How to Write a Poem: A Practical Guide for People Who Think They Can't

A lot of people stopped writing poems at school, right around the time someone handed back a page with "doesn't scan" written in red. That's a shame. Poetry is the most portable kind of writing there is. You can draft one on a train, in a queue, in the five minutes before you fall asleep.

This guide skips the jargon. If you want to know what an iamb is, you can look it up later. First, let's get a poem on the page.

Start with something you can see

It's tempting to start with a feeling. Love, loss, hope. The trouble is that big abstract words slide right off a reader. "I was so sad" tells us almost nothing.

Start with an object or a moment instead. A cup of tea going cold. The sound of your neighbour's gate. Your grandmother's handwriting on a jar label. Let the feeling sit inside the thing.

Ishani Sen does this beautifully in prose. Her essay Grief Has Choreography opens with a woman washing a dog's pee mat while spinning to a heartbreak song, and then gives us this line:

Nobody warns you that grief has choreography.

That sentence could sit at the top of a poem as it is. It's surprising, it turns grief into something with steps and movement, and it holds a whole feeling without explaining it.

Write badly, quickly

Give yourself ten minutes and write everything you notice about your chosen image. Don't worry about lines yet. Don't stop to fix anything. Write sentences, fragments, lists, half-thoughts.

Most of it won't survive. That's fine.

Find the line breaks

Here's where prose becomes poetry. A line break changes how a reader moves through the words. Sometimes it makes them pause. Sometimes it pulls them forward into the next line. Either way, it puts weight on the words at its edges.

Look at this sentence from Virender Jaiswal's horror story The Iron Box:

Somewhere off to his left, water was dripping. Slow. Steady, like a clock.

Now break it:

Somewhere off to his left
water was dripping.
Slow.
Steady,
like a clock.

The words haven't changed. The reading has. Each short line makes you wait, the way the man in the story is waiting, and the dread arrives one drip at a time. Try breaking your own draft in different places and read each version aloud. You'll hear which one works before you can explain why.

Free verse or form?

Free verse has no fixed rhyme or metre. Much contemporary poetry is written this way, and many beginners find it the easiest place to start. It isn't a free-for-all, though. Rhythm and sound still matter. You're just choosing them line by line.

Form gives you rules: a sonnet's fourteen lines, a villanelle's repeated refrains, a haiku's three short lines. (Japanese haiku count 5-7-5 sound units; English haiku are often looser and simply aim to be brief.) Rules can feel restrictive, yet they often unlock things. When you only have a handful of words, every one has to earn its place.

Try both. Write the same idea once as free verse and once as a haiku. See which version surprises you.

About rhyme

Rhyme isn't wrong. Forced rhyme is. If you catch yourself choosing "sky" because it rhymes with "cry" and not because you meant sky, cut it.

Quieter echoes often work better: a repeated vowel sound, two words that nearly rhyme, a word that returns at the end of the poem with a slightly different meaning.

Cut harder than feels comfortable

Once you have a draft, go through it and remove anything that explains what the image already shows. Words like "very", "really", "so" and "just" usually go. So do lines that tell the reader how to feel.

Olivia Mukherjee ends her story The Biryani Was for Bruno like this:

Bruno's tail thumped once. Slow. Certain.

Three beats. No commentary. If a poem of yours ends on a line explaining the moral, try deleting that line and ending on the image before it. More often than not, the poem gets stronger.

Read it aloud, then leave it alone

Your ear catches what your eye misses: a clunky run of consonants, a line that's one word too long, a rhythm that stumbles. Read the poem out loud, even if you have to whisper it.

Then put it away for a day or two. When you come back, the weak lines will be obvious in a way they weren't on the night you wrote them.

Share it somewhere

Some poems live happily in a notebook forever. If you'd like readers, though, you can publish short pieces on BrightChapters instantly and for free, and readers can leave comments or appreciate your work with a tip. If you'd rather keep things private for now, a journal prompt can be a gentle way to keep writing without an audience.

One last thing. You won't write your best poem first. Nobody does. Write the cup of tea poem, the gate poem, the jar label poem. Somewhere around the tenth, you'll notice you've stopped worrying whether you're allowed to.

Ready to put this into practice?

BrightChapters' Write page is free to use, with no account needed to start a draft.