begin writing your entries before April starts, there's nothing wrong with gathering some inspiration stored up for when the inspiration machine is short towards the end of the month. For the month of March, we want everyone participating to throw anything that inspires them into a journal so they can come back to it later.

Finding Inspiration

To store up inspiration, you can gather up little reminders that you think will help spur creative energy later. You should gather whatever inspires you, which can be a huge variety of things. When you find something that inspires you, copy, link, note, or post whatever it is in your journal with a blurb about your idea for what to write.

Some of these might be other forms of art, like photographs, art pieces, or songs. They could be other forms of writing you've crafted or have read like a short-story you read in English class, the title of the book you're currently reading, a delicious sonnet you just came across, or even a story you heard on the news or a phrase you overheard while standing in the lunch line (just remember to give credit if you end up using any direct lines). Make it your own! Whatever inspires you to write can be used for inspiration.

You can even collect or recycle some of your old poetry - just make sure you're writing new content for the actual NaPo poems. There's nothing wrong with being inspired by an old love ballad you wrote in fourth grade - there might even be some good metaphors or imagery that you can re-invent into a completely new piece! Try finding some of your old poems and highlight lines from them that you want to re-try, or rewrite.

What to do with Inspiration Starters:
Once you copy the link or whatever it is into your journal, make sure you write a brief line or paragraph about what the inspiration was so that when you come back to it a month later, you can get back into the train of thought. An example of this could be like this:

Kitty mutants that are in control of fire earth, electricity, and water protect our universe from harm!

You can see that the inspiration is not just a picture, but the picture and the comment from me.

When April hits, don't let the things you save as inspiration starters become limiting to you, remember the point is to generate new ideas! So you might start with a picture of pizza, start writing a line about Italian food, and then suddenly your poem is about love disguised in a metaphor about swimming in the Adriatic Sea.

No one else needs to be able to make the connection to the original idea, but having those little starting gems can help have a starting point for ideas rather than just waiting for an idea to strike.

Inspiration Links

Here are some links you can check out to generate some inspiration. These are the types of things you can look through now to start getting ideas, or come back to later when you feel stuck.



Inspiration Journal Challenge

To get started with your journal find 4 pieces of of inspo that you could use for NaPo.

• The first 2 can be any form of media; quotations, images, songs, favorite scents (etc)
  
• The second 2 should come from your previous poetry files: either old lines (or even just phrases) you've written and saved or entire poems that can be reinvented or spur on something new. If you write prose generally more than poetry, feel free to use bits of that instead!
  
• Post your inspo (or if it's too difficult to upload the file just describe or link to it) below and then come back to it during the month when you need a little bit of extra inspiration! Feel free to add more if you'd like, but you just need a few to get started.

Throughout NaPo you'll likely need to generate inspo again - so throughout the month as you find additional inspiration you can post it in your journal too.

Any time you feel inspiration strike, record it in your journal! You can do this even if you write a poem from the inspiration at the time because we're always growing and changing. Inspiration will strike us different every time we see it.

You might be asking yourself, do my poems really need to have a theme in the first place? An interesting discussion on that has been started here, that might give you ideas on whether or not you'd like to implement a theme yourself.
Must a poem have meaning?

If you write narrative poetry, you might find some of the plot themes and character stages an interesting point to jump off of to generate your own themes.
Plot Themes/ Stages and Character Archetypes

If you decide that you do want to play with theme this NaPo, here are a few things that might help you do just that.

Let's Get Down To Themes

First, if you haven't done so already, take an inventory of what you have. Go through your poems and see what types of themes you've used, and what you have an abundance of. What ideas do you revisit frequently? Are there any you revisit too frequently?

If you've got the stamina, see how your poems have changed over time and look at the sorts of themes you've developed. You can write a journal entry about what you're seeing if you haven't already!

Now that you've scavanged your backyard, the next step towards sweet, sweet victory is planning a theme. A theme, by dictionary definition is a unifying or main idea in a piece of writing. Theme is one of the aspects you want the reader to be able to come away from a poem knowing.

