Afternoon Ramblings: Writing Poems is...

Emotionally tiresome. I spent a few minutes writing just now, trying to get into somebody's character and write a poem from his viewpoint. It tires me out emotionally. I feel like I have just finished crying for half an hour. It's extraordinary.

I experience such feeling over and over again, because writing poems is just one of my hobbies. I find joy and relief through it. But I just realised....

How did Shakespeare manage to do it over and over again without losing his sanity? The range and varieties of emotions, feelings, and characters he had to play inside his mind to write plays like Othello, Macbeth, and Hamlet is uncountable. How did he manage to do it?

For me, to be able to write a poem that would convince myself of an emotion or feeling, I need to repeat a scene or situation in the character I want to write it for, over and over again, until the words come to me, or until I find the word I'm looking for. But when you write a poem, you only play a character - one character, one point of view. When you write a play, or a novel, you play them all.

But then people don't write novels in blank verse. Not any more, and I don't plan to revive that old habit.

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