The book biz part two

Before I start, here’s a link to an interesting New York Times article about reader reviews on Amazon: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/technology/amazon-book-reviews-deleted-in-a-purge-aimed-at-manipulation.html?hp&_r=1&.

I didn’t finish writing about publishing last week, so here we go back into it.

You may remember that I mentioned the Rutgers conference and said it’s the best one I know of, but I didn’t say why. First off, here’s the link again: http://www.ruccl.org/One-on-One_Plus_Conference.html. The conference is for writers for children and young adults, and it’s another one that you have to be at least eighteen to go – but if you’re not there yet, you’ll reach that mark sooner than you think. You also have to submit a writing sample to get admitted to the conference. You’ll find information on the website.

The conference is the best because everyone is paired with a mentor, who is either an editor, an agent, or a published author. The overwhelming majority of mentors are editors or agents. I’m one of the few author mentors. They let me in because I’ve been going for so long, first as a mentee – and I met my agent at the conference. We’re not paid for mentoring. The editors and agents volunteer because they’re hoping to find new writers.

There’s a panel on some publishing or writing topic and a speaker, but the most worthwhile parts are the one-on-one and the five-on-five sessions. Before the one-on-one, the mentors read the selection submitted by the writer with whom they’re paired. Then the two meet for forty-five minutes and discuss the work and answer any question the writer may have.

In the five-on-five, five mentors and five mentees get together to talk about publishing and craft, with one of the mentors as a moderator to keep things moving. Again, the mentees can ask whatever they like.

And there’s lunch, when the editors and agents mingle, and you may be able to ask an agent or an editor if you can send her something.

In my starting-out days, before I had an agent, when publishers still looked at unagented submissions, I often waited many months for a response. Even if I’d met the editor at a conference, I waited. Sometimes my work was lost. It was maddening. Once or twice a rejection letter for someone else’s story arrived in my mailbox!

In their defense, editors are very busy, and they squeeze in reading manuscript from newbies in odd moments. So, as is true of everything else in writing and publishing, you need patience.

Most of the editors and agents who go to conferences are near the beginning of their careers. If one of them falls in love with your manuscript, she will be almost as happy as you. Editors advance through acquisitions. If your book does well, it’s a feather in her cap. If it does super well, she may get promoted, say from assistant editor to editor.

Your editor does a lot more than edit. She (most are women) will negotiate your contract with your agent, your literary lawyer (see the last post), or you. She represents the publisher with you and your agent.

She represents you inside the publishing house. One of her jobs is to get the sales force, the people who sell books to bookstores, excited about your book. As an example, my editor dressed up as Little Red Riding Hood when she presented my picture book, Betsy Red Hoodie, to the sales people.

She’ll consult with the art director about your cover. If your book is illustrated, she’ll have a say in picking the illustrator. More than anyone except your friends and family and possibly your agent, she’ll be your book’s biggest booster.

And an agent does more than find you a publisher. She (again, most are women) will negotiate your contract, which means she’s an expert on contract clauses, language, and the fast-changing publishing world. She knows each publishing house and what its policies are. There are differences, but I’m not privy to those secrets. I think the similarities are greater than the differences.

Your agent may also represent your film rights and may sell your book in foreign markets. Or may not.

Your agent will certainly represent you to the publisher. If your relationship with your editor gets gummed up, she’ll help you straighten things out.

Your royalties go to her. She takes her cut, usually fifteen percent, and then passes the rest on to you. But before she pays you, she checks over your royalty statement to make sure it looks correct. For example, you’ll get a different royalty rate for hardcover books and for paperbacks, different again for e-books. She’ll check to make sure that the correct rates are applied. Mistakes have been made!

Onto the contract.

I discussed some of this in my post almost exactly two years ago, on December 29th, 2010, so you may want to go back and take a look.

When you sell your book to a publisher, you’re selling specific rights. For example, you might grant it the right to publish in English all over the world or in English only in North America.

