Broken-down Poetry, and what it means

Hello, my new readers.
Welcome to Broken-down Poetry.

For those of you who frequent my blog, you’re probably wondering what’s with the intro. Duh, I’m at Broken-down Poetry.

Well, here’s what’s up: Today and for weeks to follow, I am blogging for a class, Media Scriptwriting. We’re required to blog about writing weekly. Well, I do a lot of that anyway, so I thought I’d go ahead and keep with Broken-down Poetry instead of creating a new blog. (Plus, BDP needs more readers!)

So. Welcome.

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So what is Broken-down Poetry?

First and foremost, it’s a blog I started my senior year of high school over at WordPress.com. (Funny story: I moved from WordPress to Blogspot because I thought Blogspot was cooler. Most professional bloggers are doing the opposite.)

I named the blog from a quote by George MacDonald, a 19th Century clergyman/writer. He said that “poetry is the highest form of the utterance of men’s thoughts. … Prose is but broken-down poetry.”

I knew in twelfth grade that I was a prose writer – I didn’t write any of that poetry crap. I fell in love with MacDonald’s words because I knew that what I wrote came from my heart, but it was broken into easily digestible pieces.

Okay, what do I mean by that?

I mean that I am not a flowery writer. You know who’s a flowery, detail-oriented writer? Jane Austen. So is Nathaniel Hawthorne. And so is another Nathaniel, my boyfriend, who is probably reading this and is probably not very happy with me. (Heh. Flowery in a good way, Babe.)

I am a clear-cut, let’s-get-rid-of-these-stupid-adjectives writer. I delete word; I don’t add them. I don’t waste my time describing a scene to you. I say: here’s the scene. Imagine it yourself.

When I started writing poetry earlier this school year, I noticed that even then I was eliminating words. I was breaking down poetry into smaller bites of poetry.

If you look around my blog, you’ll see that everything is short. The posts may be long, but paragraphs short. My poems are typically 5-8 syllables a line.

So what’s this mean to you? Nothing, I guess. I just find it interesting…. I find it interesting how my writing style fits my personality. I’m the one telling people to hurry up – let’s go! I’m the one who goes from one task to the other without slowing down. I can’t sit through movies because I’m too antsy.

I write the way I feel – rushed. Let’s not belabor this.

I like that media scriptwriting is all about writing within time constraints. Oh, I can do that. You say 30 seconds, and you got it. I can tell a whole story in a few seconds if I want. (Okay, I imagine it’s going to be a lot harder than that.)

But truthfully, I’m excited. Finally I can worry about keeping things short than adding words to meet some stupid page requirement.

Win!