Pancakes || A poem by @JollofRice123 ----------------------------------------------------------- THE CREATIVE PROCESS *Really long text incoming...* With my profile so full of SWOW Magazine issues, I thought it would be nice to start sharing a bit more writing. This thought occured to me months ago, but I never really had time, and when I did occasionally have a couple of minutes, hours or even days to spare, I was too much of a procrastinator to actually get anything done. So today I thought, 'hey, why not use a random word generator to come up with 3 words and then use whatever those words are in a poem?' And that's what I did ฅ^•ﻌ•^ฅ ...Okay, okay, I cheated a little bit. I used the generator a couple of times instead of going with the first option, but in my defense, I couldn't gather any inspiration from the first couple of words it generated. Not that I remember what they were XD Anyway, the three words I eventually went with were 'feast', 'sphere' and 'ear'. No ideas popped into my head immediately, but I felt that I could work with them, and that little feeling was all the inspiration I needed to get started. It wasn't a lot, but as Isaac Newton pointed out, 'an object at rest will not move until a resultant force acts upon it'. Or, in other words, sometimes giving yourself a little push is exactly what you need to get your creative gears moving (◠ᴥ◕ʋ) Once I had my 3 words, I headed over to Canva to make a thumbnail for the project. I don't really know why I do things in this order sometimes, but it occasionally helps with my writing process to have visual prompts from having a pre designed thumbnail. So I searched up 'feast' and scrolled a bit, but none of the images were really giving me any boost of inspiration or creativity. As a result, I decided to focus on a specific aspect of what the feast would be, and for some reason, pancakes came to mind. So I stuck with that, eventually created the thumbnail, and moved onto the poem itself. ----------------------------------------------------------- WRITING THE POEM I didn't have a lot of ideas for the poem, but I decided to start writing straight away — without stopping — and see where things would end up. The main concepts I decided on mentally before writing anything were: • A 'sphere' of warmth • Whispering in someone's ear • Some form of present tense I also decided to try writing in iambic pentameter for the entire poem, apart from the last line, which I THINK I succeeded at XD ----------------------------------------------------------- A LITTLE BIT OF ANALYSIS... Analysing what I'm doing as I write, especially in poetry, helps me to come up with techniques and ideas that I wouldn't have thought of. For example, there are two suggested instances of dialogue in the poem, but only one of them involved use of quotation marks (which could represent the fact that only the speaker of the poem is physically present/alive/whatever other interpretations there are). The entire poem is written in iambic pentameter apart from the last line, which is exactly half the amount of syllables the rest of the lines are. Use of the semicolon in the last line is symbolic of the literal and metaphorical separation between the narrator and their loved one etc. Stuff like that, haha (◕ᴗ◕✿) ----------------------------------------------------------- CREDITS Poem: Thumbnail and background: designed on Canva Music: A Quiet Time (Fesliyan Studios) ----------------------------------------------------------- Thanks for reading! 。◕‿◕。