The Practise of Pantoums
I love a good pantoum. When I started university I was dead set against structure because it scared me and I'd just watched 'Kill Your Darlings', so naturally I assumed my academic career would be spent scrawling free verse on my walls with my coked up writer friends. Instead, most of my free time was spent eating microwave mac and cheese and crying about writer's block. Then along came the pantoum which quickly became my go-to writing exercise when I have nothing but a basic concept. Essentially, it's a series of quatrains, traditionally four but you could go on for as long as you like which most people do. Each quatrain incorporates two lines from the previous one with the first line repeated at the end for extra flavour. Typically, it looks like this: A B C D E B F D G E H F I G J H A What I love about this form is that you can begin with ten statements that don't necessarily 'go together'. My first