In exchange, you receive an advance against future book sales (royalties). You have to make some promises, like that you’ll deliver the manuscript by a certain date – which you can negotiate. If this is your first book, you’ve probably already delivered.

The contract will say that the publisher can’t change your words unless you agree, but it can follow its own standards of punctuation, spelling, and so on. In other words, it’s your book. I hardly ever make a fuss over a comma.

The contract commits the publisher to releasing your book within a certain time. And it spells out your royalty rates and says when you will be paid (usually twice a year).

Subsidiary rights are included in the deal, which means that you’ll let the publisher handle things like book club or audio book rights. (Or your agent may handle the sale of audio book rights.) The contract will specify what percentage you’ll get and they’ll get if there are such sales.

You have to warrant (assure the publisher) that your book is original – that you wrote it.

There’s more, but that’s the heart of it. There are other parts that you need to keep in mind, but your agent or literary lawyer will go over everything with you. Ask questions. You should understand it all. My latest contract is thirteen pages long, written in legalese. Many of my books have been published in other countries and most of those contracts are blessedly short, not much more than: I promise I wrote the book, the publisher promises to publish it, and if it doesn’t, I keep the money. Nice.

Here’s a prompt:

I forgot to say anything about query letters because they weren’t very important when I was trying to get published. But nowadays, you need ‘em. Usually the query letter will go with your sample chapters and probably a synopsis of your story. The purpose of the query is to create interest in your book, much like the copy on the back of a book creates interest. You paint your story in the best possible light in a few paragraphs and say a little bit about why you wrote it. The letter should be less than a page. Here’s a link on the subject: http://blog.nathanbransford.com/2010/08/how-to-write-query-letter.html. If you google query letters you’ll find more. A query letter is a little like bragging, which may be hard for some of you but in this prompt I want you to give it a shot. Write a query letter for one of your stories. Could be your latest NaNoWriMo creation. Even if you’re unhappy at the moment with everything you’ve ever written, pick one and find great things to say about it.

Have fun, and save what you write!

The book biz

I’ve contributed a couple of books (Forgive Me, I Meant to Do It and Writing Magic) to a silent auction in relief of victims of the shootings in Connecticut. There are many wonderful items in the auction, which you can view here: http://pubheartsconn.blogspot.com/2012/12/list-of-auction-items.html, and some of which have bearing on today’s post. There are manuscript critiques on offer, which may be great and seem to be at bargain-basement prices and the cause is certainly worthwhile. My only caution is that I don’t know the people making the offer, so before you bid, do a little research.

Back from poetry land: On September 4, 2012, Lark wrote that she was wondering “how to get published” or “the publishing process.” I know that’s a tall order, and might be a lengthy post- I wrote my 9th grade research paper on book publishing and got a C because it was WAYYY too long, was more of an instructional manual (!), and most likely mediocre at that because I’ve never been published- but as a FAMOUS 😉 published writer I, at least, would love to hear your thoughts on that. I’m sure that getting published is a main goal of at least a few of the readers here. 🙂

Well, this is fortuitous! I was going to post this link anyway, and it fits right in. A few days ago, on the Guestbook of my website, robin s. asked if there are any novel-length contests for teens. I didn’t know, so I googled and found this opportunity from Scholastic: http://www.thisispush.com/write/. Scholastic is about as reputable as you can get, so I would absolutely trust it. If you have something ready or almost ready, I would encourage you to put on the finishing touches, follow the instructions, and submit. The deadline approaches.

If you can’t get ready in time, you can make next year your deadline and have it to work toward.

If you do submit, be sure to follow the instructions, which require a certain number of chapters with a minimum and maximum page length and an outline of a specified length. My guess is that if you don’t follow the rules your submission won’t be read.

When I googled “novel writing contests for teens” the Scholastic one was the only one that popped up that I recognized. There was one from Delacorte, but it seems to have been discontinued. If any of you know of any others that you can vouch for, please post the information. There may be online contests that are good. I’m just not informed enough to judge.