For NaPo there are a few ways to use themes. The first would be to gather a variety of themes you want to cover over NaPo, they could be related making a cohesive collection or they could all be vastly different bringing the readers many flavors of poetry. To try the variety method, you might want to gather a handful of ideas, phrases, and button words that you want to look at over NaPo. These will be you "fall back" themes to use whenever you are stuck on what you want to write.

The second way to use themes for NaPo would be to center all of your NaPo poems around one central theme. This theme could be a concrete event or experience, subject, or emotion.

The third is to focus on themes as a style or part of poetry such as working on clarity, structures, tone, drama, emotional content, punctuation, etc. A theme can be anything that is relating a poem together. You could even write a theme about something like a phrase such as "There is strength in numbers" so write down any you love or think about frequently!

Choosing a Theme

You can choose a theme by thinking about what tickles your fancy, or presses your buttons. Consider what you will always defend, what you will always argue, and what gets under your skin whenever you hear about it.

These things can make good themes because they're something with many points to talk about! You could also pick a word packed with meaning such as "love" or "truth" and use that as your theme. Lastly, you can pick a theme about something you want to use in poetry rather than something you want to write about!

Here are examples of subject themes:

Nature, Love, Relationships, Work, Break-ups, Truth, Summer, Seasons, Space, Childhood, Feminism, History, Politics, Civil-Rights, Race, Parents, Mental Health, Physical Health, Dreams, Religion, War, Violence, Partying, Animals, Writing, Science, Bodies, Sports, Travel, Art

Here are examples of emotion themes:

Sadness, Happiness, Anger, Jealousy, Home-Sickness, Nostalgia, Fear, Anxiety, Greed, Hunger, Exhaustion, Love, Disgust, Confusion, Conflicted, Shame, Pride

Here's an example of a past NaPo thread that covered one central theme:

StellaThomas wrote her 2017 NaPo thread on the theme of experiences in the medical world. bedside manner

Come up with a few theme ideas for yourself!

To see if it's a good theme, ask yourself what type of poem you could write about it, and see if you can come up with more than three. If you can come up with three or more ideas for different discussions in a poem, then it's a good theme. During NaPo you'll have to come up with 30, so if it's difficult to come up with something to do, chances are the theme is too hard.

Theme Journal Challenge

For your journal entries, choose whether you want to pick a theme (multiple themes or a singular theme) make note of that and then brainstorm some ideas based on your decision.

Remember if you are choosing to write over one central theme, that central theme might have sub-themes within it. It should be broad enough to allow you to generate ideas for the whole month that fit within the scope of it.

As the month goes on you might see your themes change from your original plan or a new one might emerge, that's all part of the process and if you notice that any particular themes were re-occurring in your entries come back and make note of that at the end of April.

If another theme hits you later that you really love, add it to your journal too!

Finding your Style

Do you remember in English class when your teacher taught you about different eras in writing? The writing movements are examples of multiple people's styles changing at the same time. Your personal style is your poetic voice, your structure, your themes, everything that makes what they say distinctive. It's their own style in writing. Style is incredibly important in poetry. Whether you work on making your style distinctive, different from poem to poem, or uniform across the board - NaPo is an excellent time to work on developing your own unique Poetic Style.

To go about developing your style there are three steps to take.

1) Finding your Current Poetic Style

Before you can develop your poetic style, it's important to figure out what you're working with already. Read through about ten of your old poems and see what habits, forms, structure, punctuation, themes, and emotions are reoccurring.

For example, when reading through my own NaPo collection last year (which was pretty varied!) I noticed that I often relied on space or sky imagery. I've also noticed in my poetry I tend to use as many conjunctions as possible - if I can start a line with "and" I'll do it! Making quick notes about these types of habits and then what the overall effect of those similarities does to the tone of your poetry can be a really interesting exercise! You may discover you already have a distinctive style, or might decide you want to work more on it!

