Write Dreamy, Heartfelt, Soulful Poetry - Creative Writing

1. Introduction and welcome to this poetry course: Hi there and welcome to this poetry course. In this course we're going to create something really beautiful, beautiful poetry that inspires and appeals to humanity of your readers. Where we're not gonna do is we're not going to do things like political poetry. So we're not going to touch on social issues, but the kind of poetry we'll write is the kind of poetry that hopefully gives you a readers or listeners magic butterflies. You know, he's really inspires them and really makes them see something really beautiful. So the poetry is gonna be inspiring, at least that's our goal. Now, the structure of the course is we're gonna start with some basics like metaphors, similes. We're gonna look at some really good examples of classical poetry. And then we're gonna start writing your own poem. I'll write a poem side-by-side with you. We'll start with a one line and then they'll go to a haiku which is three lines with them all go to a four-line poem. So it will be kind of baby steps. So by the end of the course, the idea is that you'll have your own poem. But most importantly, I feel that throughout the course, I'm going to show you what gives your reader or listener a special feeling. You know that feeling when you come across different art music, perhaps, perhaps poetry and some lightning strike happens and you're like, wow, I just saw the world in a different way or I just felt something and they identified with what I read and I can't explain what I feel, but I feel feelings. That's, I think the most magical thing that ARDS can do for us, not that, not all ARDS do it. All arts mediums, Hindus, you can get it from music, from dance, from painting, but not all art pieces do it. And I feel that the art pieces that do this to us and the most special ones that give us different perspectives that make us feel feelings that inspire us, that take us two different worlds. That's really the biggest goal of this course. So you may not write a poem, but if you see an eventually make something that has that effect on someone else, then a feel that this course will be very successful because that's the most magical thing there is about art is that transformation of feelings and emotions. So that's really, really, really the goal of my goal as an instructor in this course. That's what I wanted to convey to you and show you how I tried to do it. Then of course, when you set out to do something like that, There's no guarantee will happen as a creative process, but at least we'll try. So that's the course. Welcome, and let's begin. 2. Psychology, science, and philosophy of Imagery to evoke emotion with poetry: In this video, let's take a logical approach and examine how do you evoke emotion? How do you get people to feel that emotional high when they're listening or reading your poetry. And we're going to use science and philosophy to understand what exactly is happening in your reader. And another thing we're going to tackle in this video is this common thing people repeat. Then say, art is subjective. Everybody experiences are differently. And to a point it's true, but to a large point, It's one of those fall back things people just repeat because they don't want to think very hard. But it's philosophically a very unsatisfying statement. We're gonna get past that and we're going to dig a little deeper. It's really important to understand what are the underlying truths and mechanisms so that we can use them to enhance our work. So first of all, when we come in contact with any art as a consumer, we only have our past experience with which to approach a new piece of art. The reason we're starting with that is if some piece of art, let's say, references some historical or specific event. Maybe you've never heard of this event before. Maybe it's not a part of your history or culture or whatever. You're not gonna be able to get a lot out of this piece of art. Also, if you're listening to music and it's classical music, but maybe your ear is just not attuned to those kinds of sounds. You're just not gonna be as ready for that new classical piece of music as someone who's been listening to it for a long time. So right away, there is an issue of being ready for it as creators, we just have to understand that part of the subjectivity of experience is that everybody comes to your art from somewhere different. But at the same time, across cultures, we share so many things in common are core feelings and emotions. Many of them are very, very similar to each other. So it's not like we really can't adopt. We'll touch on that later in this video. But for now, we have to start with the idea that ours does require previous knowledge of experience. And the prerequisites are not just in our understanding of the world, but our mood in that moment. Like let's say we're stressed out at the moment. We're not going to have the patients or the mindset to listen to classical music or to appreciate some fine art were just not in the headspace in the moment. That's a big part of subjectivity that we can't really solve. But we should understand. But let's say because as people, we do share so many things, Let's say our audience can identify with our art and they are ready. That means they already have that prerequisite in their mind, in their emotional, passed, in their emotional memory. So we just have to tap into their emotional memory. Now this is science, because now we're dealing with people's brains. What you have to do is build an image in your audience's mind. It doesn't matter which art medium you use, music, painting, writing, dance. They all work differently. But when they're effective in evoking an emotional response, they build some image in that person's mind, maybe something that evokes their memory. Some image that evokes further associations in that person's mind. If they don't see what you want, if that association doesn't click, they're not going to internally associated with their experience. And your piece of art will fall flat. It won't inspire them, it won't evoke an emotional response. So if they are ready to receive your art, but your art just doesn't do it for them. Big part of it is the quality of your art. Some people, you know, like wine drinkers, sound people just drink anyone because it's wine and they'd like to be drunk. But some people like fine wine. Different people will look for different things out of the quality of your performance or art. And in the art world, no matter what medium you use, you have to be in the top one or 2% of all creators because art has to be exceptionally good to really resonate with someone that is just something that's set in stone. Like you're now going to inspire anybody with a mediocre performance or creation. But having said that, let's actually look at what's happening inside the brain and how the magic can get created inside the brain. So we feel emotions and thinking images. Before we think in language, the part of the brain that thinks in language, that processes a lot of logic. Developed after many parts of the emotional brain we have, and of course, many parts of our brain deal with emotions. But many parts of our brain fire before the logical part of the brain fires. And so what that means for us as art creators is that our audience has an emotional response before a logical response, but a logical response is coming. For example, if you're doing music or if you're presenting on a stage, the audience has made an emotional first impression to the sound, to the look of things before they decided to. I like what's being presented. Do I like the lyrics? Music, for example, the lyrics are very important, but they're secondary. The sound has to really appeal first, this is really an oversimplification, but actually you don't need the complexities of it. Really. We just need to know that, hey, the emotional connection and the emotional responses first, then the rationalize about what we're experiencing. That's the science behind it. You need to create that image as an initial response in your consumer with both imagery and presentation, but also the language and the writing. If what you did builds that image in your consumer, they're going to experience an emotional response, which is exactly what you need them to do when they come across your art. If there is no emotional response, they're most likely going to ignore it. If there is an emotional response, There's a chance they might love it. It's gonna be a rich experience for them. They might become a fan. That's the difference. So now let's look at what's universal between us, more or less. In the modern world, we have the same understandings and very similar sensibilities. And our emotional responses are also relatively similar. So if you evoke relatively universal imagery that makes people recall and feel relatively common, emotions that are not basic, but the ones that we all feel, then you're on the right track. This is actually why, if you're genuine, if you're vulnerable in your art and you're not showing off and you're not saying, I'm so great, I'm so strong, blah, blah, blah, but show a little bit of humanity. That is gonna be something that other people recognize. That human element that you have, that they have, they'll sense it immediately. We're human, we're weak, were sometimes insecure, where sometimes fearful. We have a very wide spectrum of emotions, all of which need to be explored. And when you meet people on the level of their humanity, that's when it's special for them. So in my poetry, in my music, and what I would encourage you to do is to meet people and connect with your audience on that very human level that makes it special. And that's gonna be my exercise for you in this class. Think of which human experiences an emotion. Do you want to share and explore and connect over with your audience? And that is gonna be the poem that you're gonna start writing in this course. You may not finish it, but at least we'll write one together as the course goes on. And if it's truly meaningful to you in a vulnerable special way, it will be meaningful to other people who connect with you on that special way. Which is one of the really beautiful things of art, is that you connect with people on a real level. For now, the exercise is just to think about what human topic you want to write about, and we'll explore that in the later videos. But generally, after this video, you should have an idea of what it takes for people who have an emotional connection with your piece of art. And understand that at least at a logical level and what it really takes for your audience to connect with your work on a very special level. 3. "Slice of life" and "Art is not what but how": In this video, I want to give you a few strong guiding ideas for how to approach your writing with every poem, with every line. Kind of test yourself. Ask yourself, are you following these principles? So the first idea will be creating a slice of life. First, I thought that this was a quote by Anton Chekhov, but then I realized it might be by genre Lian, both great writers. So I give them both credit. It doesn't really matter for us because for us we want to understand what does this slice of life? Well, if I tell you that something happened to me that immediately sparks and reaction like, Oh my God, I know this feeling. I know the situation. I've been there too. Then I just told you something about a slice of life. Whereas if I told you something that doesn't feel really real, you know, it feels over done. Maybe a fake, maybe just not accurate to real life. You're not gonna have that reaction. So when we create things, when we write, we have to create a slice of life. Sometimes in individual lines, sometimes in our whole work. The more you create that recognizable little piece of life, the slice of life, the more it'll resonate with your readers, listeners, or however people consume your work. That's one thing to aim for. That's kind of a target to aim for. Are you hitting on a slice of life? Is your stuff real? Now, the second idea is art is not what, but how? Now, what does that mean? This is by Alexander Solzhenitsyn is another great writer. You see not what, it's, not what the topic is, but how well it's done. You can write about any topic, but you can write a bad work or a good work. So the subject matter, it doesn't have to matter. Sometimes subject matters are grotesque, sometimes they're unattractive, sometimes they're off-putting, sometimes there are offensive. The idea here is that if you do it well, all of these can work. If you don't do it well, none of these will work. In the comedy world. Comedians phases all the time. There's this big debate like what about **** jokes on fire, drugs? Those are some of the most basic, lowest common denominator. Not really adult material, but if it's done well and it works, most comedians, they don't frown on it. They don't stay away from it. But their goal is not the subject matter choice, but how brilliant can they create a joke about it? And it will be the same with you. How good can you create your work? If it's good, the subject matter wouldn't really matter as much. And secondarily it will appeal to a wider audience. So it's how it's done. The higher the quality, the higher the appeal. And then the third idea is show don't tell. This is kind of like if you're saying I'm scared, well don't say I'm scared. The listener or the reader, they can't feel that if you just say I'm scared. But if you paint the picture like urine a dark forest and there are sounds and you have no flashlight and it's really dark, but you see some light far away. Maybe it's a wolf, maybe it's the eyes of a wolf. May. Oh, now you're seeing a pack of wolves eyes. They're pursuing you and you're running, but you see them running after you. Okay. You are painting this world. And maybe I didn't do a great job just explaining it just now. But generally, if you create worlds and images that show what you're trying to convey, the listener or the reader. They'll feel that much more and it will touch them much more because their own emotions will start working. These are the three large ideas that all works of writing more or less have to adhere to. You don't have to have all of these, but the more of this you have, generally the stronger your writing will be. That's why I wanted to share these with you in a separate video. 