In fact, I’m not knowledgeable enough about online publishing to discuss it at all. Or self-publishing, which I understand is more and more an acceptable way to go. This post is about traditional publishing-house publishing that results in a print book and, probably, an e-book. My perspective is from the children’s book corner, which includes young adult (YA) books, which have recently been inching older and older into upper teens and even early twenties. And I think that most of what I’m about to say applies to adult publishing too.

This post can’t be nearly long enough to cover a subject that many books have been devoted to. The one I know is Harold Underdown’s The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Children’s Books. Mr. Underdown also has a super-informative website at http://www.underdown.org/.

Also, in October I gave you the name of an agent who is willing to read submissions from teens. Here’s the information again: She’s Brianne Johnson, an agent at the respected Writers House. She said to email her a cover letter describing the book and to send the first 25 pages in a Microsoft Word document, as an attachment. Brianne prefers to receive submissions via e-mail, at bjohnson@writershouse.com. In your e-mail, say you got her name from my blog. Your writing sample should be double-spaced in 12-point type and the typeface should be easy to read. Your name, address, phone number, and email address should appear on the left above the title. Your last name and the title of the book should be in the upper left-hand corner of every page that follows, like this: Levine/Ella Enchanted. This is in case a page gets separated from the rest.

I’m not sure if the Scholastic contest rules specify double-spaced, but assume that is the requirement, because it’s standard. The double-spacing gives an editor room to write in edits and comments. If an editor takes the time to do that, it’s a very good sign.

And, just saying, whether you submit to Brianne or the contest or both, make your manuscript as free of typos and punctuation and grammatical errors as is humanly possible, because those will rule you out in a heartbeat.

If you do submit to Brianne and the contest too, let her know in your cover email that you’ve entered the contest. Not necessary to inform the contest that you’ve submitted the manuscript to an agent. The contest editors won’t care.

In the regular publishing process, aside from contests and special arrangements with agents, you don’t need to say anything about your age, whether you’re fourteen or ninety-four. If an editor or an agent falls in love with your book you can confess then, and the likely response will be delight that you’re so young or so ancient. Either way, there’s a story there for the marketing folks.

Conferences are the best way I know of to meet editors and agents. The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (www.SCBWI.org) offers regional conferences throughout the year (and throughout the world, pretty much) and two national conferences annually. Alas, you have to be at least eighteen to join the organization and attend. The Rutgers One-on-One Conference (http://www.ruccl.org/One-on-One_Plus_Conference.html) is the absolute best conference You have to be at least eighteen for that one too – sorry! You may find other conferences online. There are certainly conferences for other genres, like mystery, romance, fantasy. Look for participation by agents and editors.

If you meet an editor at a conference or in any other circumstance, like through a college class, and the editor says you can send her something, then you can. Otherwise, the major publishers don’t accept unsolicited manuscripts – manuscripts that just arrive in the mail. Some smaller presses may – I don’t know. Most editors find new authors through agents.

AAR, the Association of Authors Representatives, lists agents on its website, which is www.aaronline.org. It may take a long time to load, so be patient.. I suggest you check out individual agents’ websites or, if the agent works at an agency, the agency’s website. When you do, look at the authors who are represented by that agent. Look up the books published by those authors. You can even go further and read one of the books to see if you like it, to see if you respect the agent’s taste. The website and the AAR site say what kind of work the agents is interested in seeing and how to submit. Follow the guidelines slavishly!

If an agent is interested in your work, he (or she) may ask for revisions before he’s willing to represent you. He should never ever charge for any editing he does. If his suggestions make sense to you, if you think they’ll get you to a better book, revise according to his guidance. Even after he begins to represent you, he may edit your manuscript just as an editor would, meaning that you don’t have to do whatever he wants. The edits have to seem right to you.

Most agents edit but not all. Mine doesn’t.

One advantage of an agent is his knowledge of the industry. An agent has relationships with lots of editors; he sees them at conferences; they meet for lunch. He knows who’s looking for what, who like what. My agent sent Ella Enchanted to a particular editor because she knew Alix was “hungry,” eager for new material. Often these hungry editors are just starting out and don’t already have a slate of authors they work with. For example, Ella Enchanted was Alix’s very first acquisition.

