Issue 66: "All of The Feels" Competition Tips
- writeonmagazine
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
Exploring our feelings and emotions through writing is a worthwhile endeavour that allows for insight and reflection.
Your challenge is to choose one emotion and make it a theme of your poetic entry.
But here’s the twist: You cannot name the emotion directly.
Let readers feel it through:
Imagery: What colours, textures, sounds, or sensations capture the feeling?
Metaphor and Symbols: How might the emotion live in an object, a place, a season, or a small gesture?
Voice and Sounds: Does the emotion whisper or roar? Stutter or flow?
Perspective: Is the poet confronting it, escaping it, embracing it, or remembering it?
Let your readers recognise the emotion without being told what it is.
All of the competition entry details and guidelines are on our website.
Some poetry writing tips.
You can choose whatever form your poem wants to take, but whichever form you choose, here are ways to get started and to polish up on your poetry.
We can't emphasise enough that rhyming poems are really, really hard to get spot on! Slip in the occasional rhyme or half rhyme for special effect, but choose most words for their meaning, not their rhyming quality.
Play with an Idea
Select an emotion and make a list of ways in which that emotion could manifest as ... an animal, a weather condition, an item of clothing, a colour, a sound, a texture, a gesture.... anything you can think of! Not every idea on your list will work, but a couple of ideas or more will. Could you choose one or two and expand on them?
Write yourself into the poem (we really want a fabulous poem that is your experiences come to life through words). How are you dealing with this emotion? How is it dealing to you?
Problem-solve to bring your ideas into sharper focus
Spend some time building up the main ideas.
Spend just as much time trimming away anything that's over-telling or just isn't working.
Select your words with care.
Nouns and lively verbs are really important to give your poem clarity and to help transfer what is in your mind to the reader's mind.
A tūī is a clearer image than just a bird.
It fluttered or swooped is a livelier action than flew
If we read the words pretty, beautiful, ugly or scary, then we'll know you forgot to take this advice from the writer, CS Lewis.
Don't use adjectives which merely tell us
how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. ...
Don't say it was “delightful”;
make us say “delightful” when we've read the description.
CS Lewis.
Group the ideas in your poem in a way that leads your reader to meaning and to surprises.
Polish your poem
Look at the shape of your poem on the page. How do the line breaks and the layout support the words?
** Please note that MOST poems are justified to the left and NOT centred. You need a good reason to centre your poem.
Check the start of your poem. This needs to be a great line to drop the reader right into the ideas.
Check your last line - this should leave the reader satisfied yet still thinking. If you've ended with an explanation, then consider deleting it but using something from that line as your title.
Give your poem a title!
Count the lines- we have room on the pages for poems up to 32 lines.
You can find more poetry writing tips here.
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