wherein Liz complains about doggerel

[edenfalling]

Some people have a gift for writing doggerel -- by which I mean rhyming poetry that not only scans but is coherent and relevant to the overall topic, but does not reach for greatness. (Of either the traditional strain or the sublimely hilarious strain.) My sister can write like that. I can't. I can write fairly decent free verse, if I do say so myself, and I can use rhythmic tricks and repetition and alliteration and assonance and whatnot, but I am no good whatsoever at doggerel.

Unfortunately, poetry in Harry Potter leans toward doggerel, because that's what JKR is good at writing. So I needed to come up with a few samples of Ginny attempting to write poetry and failing very blatantly, and it was driving me up the wall.

Really, the only doggerel I'd ever previously managed (aside from the inadvertent weirdness I produced at age 6) was a love poem in limerick form, written mostly because of a discussion of poetic forms and the way different structures are suited to different themes. A limerick is not really suited for epic love poetry. So I decided to write a love poem as a series of limericks, just for the hell of it.

(It didn't really work, but it amused me. I mean, a poem that starts:

I'll love you forever, my love,
I swear it by heaven above,
Let stars cease their burning
The world cease its turning
I still will not leave you, my love!

is hard not to like, on a certain level. It might not be half bad as song lyrics, actually, if I could think of a tune...)

In any case, I now have one awful limerick and two short bits of doggerel, which along with the surrounding narrative bring chapter 10 of "Secrets" to 1350 words. Only 9000 left to go... *sigh*

And I wrote another 100 words of "Locked Room Problems" as well. Go me!