If you do meet an editor somehow and the editor wants your book, you may still decide to be represented by an agent, and you’ll have an easier time finding one if you already have an offer of a contract.

The agent will negotiate your contract, and here industry knowledge is essential. The agent will know what a reasonable advance is, what reasonable royalty rates are, will probably have a standard contract with the various publishers, so you’ll get the benefit of that.

When you reach this point: an agent wants to represent you, I think you should meet the agent if you live or work near each other. If not, I think a phone call would be a good idea. You want to be sure that you’ll work well together, that he sees your work in the same way you do, that you’re a good fit. My first (brief) agent didn’t like fantasy. You can guess how that worked out.

If you don’t want an agent, however – the agent will take fifteen percent of your advance and royalties forever – you can have a literary lawyer negotiate your contract or help you negotiate it. You’ll have to pay the lawyer, but all your earnings after that will go straight to you. However, do not involve any other kind of attorney in the negotiation. Any lawyer who doesn’t know the territory will find the contract terms unacceptable, and a deal will be impossible.

This post is going on too long. I’ll continue next week with a partial post or a whole one. Your prompt is to ask me questions. If there was anything you didn’t understand or if there’s an area you’d like me to go into in greater depth, please ask. If you have industry experience, please add your expertise.

Have fun!

Poetry finale

This is the last post on poetry for the time being, but I’d be happy to write more if more questions come in.

On October 19, 2012, Charlotte wrote, …on the poetry front, I’d be interested to hear about your own experience with poetry: do you do it intentionally or just when the mood strikes? What kinds of poems do you usually write? Do you switch things up? How do you edit your poems? How is your process for poetry different from fiction?

I spoke to the sixth graders at a middle school in Connecticut on Monday, where a girl asked me how I can write from a child’s perspective. My answer was mostly about how my most important reading experience was when I was little, and I mentioned that I’ve been writing poetry for adults lately, too, and it feels as if I step from one room in my brain to another to write for kids and to write poetry for grownups. For the new writing book chapters about poetry, I wrote a few poems. At first they were poems for adults, which felt dull for kids, so I had to make a conscious effort to move furniture from my kids’ writing brain room into the poetry room. Then I was able to write about a haunted house and about that “horrible hoodlum Robin.”

In my poetry room I’m less analytical and more relaxed than in my novel-writing room. I’m not bearing the weight of pursuing a long stream of events and a bunch of characters and needing it all to come together logically, satisfyingly. In a novel I relax and play in individual scenes. A blog post is contained too, and pleasurable for that reason (and also because I’m talking to you guys directly). And prompts are the tiniest of all and the most fun.

But I’ve wandered away from poetry. I go into more of a trance when I’m writing poetry. My mind settles.

I generally start poems by writing prose about what will be in the poem. For example, a few years ago I did something online called “poetry boot camp,” which is the brainchild of poet Molly Fisk. In poetry boot camp you have to produce a poem a day for a week. I have never been more observant!

During the week my sister and I visited our aunt and uncle. Aunt Naomi had a form of dementia that had deprived her of speech and the ability to walk, although she didn’t seem unhappy. I decided to write a poem about her, and I started by writing prose about the visit, about what had happened, about the details, about what might have been going through our aunt’s mind that couldn’t break through into words. I imagined what it would be like for her if the dementia went briefly away. That imaginative leap turned it into poetry for me, not just a journal entry. Then I started to arrange my lines. What resulted is a free verse poem that doesn’t rhyme.

If I’m writing a form poem, I’m thinking about the form as I write my prose. If I’m writing a sonnet, for example, I look for meter and hunt for synonyms that will work. When I rhyme I tend to go for simple – I don’t attempt rhyming with hippopotamus. If the form calls for repetition, I pay attention to ideas that can repeat, that are important to the idea of the poem.

