Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Competition

I am not writing about writing contest but about we writers competing with the other media when it comes to writing. As the pace of life is getting faster and faster, we have hectic schedules and our attention span for reading also goes in step with life's rhythm--fast--meaning short. And, with TV, Netflix, video games, iPad, you name it, competing with our writing, be it poetry, fiction, and plays, we have to be competitive. Look at the trendy word in the writing world--flash--such as flash fiction, flash non-fiction, flash memoir. What does this fad tell us? Everything we write has to go fast. Writing Japanese short-form poetry, I have made a good move when it comes to finding a medium to express myself, and I have been doing pretty well in publication. Haiku has only three lines, tanka five, and haibun a combination of prose and poetry, but it, too, has to be short. Well, I ran into some long haibun. For me, I will keep it short. And for me, it is similar to writing flash fiction. What I need is to get all the elements--who, what, when, where, how, and sometimes why--into the prose attached with one or two haiku or tanka, and bingo, I have a haibun. The move, though, was not made by planning, nor was it because I saw the writing trend but because, as I said in my earlier posts, I was recovering from my near-fatal illness and was eager to get back on my writing but was too weak to work on big projects, such as a play or a novel. Probably I am destined to be a poet in addition to being a playwright. My ambition to be a novelist is now on the back burner. It will return to the front. For now, I just focus on the short form poetry.