4. Metaphors in poetry: Now let's introduce metaphors, which are very powerful tools in poetry and actual everyday speech and prose writing. They're everywhere and they enhance our speech, communication and writing. So first let's introduce metaphors. The definition is, it's a word or phrase that represents a mother, a DEA, in a non-literal way. If it's confusing, we'll do some examples shortly. So let's keep going with this definition. So usually, the reason we use these is to add additional or hidden or surprising elements to the original idea with the desired effect of enriching the meaning of the original word or phrase and give that original word or phrase richer life that can spurn imagery, imagination, and evoke emotion in the reader or listener. So let's look at a few examples to clarify this point, because this definition may be a little bit of a mouthful. It's allowed to process, but actually better for us, there is simple to understand once we see them. So let's look at them. Here are some examples. We'll take one from Shakespeare. The world is a stage, perhaps one of the most famous metaphors there is. Now, is the world an actual stage? Of course it's not. But when we say the world's a stage that has its own kind of a meaning. It's non-literal. It gives new ideas here, it creates new imagery immediately. And also, of course, it's unique and original. And it's interesting. It's an interesting idea. And it's very effective in describing things. Because imagine if you had to actually describe how the world is a certain way and blah-blah-blah. It would take a lot of words. But this way we see it because it's really well-made metaphor, we feel what the meaning is. The world's a stage for most people, it's really easy and natural to comprehend that idea from just a few words. But of course, this is the master Shakespeare. He's the best writer ever. So most of us can't create such amazing, simple but brilliant metaphors perhaps, but we can start with something simpler. Let me share with you something that I wrote. This is from one of my songs. It's like a pretty love song referencing Michelangelo's painting, the birth of atom, where there's a famous moment with God and Adam touching their fingers. And the line in the song says something like my caress pains, new system chapels along your back. And so the Sistine Chapel is the place where that painting is. So it's kind of like the chorus paint system chapels. Thus the paint, of course it doesn't, doesn't paint anything, let alone paintings that are historical, that are insists in chapel. So really this enhances the chorus. If you were to use regular words to describe how nicely caresses, you can say the chorus is soft and It's sensitive, and it's another thing, and it's another thing and it's really boring non poetic description. Whereas for people who know that painting, birth of atom and for people who know what the Sistine Chapel is, people are like, Wow, you immediately understand what's happening here. And it gives this caress an other worldly quality where you just cannot describe it in words, just with metaphors. That's why use the metaphors. But let's get away from my writing and let us get back to the masters. Another powerful metaphor is the world is your oyster. Again, this is from Shakespeare. It's immediately clear what's happening here. The worlds of place to play. You own the world that's yours. There are many ways to interpret this metaphor, but they're similar. But the idea is that it's a very pretty immediately imaginative way to phrase things. Again, if you were to describe this in regular words, it will take many sentences to accomplish the very same thing that these five words accomplish. Any probably would still not get anywhere close. Having gone through these, let's look at some more examples of magic created with metaphors by other masters. So here's another one that I actually really love. Love is a smoke made with the fume of size. There are actually two metaphors going on here again is by Shakespeare, he's the best. I love him and actually use this line in one of my original songs. And I kind of worked his line in there just because I liked it so much. And instead a different song, another song that I had mentioned earlier, but let's look at it closer. Love is a smoke. Love is not a smoke. It's not even a physical thing. But here we see, Okay, Love is a smoke. That's fine. Made with the fumes of sighs. Fume of size, size don't have fumes. But imagine so many size. People being sad, that instead of love, they have this smoke. And the smoke represents this idea of like there used to be something It burned. There's no longer something. Love is a smoke. It used to be there, it's gone. And the thing that burned or that people's size is really devastating metaphor. Really amazing line. Just picture it, let it sink in a little bit. When I first came across this, I was like, Oh my god, wow, Shakespeare is good. That was my reaction when I first saw this, and it's still my reaction and I can't get over how imaginative and creative and just amazing this liners. And also, you know, real to life, like people who have felt heartbreak. They can identify which is also so important. People can picture this for themselves from their own experiences. Now let's look at another example. Conscience is a man's campus from Vinson lingo. Now, Van Gogh's not a poet, he's an artist, but he's still a genius. So let's look at this is conscious physical thing. No. But does it lead them in certain directions? Yes. Leading men too good directions. Hopefully. That's why this is a powerful metaphor. Conscious is encompass. Now let's look at another one from Pablo Picasso. Another great artist. Art washes away from the soul, the dust of everyday life. And we've all felt the dust of everyday life, the boring of everyday life. Now if I say the boring of everyday life, it's not very poetic, but it's quite creative to say the dust of everyday life because we can still clearly picture what he's talking about. But it's an, in an interesting way now, in an original way. And then Art washes away. Art can't wash things. But here, because of this metaphor, it'll give it new life. At the end of the day, this metaphor would be worthless if it didn't really invoke something in us that we recognize. But here we recognize it, yes, art is that thing that inspires us, uplifts us, and does wash away the dust of everyday life, perhaps on our soul, on our heart, wherever in our spirit. So these are some really, really powerful metaphors. There are thousands of metaphors from all kinds of writers and genius, his, from his history. We're not gonna go through them all, but what we can do is we can do an exercise for you. So here's your exercise to try. The exercise is finished. This sentence hope is. But don't say the literal thing. Give it a metaphor. I'll give you my examples so that you see what I'm talking about, then you can make your own. Here's one of my examples. Hope is a butterfly. Can you imagine that when the hope really flutters, when you're feeling hope in that moment of hopefulness when you're excited. It is a little butterfly. Is, I mean, is it a real butterfly? Of course it's not. I would be crazy. But does it have elements of a butterfly? Of course, it's light. It makes your heart and soul fly a little bit. It's gentle, It's a butterfly. It has a lot of those qualities. But of course also hope is a poisonous butterfly. Sometimes it doesn't work out. Then you really sad, but you had this really positive emotions. But then some of sometimes it becomes negative. It can also be poisonous. So here are my two examples, very similar but very different. One is positive, one is very negative inside. So having seen how I would do this, create your own and by the way, hope is such a widely written about thing that there are thousands of metaphors you can make for this. But in your case, credit make five, and try to have them be the original and interesting for yourself. Surprise yourself. This is really the exercise. It's a creativity exercise. I can't test you obviously, but at least you can compare it to my answer and see how ours compare. If you want to post it in the comments of this video, I can take a look and we can chat about it. 5. Similes in poetry: Now I want to introduce similes. Similes are very similar to metaphors, with only a couple of differences. Still, it's a word or a phrase that represents another idea in a non-literal way. So far is the same as a metaphor. But the things you're comparing are connected with words such as like or as. Instead of making a direct comparison, again, it's used to enrich the meaning of the original word or the phrase. And it gives us just fuller life. They can spurn imagination and evoke emotions. So with that, let's look at some examples starting with very, very simple example. So the simplest example is x is like y. If it was a metaphor, you will get rid of the word like x is why Love is a smoke made with the fumes of sites that we looked at earlier. The world is your oyster. Or if it's a similarly then it will be the world is like an oyster. Sometimes the meaning is kept almost exactly the same, but sometimes the meaning changes quite drastically and we'll take a look at those different examples shortly. But what I wanted to show you is this is a similarly x is like why you can replace x and y with whatever you want. The other way to recognize a similarly is if it's written as x is as good or as bad or as something. Those are similes. You basically making a comparison that something like something else. Whereas a metaphor is that something is something else. The metaphor was more direct. The world is your oyster. That's a matter for the similarly would be changed to the world is like an oyster. In this case, it's very, very similar, almost interchangeable, but sometimes it's not. So let's look at an example of the difference between a similarly in a metaphor. Just to clear things up a little more. A metaphor is Love is a smoke made with the theme of size. Love is a smoke. That's a metaphor. It's a direct association, direct comparison. Whereas if we change this to a similarly, we would change it to love is like a smoke. It's not smoke. It's like a smoke. Again, in this case, they're very similar, but I just wanted to show you how it would look like in an example. That's a real example. So now let's look at some actual examples of similes. Very common. One would be, I'm brave like a lion. If you say I'm a lion, that just doesn't make sense. It does make sense except it's an entirely different meaning. Like, are you on animal? In what way are you like a lion? Here? Brave, like a lion. The similarly is the better choice here. If you want to be specific about the quality, the single quality of being brave. Another example is clear as mud. If you say I am mud, that's meaningless, that's kind of ridiculous. It doesn't make any sense in a way, but clear as mud or something as clear as mud is kind of a sarcastic common. Similarly, that's used to describe something that's very confusing because of course mud is not clear. Another example of a similarly would be like watching the grass grow. Again. If you're watching grass grow, It's a totally different meaning. Here of course you would use a similarly. Whereas if he made this thing into a metaphor, it will have a different meanings. So you just wouldn't make it. So he just wouldn't make sense to use a metaphor there. So having seen these examples, Let's do your own exercise. The exercise is finish this similarly. Life is like now. If you watched Forest Gump, don't say life is like a box of chocolates. That's a really popular similarly from that movie. Don't say that because it's been used a lot. Try to make your own. If you want to see my results, pause the video now, make your own and then compare. But if you don't want to do that, just let the video play. And then you can do this exercise on your own time whenever you're ready. So here are my answers. Life is like a drunk person walking. Maybe this is not the greatest similarly ever. But if you picture a drunk person walking kind of like one step forward, two steps back, one step to the left, two steps to the right. That is kind of like life. There is something there. Again, I'm not saying this is a great similarly, but there's something there. Maybe if I rephrase that slightly, it will be better because a drunk person walking can be many different things. So at the moment, it's not specific enough to really have the listener or the reader picture it exactly as you want because there's too much room for interpretation here. Maybe drunk person walking about to fall. Does that mean die? No, it doesn't, right. So just the similarly right now, it needs editing. It's not clear, but at least as an example, it works. Now another example, my own similarly is life is like a train to know where. Again, he said The greatest similarly in the world, no. Is it a good example of a similarly yes. So he didn't like my similarly, your challenges to make one's better than I made and perhaps post them in the discussion of this video, I would like to see better versions of similes. That's my challenge to you. That's my exercise to you. And with that, I'll end the video here because I think we've covered similes in a pretty complete way with examples and exercises. 6. Rhyme schemes in poetry: In this video, let's look at rhymes. And I know that we all know rhymes from kindergarten essentially. But in this case, we're gonna look at rhyme specifically for poetry, different rhyme schemes and how to make rhymes really enhance your poetry and make it even a little bit musical. So let's start with something basic, just to show you what a difference a rhyme makes. Let's say we make the same point essentially, like I kick the ball all the way down the hall. Nothing exciting about this. There's nothing special. It just has a rhyme, like if we put it on two lines here, you see the first line, ball rides with the second line hall. So if we say it, it's kinda fun. I kick the ball all the way down the hall or I kicked the ball all the way down the hall. However you want to say it, you have complete freedom of how you do the timing and emphasis. But you see, I kicked the ball down the hall. Sounds cool and fun. As opposed to that second line, without the rhyme, same idea essentially. But without the rhyme, I kicked the ball into the kitchen or something like that. Even though the idea is preserved, for the most part, it's a boring idea. It's not fun at all. It's not catchy and memorable. We just lose so much where it's really fun to listen to. I kick the ball all the way down the hall. I'm not gonna say it's a tremendous amount of fund who isn't that simple rhyme, but it immediately makes things more catchy, more fun, more memorable, and it's just one line. Let's look at what you can do with rhymes, especially when you have really powerful lyrics. And those powerful lyrics are enhanced with rhymes, then it makes them so much better and stronger. And most importantly, really resonate with your reader or listener because that's the end of the day, what you want, you want them to go like, wow, rhymes really helped to emphasize points. So let's look at some more complicated examples. Here's an example from one of my songs where I rhymed every last word with other, every last word of these lines. You don't have to do it that way in a second, we'll go over more common and popular rhyme schemes. But this is still a good example because this has a lot of the same rhymes. So let's read it together. I was flying through the sky, is drunk on music lullabies. It's part of a song that deals with poetry and music and really being uplifted my music. So I was flying through the skies, drunk on musical alibis. Poets fill the skies with magic, butterflies for its music flies. This is not exactly great English grammar, but in poetry this passes. This is fine. Again, poets, music flies, sometimes it's cries. It fills my skies with magic butterflies. If it wasn't rhymed, this would be very blend. This would lose a lot of that cadence and musicality. Having looked at that, Let's look at another example of a more common way to rhyme things, because it's kind of rare to find so many words that rhyme and still make good points because at some point you just lose rhyming words. And so it becomes harder to make the points you want to make. The simplest thing you can do is divide your poem no matter how long it is into sets of two or four lines. So let's say four lines each. The reason for that is you can have a one-to-one too, kind of a rhyme scheme. The one-to-one to is really this is one, this is two. So the one and the two rhyme together. And then this is one again, and then this is two again. So here's how it would sound. The ribs would just come after another. So this is an example again from that same song, just a different part of it. Our world had magic. Magic is so sparse. The Puppet master stole beauty from the art. Sparse and art rhyme. It's not an exact rhyme. The next line is an exact rhyme. The first rhyme is a soft rhyme. It's not as catchy. Let's look at an exact rhyme, logged beauty and at our hidden by the misty fog. Only one hero can save her from beyond the smog, fog and smog Ryan pretty well because the OG, the whole last syllable is rhymed. But the example here is wine one rhyming would line two, line three, line four, and basically one line rhyming the next. And then as you can see, the third line can have a different vowel. The first is arts. That's the Rime, Sparse and arts. The a is what we're soft rhyming on. But the lines 34 is OG and OG, which is unlike the previous example where all the words rhyme together. Here you just need two lines to rhyme together. In this kind of a situation, you just need the two lines to rhyme together. Now let's look at an example of another common rhyme scheme, which is a little different. I'll put them side-by-side here so you can compare. This is an example where line one rhymes with line three. Line two rhymes with line for. Now in this example, I only have lying to Robin Wood line four. But that's fine. So here's how it would read. This is a translation I'm working on. So this is a poem by somebody else in the original languages, Russian, I'm translating it now, trying to keep the rhyme schemes interesting. It's not my poem, but it's from another popular poet. Anyway. Let's read it. So perhaps my loves naive and out of fashion, I made it my life's endeavor. It's a part of a song as a poem. It doesn't read catchy in any kind of way. But let's recall this word endeavor because it's been arrived with the word forever. You see lying to his rhyming with line four. So with that in mind, let's read it again. Perhaps my loves and I even out of fashion, I made it my life's endeavor. I fight for longing hearts and won't surrender a nobleman of tenderness forever. So the endeavor and forever rhyme. If there's a lot of space between the lines, you lose the rhyme, but it certainly an option. We can also make it more fun. Line 13 right now, don't rhyme, but we can make it rhyme. Something that rhymes with either fashion into the third line or something that rhymes with surrender instead of the word fashion. So let's think of what could that be? Let's just say, I'm not going to preserve a great point. I'm just gonna focus on the rhymes so we can say perhaps my loves naive and tender. Now this becomes a little bit bad poetry because it's a little too sweet. It's not tasteful anymore. At least I think it's just a little much like it's a little too sappy, but we're just doing this for the rhyme scheme. So tender. Now ribs would surrender. Let's read it again and see if it became more catchy. Perhaps my loves and they even tender. I made it my life's endeavor. I fight for longing hearts and won't surrender noblemen of tenderness forever. In this case, when I listened to myself saying it, I only feel a very faint trace of that rhyme. So when that happens, you can keep it. It's still fine. There's still a faint trace of the rhyme. Or you can shorten the lines. Or you can say it more musically with more emphasis on the rhymes. I'm not a good orator of these kinds of things in my poetry. It's usually sung in the song and all kinds of different elements are in play. But good readers of their own poetry can and do make this rhyme scheme work. In general, my preference is to stick with the one-to-one too. It's a lot simpler. And the logic that I have is, well, why would I make this complicated when there's already so many things that are difficult, like finding the right metaphors, saying things in a few words, like, it's already hard. I don't need my rhyme schemes to become more of a challenge than they are there already a challenge because sometimes they're so few words that rhyme with the words I want to use that I'm really limited in what I can say. I don't want to limit it further. That's why I use the simple case, which is the one-to-one, two. Or in this case, I wrote 1234, just basically when the lines next to each other rhyme. That's what I use most commonly, and that's what I recommend starting to work with. Before we wrap up this video, just a quick note with some rules. You should not be rhyming. Award with itself. You can't run forever and forever. You can't rhyme hello and hello. It has to be other words. The soft rhyme is just when one vowel matches. A full rhyme is when a whole syllable matches the full rhyme is usually more catchy. It usually sounds more fun. The problem is, is that there are fewer words that rhyme fully with other words. And sometimes you want to preserve the point you're making and it's a trade-off like do you want to make the points? Do you want it to be more catchy? What do you need in the end from that line? And really it's hard to tell because it really depends on the listeners and their experience. So there's a lot of variables in mind. And it's not always easy to understand exactly what you're gonna need ultimately in the end while you're writing. So that makes it really hard. Lastly, what I'll say is sometimes when we write certain words are spelled a certain way. They're not pronounced that way. But in the reader's mind when they read it, or if they read it out loud or if you read it out loud, you have to make sure that the rhymes still rhyme when you say them a certain way. Because some words are just not pronounced how they're spelled. And also by the same token, you can change how certain words are said if the poem is meant to be sung or spoken. For example, I'll give you a small example here. I wrote this little poem just now. It's not a good poem, but every word rhymes. I fell to her spell in an emotional swell because of her smell. She's such a bell in a well I guess I fell in a well would make more sense. So I fell in a well, but you understand basically I'm doing this whole thing with well Bell LLL. That's the rhyme. You see? Well, she could tell it's kind of fun only because of the rhymes. There's almost no story. I fell in a well because there were smell. That's essentially the story like I fell in love and we made it sound more fun and rhythmic. But what I wanted to show you here is that I'm really overdoing the L. I'm adjusting how the word sounds because of my need to make the rhyme scheme work better. For example, I fell, I'm really overdoing the vowel, the fal. Well, spell, swell. By the way, if you are going to talk your poems, if you're gonna show them in present. What you really want to do is talk the vowels. When we wanted to make things catchy and musical, we don't speak the consonants very much. We emphasize the vows. More spell, swell. There's more energy to it. It's more interesting. It sounds better. Just keep that in mind for if you ever present your poetry. So these are examples of different rhyme schemes. How rhymes really enhance what you've written, and how also you can bend the rhymes to even more enhanced, which are written by just mispronouncing some words by ten or 15%, which is still an okay amount. People will still understand what you're saying, but it will just sound more musical, more rhythmic. These are the basics of rhyming in poetry. You don't have to rhyme, but a rhythm or a rhyme will make lines in your poem more emphasized. It will perk the listener's attention. It will be more interesting to listen to. And therefore, obviously with audience retention where people will like it and so on and so on. So it is a definite plus. So you should definitely try to have it. 7. What makes writing a poem and not prose - poetry definition: With this video, Let's start this section of the course where we begin writing our poem. And right before we do that, I just wanted to give you a quick checklist that you should follow in order to make sure you're staying on the right track to see what are the elements of a poem. And every poem doesn't have all of these. But at least you should try to have as many of these as possible. So for content in your poem and ideas, you should try to have original ideas. Something interesting in your imagery. You should have lyrical creativity and daring. So you can even make up words. You can say things creatively. That's maybe not correct in grammar, but you can do that because it's poetry, if it works in your poem, if it aids your poem. Often also poems have main points or takeaways. They use metaphors and similes. They often also take the reader and invite the reader into a different world. They use few or no cliches because it's original and there's a lot of show don't tell, meaning. You're not explaining things. You're showing with imagery. You're evoking imagination. And the subject matter is interesting. The poem itself is interesting and it's compelling and it's humanely relatable. That's for your content ideas. Again, you may not have all of them, it's fine, but at least try to have as many of these as possible. Now, regarding your structure, again, you don't have to have all of these, but try to have as much as possible because they typically aid your poem quality. So a rhyme structure or a meter which gives it a cadence and musicality. You can also be creative in your grammar just like your creative, maybe in your word choices or your ward. Use or changes. Same thing with your grammar. You can be creative in how you use punctuation or phrase conjugation. And of course, be mindful of the tone and the voice and the intonation and pronunciation of the poem. How will we read, even if you don't plan to read it in the reader's mind, they're going to read it. And some words should be emphasized, and some words should not be, some phrases should be emphasized. And that's how you will write the poem. And so you should write the poem with that in mind. Because of their sum word or sprays, that's really important. You want that to be emphasized. Whether it's somebody reading it out loud or in their mind. That's a checklist for what you should have. In the next video, we're going to actually start writing your poem. We'll start with something very basic and we'll get into more complex poetry. 8. Start with single line or "pretty" idea: In this video, let's begin writing your poem. And we're just gonna write a one-line poem, essentially what it's about. And we're gonna build on it. So you should pick a topic that you care about that's relatable, that you're interested or passionate about, and hopefully that your audience and you can connect on a level of humanity. So let's stay away from politics, Let's stay away from social issues. Something more deeply human is a great topic and it should be something that is on your mind and in your heart now that will make it more interesting for you to write and more interesting for your readers as well. Hopefully, here's mine. Your should not have the same topic as me. But you can actually see how I'm doing mine and transfer that to how you do yours. But here's my topic that I chose. Maybe my topic will be myself doing with self-doubt. That's a common thing. I think a lot of people can relate and being maybe unhappy about some parts of how life is going. Of course, there's always reason to be happy and appreciate how a lot of the parts of life are going. It's not a poem about complaining or it's called King or being like, my life is so sad. No, I am grateful. But even though I am grateful, I am also honest that Hey, something's maybe are not coming out as well as I had hoped when I started out. And this is the part where you're humanly honest. It's very easy to say, everything's going great. I'm grateful. Thanks for everything. I'm a good human being. I appreciate it's very easy to say that it's almost like politically correct thing to say, but we should be honest with ourselves and examine everything from both perspectives. Like some things are going great. Some things may be going less than what I aim for. I can still be appreciative of all of it, but I'm still honest with the situation intellectually. And that's what my poem is gonna be about. Your poem should also be about something that's, you're in the gray area of life, essentially somewhere in your life in some topic. So choose what that is for you, and we'll do more on this in the next videos. 9. Starting with writing just one line of a poem: In this video, I'm gonna show you literally like one line poems, two little ones, just one lines. It's not a full poem obviously, but we're just starting and building up in tiny baby steps. I'm gonna show you how I put what I talked about in the previous video about maybe life working out in some ways. Not in some other ways or maybe not as good as I had hoped all that. How do you make that poetic instead of just explaining that in a million words, right? So here is my first attempt at it. And again, this is not the greatest poetry in the world. This is just for us to learn. And by the way, when you're learning, It's always a safe space. It's always supportive because poetry requires a lot of opening up and a lot of vulnerability. So whoever you're writing with, like right now you are writing with me kind of. We're always supportive even though we may give constructive feedback. It's always from a non-judgmental space, from a nice place, from a place of helpfulness. With that in mind, let's read our one line poem here that I wrote. So knocked out by self-doubt. Notice there's an inner rhyme. This could be two lines. I'm knocked out by self-doubt out and doubt kind of rhyme. So it's catchy to say. Again, it's an image that I painted. I'm knocked out by self-doubt. Imagine a person being knocked out by self-doubt. It's a metaphor. Self-doubt doesn't have the quality of bunching anybody, but a person can still be knocked out by self-doubt. If you picture in, imagine that this poem has imagery, has a metaphor, has a rhyme, and its whole accomplished literally in just a few words, essentially. Most importantly, I believe it gets the point across. Maybe in not a direct week as poetry isn't so direct sometimes. But it gets the point across that. There's self-doubt. There's an internal struggle. That kind of stuff is happening and it's really having a toll on me right. Knocked out. So having looked at that, let's look at the next line. The next line is basically just another attempt by me to come up with a line of a poem that summarizes what I wanted to write about. So let's look at it. Lives outcomes unfair. Put me in this pair. Here. There is no metaphor, but I am using creative grammar, language. It's not grammatically correct, but it's still clear, like lives outcomes unfair. Put me in this pair. It's rhymed, makes it catch you to say, it's a relatively original way to phrase things. And it still gets the point across, like life outcomes are unfair. And that puts me in this pair, right? That's the idea, is just phrased in a more poetic way. So those are my attempts. Try to sum up the idea of your poem, the sugar in the ripe, in also a slightly more creative poetic way. Then as we go through the next videos, we're going to build on that tiny step by tiny step. And then you're going to end up with a bigger poem. I mean, all of these are, they're the greatest poems in the world, of course not because it takes a lot of practice. It takes editing, etc, etc. But at least we are writing something which is the ideal for step. So with that, I'll see you in the next video. 10. Example of a bad beginner poem: Before we go on and write longer poems, I want to show you examples of bad poems and talk about why. Remember, this is art, it's objective. This is only my opinion. But I'm going to explain why I think it's bad. And these poems, I'm not going to tell you who wrote them there by amateur poets. And I feel okay showing them to you because you don't know who wrote it. That person is not embarrassed. It's fine. Again, it just opinion from appear like I'm a poet theropod. They might not like my stuff anyway. Let's look at this poem. It's very short and we'll talk about what's bad about it. Let's read it together. I won't chase you. Beg you to stay. I'm actually grateful. And finally awake. This is obviously a person who is dealing with a breakup. It's very literal here. What's wrong with it? I feel like it's lacking imagination. It's almost Pros, it's not very poetic at all. There's no metaphors, there's no similes. There aren't really interesting ideas. The poet thought, I think, that I'm actually grateful and finally awake. I think they thought that this is an interesting idea. But I think this is kind of like it belongs in a tweet or something, which is an insult for a poem because it's something that people just repeat all the time. Or I'm strong, I'm moving on, that kind of stuff, right? Anybody can put on that fake face. I'm not seeing any vulnerability by the poet. And above all, I think that's the worst thing about it. There is no vulnerability. This is a fake poem. Because really, why, right? If you've already moved on and you're so grateful, I just don't think there's much interesting there. What would be interesting? There is an exploration of real emotions of dealing with the breakup. Something that's relatable. And again, it's my subjective opinion because you might say, Well, them getting over the breakup is relatable, but I'm not into it. This is not doing anything for me because I think there was an opportunity to make this interesting and unique and offer an interesting perspective. But this perspective really falls flat to my taste. It really is a little bit too cliche. Like I'm so strong, I'm moving on. All of us have heard that a million times before. We don't really need it. There's nothing original about it. It makes it boring and predictable. We don't want to write that. We want to catch ourselves if we write that and say, oh, wait, let's write, let's make this more interesting. That's my critique of this poem. So now let's look at another bad poem and also see that we like either with that like it, what's good, what's bad about it? Now here's the other poem, very short. I flourished in the sunshine, just as I do in the shade. Again. There's no interesting ideas pretty much here, no metaphors, no imagination. This could be a tweet, which is our insult. It's an idea that I've come across a million times. The comparisons here are now to imagine that if like really flourished in the sunshine and you flourish in the shade. Wow, good for you. You know, there's just not much on this bone here. That's the worst thing about this poem. I'm okay with no rhymes. I'm okay with many things. But I wanted to have an aha moment takeaway. I don't have that here. And that's why this poem does not get a pass for me. Now let's look at another poem that's not so good. There was nothing quite wrong, but it didn't feel right. You kept me in the dark. It's time to make my own light. Okay, this has a rhyme scheme, line two and line four, rhyme, right? And light. That's fine. It's rhyming, it's a little bit cadence. I can see the rhythm here. But again, there's a lack of imagination. Again, if you read it, there's nothing quite wrong, but it didn't feel right. Okay. We're in the gray area of life. That's cool. But I feel like there are so many better ways to phrase being endowed and not knowing where you stand in a relationship or in life. So it just could be so much better. That's the problem. We're dealing with. Something mediocre. Now, line three, you kept me in the dark. Outline for its time to make my own light. Okay, great. This person is also moving on its same, similar sort of stuff. This feels like a child who is scared of the dark. But to make themselves feel brave, they say, I'm not scared of the dark. This feels a little bit like that. Like this person is obviously dealing with something. But their writing that they're not, It's a little disingenuous to yourself, I think as a poet. Now to contrast the mediocre poetry, I want to show you an example of good poetry. This is an example of a Russian poets work. His name is Bulara Qu Java, that I translate it to English. And I wanted to just show you the imagery he uses. It's very powerful here, at least in my opinion. So let's read it together. Above my road. Shine just like your eyes. Too cold evening stars looking down at me. It's a similarly, the stars are shining cold, just like perhaps some woman's eyes, because the protagonist of the story is male. It's a song, it's a poem. That's an a song. So in this particular song, it's a male protagonist talking about the woman whose eyes to him, few cold like the two evenings stars that China above his road. So it's really kind of thought evoking imagery and then continues even stronger. Maybe if there was warmth in your embrace, my road might've been easier to bear. If you can imagine maybe having a loved one or somebody who you want them to wish you well, but they didn't want them to send you off with a warm embrace in the warm goodbye, but they didn't. There's a lot of loneliness and that there's a lot of sadness in that. But he doesn't say, I'm sad. He shows it in this very lyrical, imaginative, creative, but very human way. Probably many of us can identify with a time in their life when they wanted more warmth in somebody's embraced but there just wasn't. You see, it's kinda talking about the same things that those mediocre poems were talking about. But certainly in an imaginative, really humane. And you can even say to me, deeply moving way. It's not just to me actually because this is part of an extremely popular Russian song that I actually translate it to English. It's on my YouTube channel. And actually in English, people love this song as well. Of all the songs that have done on my YouTube channel so far. This gets the most positive comments from real people who I don't know, but they just found the song on YouTube and they loved it and they loved it enough to comment. And the comments are like, Wow, it's so touching and so on and so on. So this actually resonates with a lot of people across cultures. So hopefully that paints a picture of the same sort of topic is covered, but in a mediocre way versus equality way. 11. Next step up - the Haiku - poetry from Japanese culture: In this video, let's take our poem that we're working on. And previously we've only written one line and I showed you my one line. Actually two example of how I write it. A natural way to expand it into a haiku. A haiku is a three-line poem that has a specific structure. Five syllables, seven syllables, five syllables. So this line would have five syllables like that. The next line would have seven syllables like that. And this line would have five syllables again. So you have a very strict structure into the structure, you have to fit a whole poem. Now, the haiku is a poem from a Japanese tradition. Obviously we're doing this in English. The language is very different, so I don't want to enforce strict counting of syllables. If you're off by one syllable is fine. And you know what? Sometimes you can say I versus I will, and you're kind of cheating. You can have one or two syllables. So let's not be too strict on the syllables, but certainly not stray away from it too much. But here you essentially get three lines to write a poem and you would just expand that poem, but that may be you did in one line before. Hopefully now you can expand it into three lines. And I wrote my own haiku just for you for this exercise. So here's my own haiku about how, you know, like life. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad, Something's workout, something's Overkalix. Kind of like the gray area of life. Again, we're appreciative of things we have. We're grateful, but at the same time, we're honest with what things are falling short, what things are not. Here's my haiku. I punch, life's unfair. So obviously I'm taking a lot of liberties with grammar. I could've used more syllables here, but it just would've taken me off over the 575. So in my case, I stayed strictly with a 575 syllable structure. Let's stay with it. I punch, life's unfair. Even though there are grammar issues, I think you can still understand what that is. Life's unfair. There's a lot of things that are unfair in life and I punch it, but I can't hit my despair. Every punch just hits air. Everyone is dealing with self-doubt, despair. At least partially. No one is all happy all the time. But in this case, it's kind of like I'm losing to it. But I can't hit my despair. Every point is just loses air. I'm not saying I'm strong. I am so amazing. I'm not doing that. I'm being vulnerable in this poem. Now, writing it, It's impossible to tell how it will be red and felt by listeners or readers. But certainly when you are vulnerable, you give yourself more chance that it will resonate with people's real emotional memory of their own such experiences, which is valuable to them, which is actually valuable to me, which is why I'm writing about, It's an interesting thing to explore. So try to take your poem now and put it into the structure. Again, look, you can mess around with the syllabus because look, the last line, every punch is just heating air. I can say that we can have exactly the same meaning, but 123456 syllables. Okay, so the exact syllables, they don't have to matter in this case because you can just tweak the wording. It's still try to have something interesting and sensible in your haiku. Now, also notice I have a rhyme scheme which is rare for a haiku. Unfair despair, air. They all rhyme together. It's actually hard to do. You don't have to do it. But it's a plus because now my haiku is also k1, its musical. It's fun to say and it's more memorable. So again, you don't have to have that, but it is a plus that I wanted to point your attention what I did here, try to write now your haiku. And in the next videos we are going to grow this to a longer poem. 12. 4-line poem that can also be a song chorus: Previously we wrote a haiku there poem and hopefully you created your haiku. And so let's take that to a four-line poem. In my case, four lines. It's great for a song because a typical course of a song, and if you're not familiar with the course of a song is typically the memorable, catchy part of the song. The part of the song that you sing along to. It's usually four lines. So it's great because now we are going to be able to use something in a song. This is actually the chorus of the song that I'm gonna be writing with this exact idea, with this exact poem. And a song is about 16 to 24 to 28 lines depending on the length of the song and the complexity of the lyrics. But for now, we're not do a chorus. And even if you're not doing a song, a four-line poem isn't really good. One of the standard length of a small poem. It's very present the bowl, you can post it on Instagram, on Facebook. It's very digestible to readers, so it's a good length. Let's read what I did to our previous haiku that I wrote and shared with you in this one. And obviously I have more space here, not just that I have an extra line, but just every line can have a little bit more space. So let's read it together. I ran headfirst through walls and the word unfair, it's an image. I ran head first. It's a metaphor. Obviously I didn't run through literal walls, but it's a metaphor that shows the intensity of what's happening. Then a gotta wolves bite and a dampening glare. Again, I don't have a wolves bite. I don't have a dampening glare. These are metaphors, but hopefully they illustrate the intensity of what had to happen here. It's something that sort of happens as you go through life. You have to toughen up. But I'm not saying it in those literal words. I'm saying that in sort of poetic language. Then I'm saying still swinging hard but can't hit my despair. Even though I had this moment where I'm saying, hey, I'm so strong, I have a wolves bite and a bla, bla bla and a demi and glare and I'm so strong and all that right away, vulnerability, still swinging hard, but I can't hit my this pair with every punch. I'm just hitting air. So no matter how hard I try, it all falls flat or it feels like that. So it's a poetic way to express something. Notice how many metaphors there are. There's like metaphors in every line to metaphors here. Metaphor here, hit my despair. Obviously, you don't hit this pair. This pair is not a physical thing. I'm not actually swinging. There's like two metaphors for line. With every punch I'm just hitting air. I'm not actually punching air, right? So it's not a thing I'm actually doing, but it's an image I'm trying to paint that if you picture this kind of a person, maybe there's something relatable. And also notice the rhyme scheme, unfair glare, rhymes, despair, air rhymes. It's musical. Hopefully, when I put music to it, it will make it catchy. If it becomes sketchy. This makes music that kind of thing that you want to lose them to again and again, is kind of cool lines. At least let's say according to me, it's not the greatest writing in the world. I'm not Shakespeare, but I think it's kind of cool. It's something original here. I'm painting my own sort of original picture with these words. And there was a catchy rhyme scheme. And if I'm successful at coming up with the right melody, this can become the foundation for a catchy song. The song is still far ahead in the future. We're just dealing with the lyrics. But at least you see how a song would develop. And even if you don't sing this, if you perform it or if you have somebody read it in their minds, if they're sensible to reading it, they will see that hey, unfair and glare rhymes. And so they might emphasize that even if there silently reading, they might emphasize that in their mind. 13. Turning the short poem into a longer poem: 16-28 original lines: In this video, I want to share with you the full poem that came out from that haiku that I showed you how I wrote than the four-line poem. Then we have now a full length bomb that can also be a song which I'm working on turning it into a song. And it took me a number of weeks, actually. Get it from the four-line poem to what I'm going to show you is about a 30 line poem in, is because the storyline that's a little bit too long to show in a video. And really they said, I'm going to have it as a downloadable if you want to read through, it will read through together. I'll only highlight the most important part just because it's gonna be a little too long if I focus on details. And the most important thing for you really is to just see how it evolves for me. Maybe see if there's anything that resonates with you. If there's any image that resonates with you, take that away as a learning experience. You don't have to copy what I did. But for your topic that you're writing, C, if you create something like this, and the way I did it is I created a long poem that has the structure of a song. Because I'm going to obviously turned this into a song. At least that's the plan. If you're not planning to turn your palms into songs, you can have more free structures for your poem. But I will warn you that what I see a lot of beginner poets do is if they embark on longer poems and they don't have a specific structure, then it gets crazy and wild because you don't know when to stop, you don't know how long, how long it's supposed to be. The editing becomes hard because you don't have a target. Here. I have a real strict target structure. And that actually made it easy for me to fit everything that I wanted to say into it for you. What I would recommend if you're new at writing longer poems like over ten lines or so, especially they get into 2030 lines and more. Pick a structure beforehand and try to fit things into it. It's not something that you want to do as you get more experience. But certainly you will get really lost if you don't stick to a structure. And a structure will actually help you stay organized and on track and not have too many supercilious things because also are things we add to our poems we need to take out during the editing. But sometimes if you have a lot of space, you're not constrained by space. And so you don't take things out that actually damage your poem because brevity and being to the point actually makes it better than having a longer poem. Not always like that, but often. So anyway, that's just my advice for if you're writing longer poetry. But let's look at what I did here. And let's see what you can take away from what I did. The first verse and songs are kind of like verse, verse chorus. So here's the first verse vision. I see five-year-old me, first-time knocked down innocent, scattered on the ground. So young and already so-called, tugging my sleep with a plea, asking only one thing, make life turnout for me. Now, it's kind of complicated, so I'll explain that a little bit. Vision I see. So it's kind of like me, the current age mete. It sees this vision of me at five years old getting knocked down. And then it's kind of like in the imagination, this five-year-old, me tugs my sleeve with a plea. The five-year-old tugs the sleeve of the current asking make life to or not for me. It's a little bit of a dark kind of opening. I would say it's a little bit imaginative because, you know, you always have the younger you sort of next to you. It's a part of you. But here I put the younger mean right next to me. And the younger youth, they're always weak. The child. And so they're asking you, Hey, make life for not for you. That's what I tried to do in the opening. And notice there's a lot of imagery, innocent, scattered on the ground. Metaphor. Vision may see five-year-old me, first-time knockdown, You know, like you and next to your younger you. That's not a common image. We typically imagine. There's a few things going on here. And then I answered that in the course, which is similar to our four line poem that I showed you before. And it answers to that child would happen later. Well, here's what happened later. I ran headfirst through walls in the word unfair. Gotta wolves bite and a dampening glare. This paints the picture of like this Refer adult. The child was innocent. That voltage refer. Then the adult still swinging hard but can hit my despair with every punch. I'm just hitting air. So the adult is rougher. But what is that worth anyway? It doesn't seem like it's really compensating for everything. It's still, some things are off. So then we get into V2, which is still the story. And V2 is like this. I see me at 20 fighting for this kid. Now, instead of picturing just me at five years old, I also see me at 20 and I'm choosing a life path, but I'm dreadfully and equipped, you know, kind of like 20-year-old young adults. They don't know everything about life. They're not fully equipped, right? Backpack over my shoulder, maths fall out because it's unzipped. Somebody's taught him for the rest of my life, I'll be fixing his ****. Now I took a little liberty with the word **** just because it rhymes with unzipped and it sounds kind of cool. But the idea is, you know, like decisions you make when you're 20 or 18 or whatever, you'd have to live with them for the rest of your life in a way. And some of those decisions aren't quite right, but you have to live with them and you have to fix them and they lead you to certain directions. So that's the line for the rest of my life. I'll be fixing his shed. Some of the decisions may be born right. But I couldn't No, it's just 20 years old. There's a lot more kind of philosophical stuff going on here in the worst too, but I'm not gonna get into it because it's a little too detailed and I don't want the video to run too long. So let us get to verse three. Still talking about the young adult. He dreams of ideals, but stuck in swamps of the mundane. Metaphors see swamps of the mundane. There's no such thing as a metaphor helps turn frustration that every bend, anger boils with a depth of its youthful flame. I look back and watch him grow and raised in insane. If you were speaking this and if you were reading this, you would say, I look back and watch him grow in, raised and insane, like this attorney in point of the song here. Where this kid gets in angrier or crazier as an adult as life goes on. Now it's not autobiographical. I don't think I'm crazy or angry, but I thought it would be cool for this poem. And honestly, when I was writing this every other day, I was like, is this too much? I wonder if I overwrote it like, I'm not crazy and I'm not angry. But I thought it would be cool for the poem. It's an artistic piece, of course, a lot of people often interpreted like, is this autobiographical, I do crazy. Well, are you angry? And of course I'm gonna hear it from all my friends. Hey, why are you writing this? My mom will call me, hey, like why are you writing this heavy crazy? Like Are you angry? Is anything wrong? Right? That kind of thing? No, no, I'm not crazy. I'm not angry. But in the poem, I thought it would make it cooler. And then in the song usually the course would repeat after this, is the same lyrics from the course. We're gonna skip that. And then the bridge happens. That bridges a little too long for a standard song. In this case, I might have to cut it when I make a song out of it. But what I wanted to do in the bridges kind of have a different perspective. So let's read it. So in this whole song, like I'm looking for the destination, There's hold this whole life path metaphor happening. So I addressed that here. I'm looking for destination. But every turn has more frustration. I want to find the 80-year-old me to ask if life worked out. You see, I'm looking. So we had the five-year-old, the 20-year-old, the me, the adult now me. And then I'm looking for the 80-year-old me, the one that's going to grow up hopefully in I want to ask him what happened. And that's where we are. I wanted to find the 80-year-old me to ask if life worked out, but he's nowhere to be found. I sink into self-doubt. I led that five-year-old down. We watch our life gap size. I can't look in his eyes. He's kind of like he's still standing next to me. But I'm like, did I fail him? What happened? We can't do that. I die. I don't know. Like it would be weird to write. Like we met the 80-year-old and he said everything is great and fine, or he said everything is bad. I thought it would be cool if it was ambiguous and open-ended, like we can't find him is a little more mysterious. So that's where I left it. It's more dramatic. I'm like, Oh my God, we really won't find out. And then that's how this bridge ends. I think if it was a poem, probably these three lines I would cut in the song. I'm currently writing a melody and I found the way to make it sound cool. So I'm keeping these three lines, but that just a matter of what you're going to use this for, generally abridging the song would be four lines, so even here it's a little long. But whatever, we got the general idea, then the last verse of the song, the last part of the story. I'd thought to end up with something hopeful in moments when I feel like I've drowned, that child in me opens a world clock rewound. Here I was in the writing doing with the rhyme schemes, drowned rewound, and the lengths of the Vs. They really had to be strict and mimic each other in all the verses so that the melody can fit when I write it in those hung. So the wording here is a little weird. I kind of left it like that, but I know it doesn't sound quite right. I just took that liberty for the song. Anyhow. So the child, when he opens a world clock rewound, were magic is floating like a blown dandelion. Wonder still waiting to be found. Kind of ended with something hopeful. I think this is philosophically maybe the weakest verse, but it actually took a long time to write it just, it was really hard to tie in all the loose ends of the song or a poem. And then finish with the last chorus, which is mostly the same, up to the third lines still swinging hard but can't hit my despair. And then finish with a slightly different ending at the very end of the song. But sometimes I find magic in the air. A second, forget about this pair. This pair is not going away. Problems are still here, but sometimes there's a second where you forget about it at all. And that's the most hopeful spot where I left it. It's not too hopeful, but it's not hopeful. You know, it's kind of like in the middle of life somewhere. So that's how my poem came out in the future. I don't know when. I don't know when you're going to see this, but I'm gonna put the song when I get around to recording it, editing it, all that stuff, making a video for it. It's gonna take awhile. But I'm gonna put it on my YouTube channel. I have no idea when, like I said. But if you're curious, you can check out my YouTube channel. Alex getting denied music and see the previous songs I released and this one, because actually I think this one, the melody I'm writing will be cool as a song and really see how the music makes the lyrics come alive. And that's it. That's my longer poem. And now it's your turn to write yours. As I mentioned, this took me a while. So it's not like overnight, you're gonna come up with a whole story and a whole bunch of metaphors. It takes a lot of soul searching, heart searching, editing, etc, feedback. That's the process you should go to. I don't think you're just gonna overnight half of this. If you are, It's not gonna be good. It's only going to be good after a ton of editing and all that. So don't let that stop you though is just the regular process. So now it's your turn to embark on that arduous process. That's also very rewarding. So go for it. 14. How to improve and an intellectual challenge for poets for growth: Now let's talk about how to improve as a poet. Well, there are some obvious basics that you can do and everybody essentially does IVs the right more and read more poetry by the grades, you must get inspired and get ideas from people like Shakespeare and all the other great poets who came before you. If you don't, you'll have a lot of blind spots. And experienced readers and other writers will easily notice our lack of the right fundamentals that you would get from reading the classics and the grades that came before you if you don't read them. So that's like a requirement than a mass. And it's actually just enjoyable to also make sure you get a lot of feedback from all sources. We'll talk about that shortly. Also put it out there. Put your writing on Amazon, on the Kindle, make videos about a church, your friends, and also be self scrutinizing because a lot of times today people are like, You're so great, you're so great. And that's the feedback we get a lot today, even though people are just being nice and kind of fake. But in the arts, you can't accept that in the art. You have to be absolutely objective and find all the flaws. Because guess what? If people aren't verbalizing the flaws, the field in how your art impacts them. That's why self-scrutiny is extremely important here. It doesn't mean you have to make yourself have low confidence, know, but certainly you have to find the flaws to improve it. Let's talk about getting feedback because it's so important really in every profession, but especially in the arts. Now I'm going to make a suggestion that's going to seem a little contrarian. I'm going to say that you should love your haters and your trolls. They're pointing out where you can be better, even if they phrase things and hateful or not nice language. There is a reason why they don't like your work. Most haters, they're gonna find something that irked them in your work. And of course, you don't have to take all of their advice, but certainly you should think about it to look for clues, because some clues are easy to find out how you can improve. But some clues of how you can improve are so hard to find that it will take you years. It's actually a lot of really complex work to find all of your flaws. And haters and trolls are one of the great tools to identify what's a problem in your work. This is the kind of advice you will rarely hear. You usually hear exactly opposite advice. The lungs into the trolls, blah, blah, blah. That's fine if you just want to protect your feelings. But here we're after something greater and bigger. We're after making better art. Because your friends, 95% of them, they're afraid to give you that kind of help of being truly critical because they don't want you to get offended. They don't want to strain the relationship. Everybody's politically correct these days it's easier for them, but it doesn't help you. If people say nice, nice, nice, it feels good in the moment. But long-term, you don't get that great benefit. And of course again, the feedback you get, you can think about all of it and synthesized it, but you don't have to take all of it. What the feedback does, it just gives you more ideas to think about, more ideas to synthesize. Now there are also constructive ways to get feedback on your work from other peers. And that's something like attending writing workshops. Every city has a bunch of writing workshops. You have to Google or ask around. And these are specifically designed to get feedback like people will read their work to a group of peers than the peers will comment. The feedback is sometimes limited because the peers don't have a lot of time to process your work. Don't have a lot of time to explain to you what's wrong with it. But at least you get some feedback. And what some of them you can build relationships and then you can give and receive feedback with individuals there that you have a good working relationship with and with chemistry long-term. You can make writer friends. Like any industry, you have to network within your industry. And this is exactly how you do that in writing. Now, also, regarding being self-critical, every year, you should give yourself the challenge of looking back at your previous year's work and have at least some discussed okay. Be turned off by it, at least to some degree. Now again, it's a little bit contrarian, like why would you have that? Why would you do it to yourself? Why would you do that your work? Well, because every year you'll be finding mistakes that today you the improved you with that make. If you're disgusted by your past work. It means today you have improved. If you don't see a lot of flaws in your previous work, that means you haven't improved. Now, most poets, including myself, right? A lot of mediocre poetry, especially early on. Every poets challenge is to say, I'm bad, and then find the way to improve. Because it's very easy for a beginner port to write platitudes and write about. I'm so great and I'm so strong, that kind of worthless poetry. And until every individual has that dialogue with themselves and tells themselves while I'm writing worthless poetry, they won't improve. So it's very kind of soul searching moment that you might have. But it's a moment of growth because your audience will also see that when you improve, your audience response will improve. So that's the challenge actually, that I have that challenge for myself. And if you're starting out, make it a challenge for yourself. Get to a moment where you look back at your previous poetry and say, Wow, this is worthless poetry. Today I'm writing worthwhile poetry. Next year. That poetry thought it was worthwhile. Maybe it won't be still the best poetry in the world, but it won't be worthless. It will just have flaws. And you will say, Oh, I see how improved it still had a lot of flaws. Here's how I'm improving this year. And every year. They should be the cycle. If there is one year without the cycle, something's going wrong. If you stay consistent and improve every year, right? Better and better poetry. Eventually, you'll get to a high amateur or professional level where some things become possible. You may become a published poet. You may actually sell as an independent poet, but you sell successfully on Amazon. Or you might perform your poetry to a bigger and bigger audience who actually likes the poetry and comes back. So all that growth will only really happen once your work is good. If you're judged purely on your work, of course, you can have gimmicks like you can dress and flashy ways or things like that. But if you're gonna be judged purely on the quality of your poetry, you have to have a very intense focus on self-improvement. 15. Editing, editing and more frustrating editing: I want to quickly talk about how to make your current poem the best it can be. So many people, they write their poem. They edited a little bit and they think it's done. But actually professionals and a professional approach would be something like this. First you have a draft 0 where you just put down your ideas. You added that, you get it to a reasonable draft. You get feedback from other people, maybe your friends and family. You take that feedback into consideration. You fix all the things that people pointed out that makes sense to you. Obviously, not everything they pointed out, but those things that you agree on. Then when you fix that, that becomes your draft one. Then you take your draft one and you get feedback from the same people, but also from different sources again, right? So it's kind of this iterative cycle. The different sources can be greater circle of friends, maybe workshops, etc. Then the same thing happens where you take the feedback you got there, you edit the poem, you'll get draft two. And this continues and continues and continues. And you can do this quickly, get feedback everyday, fix it every day. It gets you take every day to get fixed there every day so that you can publish this quickly. But if you can be patient with the final release gets, guess what's gonna happen in about a week or in about a month, you'll have a whole new level and dimension of ideas like, Oh my God, I could've taken this to a whole different direction. And oh my God, I could have done this. So if you obviously spend two or three months on a poem, versus if you spend a couple of days or a week on a poem, you're going to have richer ideas in general at a high level for the poem. And it's gonna be levels better like that. So yes, feedback is great. And of course you should always proofread get feedback. But patients with the final release can also really help. But even if you're not to patients, then you want to release quickly. Definitely go through that iterative feedback cycle. Almost make it a rule of thumb like you can't publish or you can't show anything to anybody. Unless you've actually done a few feedback cycles. Because without that editing process, it's just never ready. All writing, all creative work becomes better only after a lot of editing. So it's like 5% creativity. And ninety-five percent you being patient, discipline and professional, and getting that poem to a place when it's red to a point where it's reaching its maximum potential of quality. That's the idea of this video that I wanted to convey. 16. Introduction to creating your poetry book and performing: Now I know if you write poetry, one of your dreams is to create a poetry book. And that's why in the next videos I'm going to show you how to actually create your poetry work and upload it to Amazon and create your Kindle book and the paperback book. So what I'm gonna do in the next videos is I'm going to walk you through all the setup steps so that your poetry book when it's ready, so that it can go on the Kindle. You can also have it in paperback form. So in the next few videos, we'll go through the Kindle setup process for how to set up your book in the Kindle in under 30 minutes. We'll go over how to create your book cover. And we'll even go over some very initial basic promotion strategies that just a little bonus extra because every person writing poetry that I know he's dreaming, dreams of having their own poetry books. So that's why it's a special thing we're gonna be doing now in the course. And it's a pretty simple process. You'll see that I'll walk you through it pretty quickly. And you'll have a very clear idea of everything to do to actually have your Kindle or paperback print book that is done for you entirely on Amazon. So with that, let's begin. 17. Complete setup process to publish your book on the Kindle: In this video, I'll walk you through the steps of setting up and publishing your first Kindle book on Amazon. The first step is obviously to go to kVp.amazon.com, that's ADP.amazon.com. That's Kindle Direct Publishing platform that you have to use to publish on the Kindle. Obviously, if you don't have an account, you would set up an account. And if you have an account already, maybe your Amazon account, you just sign in with that. And the account setup is pretty straightforward. You click sign up. Most people already have an Amazon account. Kvp. P just stands for Kindle Direct Publishing. Your kVp will just be associated with your main account. If you don't have an account, then you just say create your kVp account here. Then it asks you for your basic information like your name, email, password, and then says create your kVp account. Pretty simple. It's not hard to set up this account. Once you set up an account and you're logged in, you'll go to kVp, that amazon.com, and you'll see something like this. This is your kVp dashboard. You see I have no books here. This is a clean account. This is not the account I use. I'll show you the account I use an a second, but this is closer to what you'll see when you just create your account. So the reason I'm showing you this is just because I don't want you to get surprised by all the extra things I have in my account. But now that you're not surprised, now that you know what to expect more or less. And of course this is going to change over time. Amazon is going to change their layout, but for years they haven't. Really. What you really need to do is find, obviously you're publishing on the Kindle. So you need this option and you can find it anywhere even if they changed their design. So let's go to my account and start the setup process from there, because that's actually where all host the book that I'm setting you up now, the setup of which I'll walk you through. This is my account and you see I already have some books published. But in any case, what I'll do is just click on this Kindle e-book and then it brings me to this page. You'll see there's a three-step process, three major steps. The Kindle book details you have to enter, then the content you have to upload that your manuscript, and then setting your pricing and everything. So we'll go through that together. So obviously my languages, English. And of course, you will set this for whatever you have, then your book title and subtitle. So I'm gonna grab that. And the book I'm uploading is a poetry book that is kind of poetry that I made music too. And that music is on my YouTube and that idea of my Kimball is to promote my music and poetry. So with that in mind, That's my title. Poetry book would songs and the subtitle will be poetry collection for journey into beauty. Now, I don't love this title, to be honest, I don't love the subtitle. Here's the good news. Your first upload is your drafts 0, meaning that you can Unpublish the book every publish it later from scratch. If you have a new title in mind, sometimes it's not so easy to change the title because it's associated with your book cover and your ISBN, etc. But in the worst case, let's say I really don't love this title, which I don't really love this title yet, then I can just either published a slightly different book, has a new book, or unpublished this book. And just republish it being the same book, but just republish it fresh and clean. That's totally possible. So I'm not too worried about my title and subtitle because I know it doesn't have to be the final. This is sort of drafts 0. If you are uploading with the idea that this is gonna be my final draft, I'm never going to re-upload again. Then of course you want to give your title and subtitle a lot more thought. But in most cases it's not that necessary. Then as we go on the series, this is if you have a multi book series, we're gonna skip that for now because I don't edition number. We're going to obviously have the first edition author, your name. If other people contributed, which in most cases they didn't. So we're going to leave that blank description. This is very important. You want to describe your book really well. Here I wrote a brief description. You can also edit this later. The description you can edit anytime you don't have to Unpublish the book. So it's not a problem then the publishing rights, probably in most cases people will own the copyright for their book. So we'll just set that. And then the keywords I used to tools through Google Keyword Tool and helium ten, and basically just found keywords. In many cases, keywords are obviously like, for example, poetry, poetry book, like love poems. Some of the poem translations in this book are from the original point, will article Java. So I wanted to have that as one of the keywords. And by the way, if there are some keywords you didn't find that you wanted, you can always come back to this and update this as well. Then we move on and we said categories, in your case obviously would find the one that's relevant for you. I chose two categories, love poems. And because again, I translated some poems from a Russian word, I added that Russian poetry. So pretty simple. Save then the age range that you want to select. I think probably for poetry 16 and over again, he would fill this out wherever it makes sense for you. And then you would choose whenever you want to publish your book, you can release now, which for most of us that will be the case or make it on pre-order. So I will release now in my case, Save and Continue. And we'll be done with the first part of our setup. And you see it takes you through the second part of the setup. This is where you have to upload your manuscript and it tells you fork ADP what format you want to use. For example, see the full list here. Doc ex ePub KPF. There's a ton of them. So you can click that. And it will take you to all the formats. Pdf is available, So it pretty simple. Many formats are available. Again, the formatting, you can make it prettier later. But for now this is draft 0. The goal of this is just to launch early get feedback, etc. If you have that goal, you can be early in your formatting. If you don't have that goal, if you can wait, you would go maybe YouTube, how to format your book for your specific situation, for a specific type of book that you have or you would go on Fiverr.com and hire a freelancer or something like that. But for now, you just want to upload your manuscript with whatever you have if you're in a rush where you want to launch early. And so I would click on upload the manuscript, go and get my manuscript and just upload. They give you a warning that most PDF files don't produce great results in automated conversion. Again, I'm just gonna do this now. I'm going to take a look at how this looks like. If it doesn't look good, I'll re-edit the formatting. But for now we'll say continue with PDF. It's gonna take a few minutes to upload. I'll just fast forward to the point where it uploads. After that, it's going to say upload a cover. If you don't have a cover, you can launch the cover creator. It's not gonna make you the most beautiful book cover, but it's gonna be fast. That's what we're after. You can always update your cover later. You will choose a design and then style and edit. So say got it here, you continue. And we would choose the design from their gallery. Let's say we want something artsy. In my case, I want something maybe kind of abstract because it's poetry, something kind of artsy. So let's go on maybe, what's art paper here? Pastels. You would sort of browse the left side here and see what makes sense for you. Like I had one, maybe something inspirational. I browsed and I sort of like this abstract one. I'm going to use this image. I like the read of it because it's going to stand out. You see, it gives you options for how it would look like. I think that few of these, Luke, reasonable, like this one has very bold and readable title, which is good on Amazon. It's very similar with this one. I think this one is a little bit cool and artsy because it kind of goes the diagonal, but maybe It's a little too artsy. And this one I kind of liked because it has kind of like a retro old-school feel. I'll probably changed the cover. So it doesn't really matter. But I do like this one that does stand out to me. So I'm gonna say choose this design, preview, Save and Submit. Great, so I've got my cover. After that. You want to launch your viewer just so you can see how the texts will look in the book. That's the manuscript you uploaded. The one that he told me, hey, like your PDF might not look good. So you can actually preview this. Whatever this is going to show, you may not look the same on all devices because they are Kindle devices, smartphone devices, iPad devices, android devices that are tablets. So there are many devices. Some people will even read this on their television. Who knows? But this is at least going to give you some sense of, are there blatant errors? And it's gonna take a minute or two to spin. And I'm going to fast-forward to the moment where it finishes spinning. And then we'll pick up the video from there. I'll just cut it to that point. Now it took about five minutes of converting and my book isn't very long. It might take awhile in your case. And then once it's ready, it's just going to give you an option of launching the viewer. You'll see how it looks like. So this is the cover. And then you click Next. So far so much. Okay, not terrible. This is just the beginning of the book then you've got the palms. Okay, So it kinda looks okay. Some of these are not well formatted. Like the titles look broken and some of the indentations I had aren't working, so I have to go in and check it out. So I do need to fix the formatting nonetheless, because it's gonna go through some review process and it's going to maybe have other issues. I want to complete the setup process because while that's happening and it might take a day or two at the Amazon team might have to look at it. There may be a couple of days between this moment and when the book is live. I'll actually have time to fix. The formatting issue because I probably will just fix the formatting issue in like 30 minutes or an hour. I can re-upload my manuscript without having to delay the launch of my book. So actually even though there are problems with this manuscript, I'm actually going to move forward with the uploading and publishing of the book as though there aren't because I can fix this before any readers actually see it. So with that in mind, let's say, okay, on the top-left we will go to, go back to book details and we'll say, Great, It looks fantastic, even though it doesn't. We'll be able to say seven continue before that. There's this ISBN question, but it says Kindle e-books are not required to have ISBN, so we're going to not enter anything. And for publisher, if you're an independent publisher, you want to enter your name. So Save and Continue. It's going to save that. And then it gets to the fun part, pricing. First it asks you, do you want to enroll your book in kVp? Select. It just basically enrolled if you can, because you just get a little bit more access to potential readers. Territories, unless you have any restrictions. Why not enter all territories? Primary marketplace, amazon.com. If you're in a different country, it might be a different one for you, but that's my primary one. Now, my book, my personal book. This book is a very short poetry book. I only want to price it at the lowest, lowest price possible, which is $0.99. Because it's $0.99, I have to enter the thirty-five percent royalty. Because you see if I enter the 70% royalty, it says only books that are between 3 $10 can have 70% royalty. The reason I'm entering at 35% royalty is because I'm not planning to really make money from this book. Because this book is more to promote my music and my poetry. Like I have other sources of revenue. I don't need $0.99 sales and it's not even $0.99 because you only keep 70% of that. So anyway, when a buyer buys his book, I'll keep $0.70, which like a dollar is nothing these days in the United States. It's not like I'm going to amass any kind of wealth. I don't care. I'm just gonna collect thirty-five cents every time somebody buys this for $0.99. Because mostly I'm going to give it away for free so that I can promote the music that's inside it. And I want to find true fans who liked my poetry and who liked my music. This is my passion that I want to share. That's my case. For most people's case that won't be at if you want to make money, then he wanted to set the 70% rate. And you want to go maybe if the book is really a great book, 999, if it's irregular book, maybe 499 if you want to sell a lot to 99. That's the general breakdown. So let's come back to thirty-five percent. It gives me the conversions for other markets. You can see him. Okay. 74, right. You know that 6974 doesn't it's not a big difference. But if you could place it like that, people will buy more at 69 just because it looks like it's cheaper, even though it's pretty insignificantly cheaper. Same thing here like 77. Well, here you can round up like 79. Now this is an exercise in futility a little bit. I really just wanted to make it cheaper and more accessible. So I'm gonna say 69. This 89 is perfect in euros. Here is perfect because instead of 103, I can say 99. Here, 499, you see, you just want to adjust it so that you don't lose a lot of money if you make it cheaper, But what you gain is more purchases. 099. You see what I'm doing here for this is perfect for 1999. You go down the list like that. If you don't want to give up your 34 sense here because, you know, I dropped to $0.99 in Australian dollars might be a lot. You might want to say one 1900's or 129, but I don't care. I'm just gonna say 0.99. Book lending allow again just because I wanted the biggest circulation and then I'm gonna say published her book on the Kindle. Then I have a book cover, a preliminary one. And it says it might take 72 hours for your title to be available on the Amazon marketplace. And because it's not an immediate, you rush to go and fix the errors if you encountered any errors. So in my case, I will go and fix the formatting and I will make my title better. Those are the two things I didn't love. And maybe I'll spend a little more time on getting the keywords right. You don't have to do all this now, but as soon as you can, why not? So essentially what we've done is we've went from absolute 02 now, we're just about to have a live book on the Kindle. 18. How to create a book cover on your own and quickly: In this video, I'm gonna show you how to make your own book cover, even if you're not a designer like I am, and your book cover will come out looking something like this, which looks pretty natural. Maybe I would say 70 or 80% of something that a really good designer would give you. But certainly it looks like it has pretty artwork. This is something that I made in about five or ten minutes with the only caveat was that it took me longer because obviously after my first draft, I showed it to people then they told me what they didn't like and then I fixed it. I'm not a painter, I'm not an artist. I don't know. Fancy Photoshop, nothing like this. So in this video I'll walk you through exactly how I made this poetry book cover. What did I do first? First you have to think of what's the essence of the book and the essence of this particular poetry book that I published. It's a poetry book, a collection of my songs accompanied to music. And it's kind of poetry and dreamy. So the idea of the cover was supposed to be something like that. What I did was I went to pixabay.com, which we're gonna go to together now. And I searched for something like dreamy magical images. Let's do it now just to see how I did this research. This is Pixabay. It's basically a website where you get free stock images. And I searched for something like dreamy. I just wanted something imaginative. Things like this. I could have easily used this kind of a cover all, although this is too much for kids, right? So you have to go through many images and find something cool. Like, I think this could have been a cool idea for a cover. Like it's something that's a little bit ethereal like poetry. It's like takes you away to a different world and into a dreamland, something like this. And so I browsed a bunch of these. This could have been a great basic background for a cover. Maybe it's a little bit too uninteresting to little going on. But that's the idea. It could have been this cool image where the middle of it that could have been something like this. Although none of these so far exactly hit the spot. Like for example, if I click on this, like there's this woman, she's kind of, I don't know what she is. She like a cartoon character or a fantasy character that doesn't perfectly fit with my book and the bell doesn't perfectly fit with my book. So I left it and I kept on looking and looking and looking until I found that kind of a woman that is currently in my book cover. And I don't know how I found that. I think I did a bunch of different searches. This is a really beautiful image, even though a book cover would only be half of this because it's vertical. But this is really pretty good. Had been kind of the background, that really nice background. But the reason I also chose a woman and she specifically looking at the screen because I think this makes a human connection like this woman. If you're on Amazon as a customer and you're searching for books, she makes eye contact with you and it's a little bit more engaging. So basically I took this image and I'll show you what I did. I went to Canva. Canva.com is a free and popular image editing software. And they have an account, you would just make a free account. Once you're in, you would say create a design on the top-right. And it will let you create a custom size design. And the Kindle tells you the kVp, they tell you where the pixels are, will go there now, just so you can see where to find this information. If you're uploading a book or editing, like for example, I'm going to edit, I'm going to select edit the content. And one of the parts of the content is the cover. And it will tell you what the cover dimensions are supposed to be. So you see this link CR cover guidelines. They tell you what the dimensions are. They literally tell you the height is 2560 pixels and the width is 1600 pixels. Now this is for the Kindle. If you want also to print paperback edition of the cover, it will be a little different because you have to also create the back flap and the middle part of the book. But we're not doing that just because it's the same process as we are doing now, just different dimensions. So what I wanted to do is show you exactly how to do the sort you on Canva and you just select the image dimensions that you're told by kVp. Very simple. And you can see my designs are here. So I'm going to click on this design that I made. We're gonna go through how I made it. You see, I took an image, this is a background image of this woman. But notice I put some notes. That's another image I took from Pixabay. And I put that image here. That image wasn't part of the painting. I took this little boat. Boat wasn't part of it. I do the clouds. I added a little, little tiny elements. They're all images I downloaded from Pixabay. And I just thought, well, you know, like a ship on a clouds is also dreamy. Some feedback that I got was that it's not people's favorite. Some people said that it would've been better without these. And then all I did was add text. This text you'll see the title and my name, the author name, and the subtitle. It's all just texts that you would add here. Nu see on top there's all these options for editing text and then you download. And then you have options for how to download. You want to download it as a JPEG so that you can upload it as a cover. And really this is it like literally this is the background. It looks like a beautiful painting that somebody would have done for you in Photoshop if they were like a professional image editor or a book cover editor. But really, I just took this entire background like the clouds, the woman, the railroad. That's one image that I downloaded from Pixabay. This was the original image. You see how I zoomed in on this woman a little bit. And I had to do that because the dimensions, we're not allowing me to take the whole painting. But basically I just stuck it as the background and a cut a little bit of the left side, a little bit of the right side, a little bit of top just to trim it enough to fit the dimensions of the Kindle. And that became the basic background of my cover, which looks like probably I hired somebody, but really I did this myself in a few minutes, just like you see here. That's also how you can create your own book cover for free without spending any money. 19. Bonus lecture: So congratulations, we're at the end of the course. And since this is the last video of the course, I want to invite you to read some of my poetry if you liked some of the examples I showed you in the course of things I wrote. Here's my poetry book, and it's on Amazon. It's very cheap, as you can see, it's $0.99 on the Kindle, so it's the cheapest it can possibly be. And you would find it literally Bye. Either clicking on the link in the resources of this video or if you just search for poetry book would songs. And all you have to do is just look for a book with my name, or this is the one with the woman there. And you click on that one. And this is my book by Alex can deduct. It has my name there and this is the cover at the moment, I may change the cover, but right now I like this cover, so it seems like it will stay. This book has my poetry, but with every poem is a link to how that poem sounds as a song. In this book, there are links to my YouTube channel, for example, on YouTube. This is my YouTube channel. And you can see I have a number of songs, and all of them have some poetry associated with them. Either poetry that I translated from the poet that I like or my own originals. But the cool thing is that every poem is to a song. And if you don't want to pay for the book, you can just go to my YouTube channel and browse the songs. Hopefully you like some of them, hopefully the poetry in them speaks to you. But actually if you want to have a more interactive, immersive, unique experience, you can get the book and read the poetry as you're listening to the music to see if the music really opens up the poetry and gives it a new life. And I'll have the links to this book and to my YouTube channel in the resources of this video, you can easily go and take a look at both and see what you prefer to do either the $0.99 option or the free option. Of course, it also helps me and I'd appreciate it if you get the book because I'm trying to grow this book on Amazon at the moment. So if you liked the course, if you appreciate the learning, this is also something that directly with help me. If you got the book and perhaps left to review on it, etc. Because you know those things really help authors. So that's something I'll leave you with. And of course, also make sure on your end, right. All the time. