February is the month in which we here at WoPo run a poetry writing challenge. So for the next month there will be daily posts including writing exercises and guest bloggers and maybe a give away or two.

But why take part?

Sometimes it can be hard to carve yourself out a writing space or time, and sometimes without practice ideas either start to crowd the brain or disappear altogether. Writing challenges in general help you to develop a writing method. If this is your first such challenge then you may need to tweak it slightly to suit but keep with it!

Poem a day writing challenges can be extremely productive. You can follow the exercises posted here or just set yourself a certain amount of time to sit and just write – do not worry overly about the quality of the poem or piece of writing. You may not like what you are writing, think it is cheesy or too dramatic – write it anyway and then put it away for six weeks, maybe even make a box to post your poems in so you can’t go back and look at them.

You may find later on that the work is not as bad as you thought it was and a bit of editing will have it all ship shape and ready to go!

Perhaps you’ll need to merge poems or split them up into two or three separate pieces or just delete 2/3rds of what you have got.

What ever happens you will end up with more poems than you started with 🙂