If you have a poetic style, write a short explanation of what you think it is as you go over some of your old poetry. Do you use a lot of 'S' sounds? Do you avoid capitalization? Are all of your themes dark? Do you use first person all the time? Third person? Write about what you think you do the most!

If you don't have a poetic style, then write what habits you would like to have.

2) Discovering other Poetic Styles

Now an old saying goes, "if you want to write good poetry, you need to read good poetry" and the same goes for poetic style. If you want to have good poetic style, you probablly need to have read some poems with good or unique style. So go out and read a few a poems - either on YWS, from Poets you admire online, or from your favorite poetry anthology and do the same exercise as above. Pick out the reocurring themes, tones, topics, formatting conventions, and word-choices that get reused again by authors.

Pay attention to the poems that you thought had distinctive style that you want in your own poetry.

If you're really interested, compare two writers' styles in a journal entry. Compare Emily Dickinson to Robert Frost, or Langston Hughes to Lord Byron! Explain their styles and then contrast them [say how they're different]. Follow that up with what one you like better and why, or what you like best about each style and why.

3) Picking your Poetic Style

Now that you've seen your current poetic style and some of the styles that are out there, you can decide which elements you want to retain in your own poetic style. That might mean that you try a lot of different voices and create a different style in each poem, or it might result in having a theme or formatting convention that re-occurs throughout NaPo.

Additional Resources

Here are examples of ways to describe Poetic Style:

Emily Dickinson is light and humorous with deep undertones that really make you think.
Robert Frost always uses rhyming to make his point clear and most of his poems are in some sort of meter.
e. e. cummings loves to use the image of the poem as part of the meaning of the poem. He also avoids capitals and some punctuation.

If you need more help figuring out just what characteristics you can combine to create a unique poetic voice Kays has written a nice descriptive article on the topic on voice, which is one aspect of style.
Discovering Your Voice

If you'd like examples of different poetic styles and aren't sure where to start the Poem of the Week thread has good poems with many diverse styles and Poem Hunter is an easy to use site to look for poems.

Update your journal with a new post describing of what you want your style to be!

Poetic Style Journal Challenge

Now that you've posted a few times about style, consider what your stylistic goals will be for NaPo. Do you want to work on changing your style? Keeping it the same? Developing some aspect of your style?

First decide whether you want to work on style in your NaPo or not. If you do, then write a post describing what you want to work on. This could be something as simple as "I want to develop a voice" or as complicated as "I want to figure out what punctuation and capitalization works best with my poetic style through writing at least 3 poems of each combination of capitalization and punctuation."

These goals are personal, so feel free to change them as many times as you want! Post updates of your changes in your journal throughout the month.

If you already feel really good about the style you write with, you might want to consider stretching your limits and writing in a new style just to have some fun!

Creating Challenges For Yourself

So, it's almost NaPo and we've gone over theme, style, and planning, but what about the fun stuff? What about a challenge?

During NaPo, people don't just write poems, they often redesign their poetry styles. You've already heard enough about that but along with refining that style, it's fun to have challenges along the way. No race through the poetry marathon is complete without a few hurdles and bridges across troubled waters, and not all challenges are challenging!

Sometimes challenges like picture prompts just give us a direction.

Our great poetry queen @Aley has said:

Choose whether you want to develop a certain skill during NaPo or if you'd like to chase a metaphor, phrase, or idea, or develop some personal challenge for the fun of it like not using any 'e's in any poems.

Past NaPo Challenges

Over the years, there have been some very creative challenges turned out by the Grand Ole Poetry crew and oftentimes they'd result in badges. Once the challenge was to complete an old NaPo challenge, so you can certainly see we're keen about recycling and saving the environment and such.

Don't want to send around too many memos.

This is the Contests Thread for NaPo 2017, which introduced the challenges they had that year and in ones before.

One such past challenge in 2016 was of the Day, by @Iggy. It's a bit complicated to explain over the telephone but go check it out and the NaPoWriMo archives.

