Creating Outside Our Comfort Zone ... with Haiku

Last week, we started looking at ways we can try some creative endeavors we may not be fully comfortable with as a way to break out of some old habits and ruts, and give ourselves fresh insight and perspective in our chosen creative fields.  We looked at journaling and all the benefits to be had from it.  If the purpose of journaling is sort of stream-of-consciousness, long-form working and thinking and planning and dreaming, then today's topic is practically the exact opposite.  Today, my friends, we look at ...

Haiku

How can I condense
All my thoughts, hopes, opinions
Into just three lines?

Haiku forces you,
In seventeen syllables,
To say everything.

Five, seven, then five,
That's how many syllables
Go in every line.

Haiku as an art from originally came from Japan, but like all good, elegant, and simple art forms, we've adopted it and made it our own.  By forcing our minds to think in a constrained number of syllables, we are forced to boil down what we want to say to it's bare essence.  So much of what we write in our everyday lives is filler, extrapolation, leavening, and very little of it needs to be there.  Much of this is natural, the same way we hem and haw and say "uh" and "um" when we speak.  Some of this is doubt -- we worry if we don't put it in, our meaning won't be clear to our reader or listener.  Some of this is arrogance -- we add all these adjectives and explanations and thirty-seven-dollar words to show just how smart we are.

Haiku strips that all away.  Haiku forces us to be brief, to say what we really mean, and then get out of the way.

What can you write about?  Absolutely anything.  My wife and I (and yes, I'm revealing just how nerdy we truly are) will frequently spend evenings while watching TV passing a notebook back and forth wherein we write haiku to each other.  To say they get silly is an understatement.  They cover everything from commentary about whatever we're watching to what we'd like for a nighttime snack to how much we loathe our technology when it doesn't work properly.

The best thing about haiku -- at least in my opinion -- is how little time it takes to create them.  If I want to write a novel, I'm committing around a year of diligent work to get it done.  Even a handbell composition is looking at around a week to write.  With a haiku, I've got a finished product in about a minute, if that.  I've stretched my creative muscles, made some commentary about life or the human condition (or the fact that I'm rather upset about our house's current lack of chocolate chip cookies), and then gone on with my day.

Give it a try -- do it on the computer, in a notebook, or on a Post-It note.  Five syllables, then seven, then five -- that's all there is to it!

I must leave you now.
Must make sure we have candy.
Halloween's tonight.

Ghosts and goblins come.
If I can scare them away,
More candy for me!

Go out and create!
If I don't overeat sweets,
See you here next week.