I'm a poet.

Wanna write some teenage angst from the pov of an adolescent boy? :-)

Edited at 2008-04-28 11:35 pm (UTC)

I reckon you could outsource that by going approximately ten feet...

Indeed. You're married to a poet. Bribe him.

Nah, he's only five feet away at the moment. :-)

Edited at 2008-04-29 12:14 am (UTC)

Somehow I suspect Larry might be better at that....

There seems to be a consensus on that.

(He says he'll think about it. :-))

You don't flinch from slitting throats or destroying the world, but you flinch from writing poetry?

I've read enough books in which a character is a great poet, and the evidence for this is some seriously not-great poetry, to feel there is some justification for your reluctance. Except that the comments here suggest that what you want isn't great poetry, but in-character poetry. Hmm...

Yeah, the good thing is, this is a teenager with at least some sense of self-irony, so he sort of knows he isn't writing great poetry. Fictional poets who think they're better than they are make me wince, too.

Basically, the poem he offers needs to fail to impress the sorcerer he offers it to (who knows from good poetry), but can impress the girl who hears it. :-)

What about?

I'll do you a bad 15 year old boy poem if you give me the subject and the style, or the time period and context so I can figure out the style. (If you want a bit of bad 15 year old Icelandic saga-style that's different from if you want a bit of bad T.S. Eliotesque.)

It's a 15-year-old contemporary (Icelandic) boy, so I actually did ask lnhammer. :-) But thank you! (I love your poetry. :-))

Said boy was asked by a (saga-era) sorcerer what he'd offer in return for the sorcerer's aid, leading the boy to respond on impulse "a poem." Because that sort of thing always works in the sagas, right? (Which he's read in school, mostly, and maybe heard his Mom go on about a bit.) Probably the poem was intended as a song lyric (even worse). It will fail to impress the sorcerer, who knows from good poetry and has different standards than our boy for same anyway, but it just might manage to impress the 15-year-old (American) girl who's with him. Or not. :-)

What I want to know is, is he writing a song in English for the international potential or in Icelandic that's being translated for the reader?

---L.

Since the sorcerer speaks Icelandic, he probably offers him something in Icelandic. Though he's likely written both. :-) (If he's pretentious enough to be imagining international potential. Don't know him well enough to know that yet, which is interesting to realize.) (If he is, I don't think he'd actually admit it to anyone, as he's also a bit self-deprecating.)

The second one's definitely me.

As always, your character letters make me smile. Especially the thought of you flinching from writing poetry.

I actually sold a poem once. But it's definitely not my strong suit overall.

Yet nearly every book has a point where it asks me to write it. I thought I'd escaped this time! (I did manage to escape with Bones, where all I had to quote were a few lines from an existing song.)

Edited at 2008-04-29 02:57 pm (UTC)