... not that you'd know it.
I've gone and backed myself into a bit of a corner with Heart of Flame: I'm going to have to write some cod-Arabic poetry.
Why do I do these things to myself?! Luckily it doesn't have to be good poetry, which is fortunate because I have no talent for it at all. And I'm not even going to attempt the fine detail of the meter (which involves counting consonants - Arabic poetry is highly technical and complex and makes Shakespeare look like McGonagall). A quick scout around on Wikipedia (All hail Wikipedia!) has provided a suitable template. We're talking couplets with the rhyme scheme AA BA CA DA etc. Where "A" has to be the same word, mind.
This'll slow me down.
5 comments:
You're completely insane!
Mind you, that seems to be the norm for writers. :-)
Can't argue with that, Madelynne!
I suspect that because we don't work in an office where people dump crap on us all day, we have to dump it on ourselves.
:-D
Or maybe that's just me!
If it's a ghazal you're thinking of, I understood the rhyme pattern to be something like...
------------A
------------B
------------C
----------A-B
------------D
----------A-B
------------E
----------A-B
English doesn't time its speech patterns by consonants, so it's normal to substitute heavy syllables for consonants. (Iambic with six feet works well, I found.)
Spot the English graduate...
:-)
One thing I really wish I'd had the benefit of at school was a proper grounding in poetic meter. I wouldn't know an iambic pentameter from a limerick.
Oh, and I wish I'd done Latin too.
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