You know from the blog that I love to revise. Poetry, the way I write it, is mostly revision. From the moment I get my ideas down in prose I’m in revision mode, happy, happy, happy.

Occasionally I’ll write a poem because the mood strikes, but more often it’s because I’m taking a class. I go to a poetry retreat every January, and write there and often revise when I get home. Sometimes I decide to look in one of my poetry books for a prompt, and then I write a poem. Nobody is expecting poems from me, so I have no deadlines.

Although I’ve written a bunch of poems, I still feel like a beginner, or at best, an intermediate student. Sometimes when I finish a poem, I feel sure about it, but more often I don’t know. A poem is such a little thing. A perfectly lovely poem can be about not much, but even so, often I’m not sure I’ve done enough. And sometimes I worry I’ve done too much, been obvious. I wish I had a poetry editor, like I have an editor for my novels.

I write all kinds of poems except long. I write free verse (no rhyme, no consistent meter, no set number of lines, no anything) and form poems, like the tritina, triolet, pantoum, sonnet. My poems are about almost anything. I wrote a sonnet about a genetically modified apple variety.

And writeforfun asked, …could you address the subject of publishing poetry? I mean, nowadays, it seems like the only thing poems are good for is song lyrics. Of course, you wrote Forgive Me, I meant to Do It, which is poetry, but aside from that, do people publish poetry? Or is it a dying art form? And if it is still alive and kicking, how does one go about getting published?

Forgive me, I Meant to Do It is for children and is the publishing arena I know best. I don’t think poetry is a dying art, but it seems to have limited appeal – which I don’t understand because it appeals mightily to me. I mean poems appeal to me if they yield themselves up to understanding pretty easily. Very dense poems confuse me at this point in my poetry development. But straightforward ones go right to my core and warm me or chill me or thrill me in a way that no other kind of writing does. I mean, I love fiction, but fiction worms its way into me more gradually through the medium of the story. Poetry is like a sword straight to my heart – in the best possible way!

Anyway, here’s the little I know about the poetry publishing world: A lot of people (including me) get the magazine Poets and Writers, which carries classified ads for journals and publishers seeking submissions. The publishers are usually looking for chapbook (from twenty-five to forty-five poems, shorter than a collection) or collection-length manuscripts. Poets and Writers also lists poetry contests that you can enter for a fee.

Here’s what I’ve been told by experienced poets: that contests are a good way to begin to become published; that by reading poetry journals and hanging around the poetry world, which I think is to a large extent an academic (university) universe, you get to know which are the best journals to get published in and you can submit to them.

The Association of Writing Programs (AWP) has conferences that poets attend (I’ve never been) where they network with other poets and with publishers. I don’t know much about this.

I’ve had a few poems for adults published, only one by submitting through Poets and Writers. I haven’t put much time into it. On one occasion I met two people at a signing who published a journal, and they asked me to submit, and they took one of my poems. Five poems got published because I audited a poetry residence at an MFA program.

None of them paid a penny. They paid, as is common, with a copy or two of the publication. That was fine with me. I was just happy to have them published. And publishing them was like dropping a pebble in a well. I’ve never heard back from a reader. I don’t know if my few poems have been read by a hundred people or by three, have no idea if they made an impression on anyone. If I weren’t such a newbie, I’d probably have an idea of who’s reading what. And poetry readings are probably the place to experience a direct audience response. I’ve certainly never read my poems except to friends.

Please! Anyone who knows better and more than I do, please comment!

Here are three prompts:

• Write a poem about something that seems entirely unpoetic, a hair knot, a fork, bumping your head, chewing gum. In the last stanza, find something significant to add. Twist whatever your little thing is into an important statement that lots of people should care about. Don’t start with significance. Don’t even think about going there till you get to the end of whatever you wanted to say about chewing gum or whatever. Naturally there’s a poetry term for this switch: the turn. The turn is a characteristic of lots of poems. We think the poem is taking us in one direction, but skreek! off we go in another.