But you can also create those challenges for yourself. Instead of waiting for us to do it for you, you can do it during your Inspo for Napo. These types of challenges are often prompt challenges where you have to take something and we've prepared for inspiration and given it to you as a prompt. You can use your inspiration you've already collected as challenge material for yourself!

Choose a Personal Challenge

Here are some pointers on how to make something personal that's fun for you to do.

Think about your experience as a poet. If you have none, then think about something you want to have as an experience. Do you want to play with structure? Longer poems? Shorter ones? Poems from images? Poems from poems? What do you want to work on?

I know my personal challenge is keeping to a structure over 20 lines, and it's something that I like to experiment with whenever I get the chance.

This is the month to decide how you're going to challenge yourself and take the whole thing for a test run. NaPo (April) is the month when you can experiment however you like, turning up the heat on those lines and rhymes, or sticking the whole thing in the freezer for awhile. It's up to you. That's what matters.

But if you're gonna go through the whole thing anyways, you might as well move a couple of barricades and traffic cones into the road. Don't swerve too much though. Pick some better metaphors than these, collect a few challenges, and try to have as much fun as possible.

Creating challenges basically comes down to 'what do I want to try' and then creating a variety of that type of thing. For instance, if you want to try to use pictures for poems, lay out a method to search for those images and to pick which image you're going to use. Is it going to be random or something you're drawn to? Is it something you would have already collected in your inspiration?

What if you wanted to play with structures? Write a method to pick the structure you want to play with.

Earlier Aley told us about wanting to use structures corresponding to the alphabet, that was her way of picking what structure she wanted to use.
I want to keep my lines over 20, so I'm going to go with creating a challenge to make longer poems.

Write a journal entry talking about what you want to work on. That will nail it down because you have to put it in words. Once you have it in words, decide how you might go about choosing to work on that thing during NaPo.

Do you want to work on a poetic device? A structure? A style element? Create your challenge centered around that!

If you're totally stuck, we're here to help. Tag us in your journal and we'll talk about it!

The biggest tip to creating challenges is to leave room to explore. Don't dictate what you have to do every day, leave wiggle room! If you want to write the same sort of thing for a month, then cut it back to 25 days so you have 5 free days to goof off, be sick, or go out with friends.

Structure Challenges

Some of the biggest events for NaPo deal with structured poetry just because it's so easy to use as a challenge, so let's look at how to tackle these so you're not left in the dust during NaPo.

Most of the things I've linked in here came from the Knowledge Base - Poetry Section but there's a few outside articles scattered across the horizon.

If you're someone who typically sticks to free verse and the like of that, structured poetry can be a challenge but it's also very rewarding. Being able to get over that hurdle of writing the first one in that form, (or the first one in a long time), opens up a lot of new directions to go as a poet.

@Snoink wrote a general article about structured poetry called On Highly Structured Poems. It's a good place to start as you work your way through the poetry section of the Knowledge Base, where all of the articles are going to be equally helpful this season. You can also check out Aley's Making Meter Easy if you're stuck on the who/where/what of that.

For an outside resource, try Shadow Poetry, which has information for nearly everything relating to poetry, and comes highly recommended. It has most of the structures that exist in one handy place with examples of the structure to see it in action!

@Hannah wrote another broad article called Secret Treasures in Poetic Devices. This covers rhyme, meter/rhythm, and alliteration, along with their uses.

For Villanelle, a few YWS articles have been written on the subject.
But in the Knowledge base, you can find Poetic Forms: The Villanelle, which was written by @Rydia and is the most popular guide to use.
Rydia also wrote a few other KB articles on poetry forms, so be sure to check these out too.
Climbing Rhyme
The Terza Rima

There's always the short and sweet haiku, and often people will write in a series of haikus to get the entire message out, but often they don't entirely stick to the rules. You might think you know everything going on there, but just to be safe before writing, check out these guides.
For more information on the specifics, read @Kyllorac's Things to Consider About Haiku.

Feel free to do some outside research on these structures and how to write them, a bit of extra information never really hurt anyone. Well, at least not in the context of poetry.

