Rules for a Good Walk - Free Verse...

Did you get outside today? This is my poem Rules for a Good Walk. The brilliant illustrations are by Lauren O’Neill. Scroll down to see the pages from my notebook that show how I started to write it.

Rules for a Good Walk is written in free verse, which means you don’t have to rhyme of follow any particular pattern to make your poem. You just write your thoughts, taking a new line as your thoughts move on.

It can still take a lot of work to get it how you like it! When I look back over what I have written I sometimes make changes to ‘strengthen’ my free verse poems. I often use repetition (can you see how many times I wrote ‘put your phone away’?) and alliteration, where some words that are close together start with the same letter (look at ‘slow’, ‘splash’, & ‘shiny’ and ‘show’, ‘stone’, ‘show’, & ‘stick’).

I read it out aloud to myself loads and loads of times to make sure it sounds as good as I can get it - then I type it up!

These pages from my notebook show how I started to get my ideas down. And how many ideas got left out!

Maybe you can think about everything you did so far today or this week? Then write everything down and pick and choose what you like best to make a free verse poem.

Send me your poems in the message part of the Contact page if you like. I’d love to see them!