How to Write a Damn Good Sonnet
Forget the ruffles. Forget the “thee” and “thou”. Kick this form’s ass, 21st century style.
Okay, I lied to you in the title. Just a little bit.
This post will, hopefully, give you a crash course on writing a sonnet. But if it’s your first sonnet, it probably won’t be good. And that’s just fine.
The secret to writing a damn good sonnet is simple: keep writing bad ones. And eventually, they’ll stop sucking.
To be fair, that’s how we get better at anything. But with Sonnets, the learning curve is a little bit more pronounced, because our cultural touchstone for the form is a literal poetic genius who lived and wrote over half a millennium ago. We look at our own work and say “This isn’t Shakespeare!” And decide to give up on the prospect.
Screw that. This is the 21st Century, and we will not be held back. I give you permission to write sonnets that look nothing like Shakespeare’s. Or Spenser’s. Or even Millay’s. I’m giving you permission to write bad sonnets.
Before you can learn, you must forget.
To that end, I want you to purge these AP English vocab words from your brain. Just forget about them.