Shooting For the Golden Star Sticker aka Higher Line Counts

If you want to focus on a poetic element such as clarity, length, sound, entertainment, originality, or something like that, you'll have to really work during your NaPo and that will be a challenge, but it is possible. This could involve a lot of asking for people to read your poetry.

To start a challenge like this, pick what you want to work on, and then try to create a game plan for how to improve. Give yourself some free time where you're not going to be dealing with the same topic. Leave a little leeway in your challenge design!

One challenge you can use is to use inspiration in the order of your journal with an aim at descriptive writing. For instance, you would have to write poems using as many descriptors as you could comfortably fit in the poem. This could help you improve setting in your poetry, along with character descriptions and style.

A secondary challenge relating to the structure ones above, is aiming for higher line counts, going to opposite of the many challenges that ask you to cut it down. You'll find it's just as difficult to keep your theme and grace running for 100 lines, as it is to compact the message down into 10.

A third challenge could be to work on the clarity of your poetry. You could set it up as a challenge to get 15 of your poems to have the same theme said back to you from someone else as what you wrote down as the original meaning of the poem.

Multi Media Buffette

If you're not into all of that sort of thing you can actually use what you already have as your NaPo Challenge!

A perfect challenge for you as someone who is working on an Inspo journal is to use 25 pieces of your inspiration! That means you need 25 pieces of inspiration to use, at least. Remember, wiggle room is better, so if you have 50 pieces of inspiration, you can leave half of them on the cutting room floor!

Since inspiration can be anything from pictures, words, songs, movies, games, poems, essays, ideas, and so on to random thoughts that keep you up at night, it's really not that difficult to find 50 things that you can use later as inspiration!

Actually, I think we should all take this challenge, so here it is.

The Inspo to NaPo Challenge

To complete Inspo, create at least 25 pieces of inspiration throughout the month of March, at least

5 should be pictures, movies, or music,

5 should be self created things such as your own poems, novel quotes, drawings, or pictures

5 should be related to poetry directly such as structures, clarity, poems, or writings about poetry

5 should be related to emotions, ideas, or imagery such as comments about landscapes, thoughts on things you hate, or love, a written out expression of emotion, and so forth.

And of course, no good challenge is complete without some wiggle room, so the last 5 of the minimum are free game.

If you complete all of this, try to complete the Inspo for NaPo challenge of "use 20 of your inspiration from Inspo for NaPo as inspiration for your poems"! You don't have to use the same 25 from the requirements above for the 20 used in your poems.

Guys, I absolutely love this thread. Also your own use of colour and images in it. Beautiful. And such good advice from such wise people! <3

I appreciate the shout out for "bedside manner" last year - I'm not 100% sure but I thiiiink I was the only one to do a theme last year? Please correct me if I'm wrong! But it worked so well for me in keeping me focused and giving me inspiration - it's easier to write about one thing for me? That's probably due to the transition from being a primarily fiction (and mainly novels at that!) writer.

This year I'm taking notes from a few wise ladies in my acquaintance who are giving their NaPos themes of stories they'd like to write but can't. I'm endlessly fascinated by a character of a young female ship's doctor - what type of ship I have yet to decide. But as I'm travelling through most of April I decided to use this character as a proxy - I can still write a little about my travels and about my life but through her eyes. Except she's not me. She's a little bit broken and a little bit melancholy. And she'll be my speaker for the month. Hopefully the month will have some kind of narrative arc - hard to tell!

I included in my introductory post some images to keep me going (of Dublin, Tokyo, Kyoto and Halong Bay each of which I'll be in) and hope to keep things as visual as possible throughout to keep myself inspired.

Will be back to reread your advice when I get stuck!

I'm really glad that it helped and yes Stella, I remembered your theme of words from your profession last year and wanted to bring it up! It was a great idea and I love to see jargon in poetry, so it just Had to be involved ^.-

Some advice [donno if it's wise or not]: Don't limit yourself to JUST your theme. Just write more than 30 poems >3 that can help make sure you get through the whole 30 days.