• Write a poem in which several of the lines start with one of these words or phrases (the term for repeated beginnings is anaphora):
I wish
actually
when
do not
long ago

• Write a cinquain, which is a five-line unrhymed poem. The first line has two syllables, the next four, then six, then eight, and then, finally, two. Here’s an example. I wrote this, imagining someone looking down on the New Zealand city of Christchurch after one of the earthquakes that hit there in the last several years (I visited a few years before):

Vantage Point

Alone
she walks along
the heights above Christchurch
to see what looks the same and what’s
missing

Have fun and save what you write!

Rhyme time

Congratulations to NaNoWriMo participants! You did it! Admirable!

For those of you word nerds, this appeared in the New York Times, and for those of you who are thinking about jobs to support you before you become literary super-stars, lexicographer may be a possibility (I don’t know what the prospects are), but it’s an interesting article: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/03/opinion/lies-murder-lexicography-dictionary.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

And my husband found this interview with me on YouTube from my visit to the central library in Pittsburgh. It’s long, and the visual quality is pretty bad, but if you’re interested, here it is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pB4ZZHLbJRc.

There’s this post and probably one more coming up on poetry. Then back to fiction. In her question last week, writeforfun asked about rhyme as well as meter, so that’s what this post is about. And writeforfun also asked about rhythm. Rhyme contributes powerfully to rhythm.

When I see rhyme or hear it, a pleasurable buzz runs through me, a little zzzt! Almost any kind of rhyme does it, sometimes with the added fillip of thinking, “Aren’t I clever?”

I say almost any kind of rhyme because there are quite a few. There’s the kind we all know, called end rhyme, obviously because it comes at the end of the line, like this:

Hickory dickory dock,
the mouse ran up the clock.

Dock and clock are end rhymes. But there’s another kind of rhyme in the first line of this nursery rhyme. Hickory dickory is an example of internal rhyme, because it happens inside the line, not at the end.

Here’s a poem (in a poem form called a triolet – see if you can figure out how it works) that I wrote for the poetry section of my new writing book:

Bad Day

When I enter the tall, tilting house on the hill
my hands make fists. I wish it weren’t Halloween,
wish the silence didn’t stiffen with ill will.
When I enter the tall, tilting house on the hill
I hear a voice. “At last, a guest. Welcome, Bill,
brave Bill, who won’t live to turn fourteen.”
When I enter the tall, tilting house on the hill
my hands make fists. I wish it weren’t Halloween.

Ill will in this poem is another example of internal rhyme. But for internal rhyme the rhyming words don’t have to appear right next to each other. It’s good enough for them to be in the same line or in a line nearby, and it’s more fun to discover them when they’re apart.

Aside from their internalness, these rhymes – ill will and hickory dickory – are just like the end rhyme example, dock and clock, in that they rhyme exactly. In sound they’re the same except at the very beginning. Such exact rhymes are called perfect.

There are a lot of technical terms in poetry! More even than I’m about to run through.

Here’s a bit of a ditty that used to excite and horrify me when I little. The versions I found online are different, but this is what I used to sing in a quivering voice:

“The worms crawl in,
the worms crawl out.
They eat your guts
and they spit them out.”

Poor starving worms, spitting everything out! The rhyme comes from the repetition of the word out. When a word rhymes with itself, it’s called identical rhyme.

Dock and clock above are examples of what’s known as masculine rhyme. Another example is debate and inflate. Masculine rhyme (those sexist poets of yore!) means that the rhyming syllable is accented. An example of feminine rhyme is mother and rather. The rhyming syllable here is unaccented.

Another kind of rhyme is called slant rhyme, and it may be my favorite. It’s almost rhyme, like stink and skunk. Look at the fifth line of “Bad Day.”

I hear a voice. “At last, a guest. Welcome, Bill,

Last and guest are (internal) slant rhymes – almost but no cigar. That’s the kind of rhyme that makes me feel clever when I notice it. Hey! I think, this poem rhymes! And that little buzz of delight goes off. Last week I mentioned not being fond of forced rhyme, and the example I gave was:

Then Jack did run
to have some fun.

Another example would be:

Jill did frown
when Jack fell down.

I’m here to tell you that frowned is an absolutely completely acceptable rhyme for down. The ear barely registers the ed.

Jill frowned
when Jack fell down

One kind of slant rhyme is called consonant rhyme, because the final consonants are the same but not the vowels, as in guest and last. If there’s consonant rhyme, naturally there must be vowel rhyme, also known as assonance. An example would be elf and spell because of the short e.

Moving right along, there’s rhyme that’s apocopated (I love the sound of this word – pronounced a-POCK-a – pay – ted – sounds to me like popcorn popping). Apocopated rhyme is a kind of slant rhyme, in this case when a syllable is missing, as in stinker and clink.

There’s even eye rhyme, when the sounds aren’t the same, but the letters are, as in lone and gone or dough and cough.

A great online resource for finding rhymes is Rhyme Zone. Here’s the link: http://www.rhymezone.com/r/rhyme.cgi?Word=boot&typeofrhyme=perfect&org1=syl&org2=l&org3=y.

My favorite kind of rhymed poem – I mean end-rhymed poem – is when the rhyming is so subtle and natural that I don’t notice at first. A poet who’s great at interesting and inventive rhyme is Molly Peacock (generally high school and above). Here are some end rhymes from her poem “Widow” about the sadness of a cat after the loss the other family cat: usual with dull, I let with toilet, and weight with wait. The last rhyme, weight with wait is called rich rhyme, which I learned just this minute .

Last of all, there’s rhyme for pure pleasure in the words. Here’s a poem by Edward Lear:

How pleasant to know Mr. Lear

How pleasant to know Mr. Lear,
Who has written such volumes of stuff.
Some think him ill-tempered and queer,
But a few find him pleasant enough.

His mind is concrete and fastidious,
His nose is remarkably big;
His visage is more or less hideous,
His beard it resembles a wig.

He has ears, and two eyes, and ten fingers,
(Leastways if you reckon two thumbs);
He used to be one of the singers,
But now he is one of the dumbs.

He sits in a beautiful parlour,
With hundreds of books on the wall;
He drinks a great deal of marsala,
But never gets tipsy at all.

He has many friends, laymen and clerical,
Old Foss is the name of his cat;
His body is perfectly spherical,
He weareth a runcible hat.

When he walks in waterproof white,
The children run after him so!
Calling out, “He’s gone out in his night-
Gown, that crazy old Englishman, oh!”

He weeps by the side of the ocean,
He weeps on the top of the hill;
He purchases pancakes and lotion,
And chocolate shrimps from the mill.

He reads, but he does not speak, Spanish,
He cannot abide ginger beer;
Ere the days of his pilgrimage vanish,
How pleasant to know Mr. Lear!

Runcible is a nonsense word Lear invented.

Here are some prompts:

• Pick a poem you’ve written and look through it for rhymes you didn’t know were there. Underline them. Look for synonyms you can switch in to add to the internal rhymes.

• Go to a page of one of your stories. Look for places to add alliteration or assonance without changing meaning. When you’re done, read the page over. Try reading it out loud both ways. If you don’t feel you’ve improved your prose, change it back.

• Try a bouts-rimes (from French, pronounced boo ree may), which requires at least two people. Each person writes a list of rhymed words, like joke, flop, smoke, drop, inhale, plate, derail, great. They exchange lists and each has to write a poem using those end rhymes. Be wild. Poetry doesn’t have to be logical.

• Use me as your bouts rimes partner and use my words: joke, flop, smoke, drop, inhale, plate, derail, great. Don’t worry about meaning. If you’re able to cobble together something that makes sense, fine, but go for the pleasure of the sounds.

• Look at my triolet and follow the form (repeat lines and rhyme sequence) to write your own triolet.

• Write a poem about yourself or about someone you know or about a dragon along the lines of Edward Lear’s poem about himself.

Have fun, and save what you write!