November PAD Chapbook Challenge: Day 1
Good morning. Here we are. Another PAD challenge. Feels like it was just a few weeks ago we were doing one, but I guess it hasn’t been since April. This…
Good morning. Here we are. Another PAD challenge. Feels like it was just a few weeks ago we were doing one, but I guess it hasn't been since April. This time around I'm going to be throwing out a prompt (and my attempt at a poem) each day, but we're going to do it with a focus on having a chapbook's worth of poems at the end of the month.
So, with that said, I'm going to give a little more room than normal on following the prompts--and the prompts themselves may at times feel a little spacious. This is to give you the ability to write a collection of poems around a particular theme, which means, yes, I want you to give a little thought to the theme you'd like to explore through the month of November. For instance, your theme could be political poems, poems about motherhood, nature poems, food poems, animal poems, poems about your life, poems about a particular medical condition, poems about whatever, etc.
You probably don't want to make your theme too specific, but having some sort of focus will be helpful, I think. My theme will be to write poems having to do with monsters. I'm not sure if it will be just horror movie monsters or if I'll mix in real life monsters as well, but that's the theme I'm choosing for myself.
So before moving on, think a little about what theme you'd like to write about. You can include it with your poem today--or leave it a mystery for other writers to guess at. Totally your call. Here, I'll wait while you think of a theme.
*****
Okay, you've got your theme (even if that theme is just to write a bunch of disjointed poems). At the end of the month, I may be asking you to collect your poems together from this challenge and send me your chapbooks so that I can try to pick a Best Chapbook Award. If I do this, the winner probably won't be announced until Groundhog Day. But I'll give more information on this idea as the month unfolds.
Let's get into today's prompt. For today's prompt, I want you to look at your theme and write a "hook" poem. This is a poem intended to hook your reader on your theme. Think about the beginning of poems like "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "Howl." This poem gets right into the meat of your theme, and pulls the reader along. Think of a dramatic situation involving your theme and start there (in medias res). Totally.
Here's my attempt for the day:
"The Hook"
She screamed as she closed the door,
so that the annoyed boy could not ignore.
He walked over to her side of the car,
only to realize he'd tried going too far
earlier in their Lovers Lane evening spat
when she grew so anxious to leave that
she made him curse her under his breath--
now realizing how close he was to death.

Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Editor of Writer's Digest, which includes managing the content on WritersDigest.com and programming virtual conferences. He's the author of 40 Plot Twist Prompts for Writers: Writing Ideas for Bending Stories in New Directions, The Complete Guide of Poetic Forms: 100+ Poetic Form Definitions and Examples for Poets, Poem-a-Day: 365 Poetry Writing Prompts for a Year of Poeming, and more. Also, he's the editor of Writer's Market, Poet's Market, and Guide to Literary Agents. Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.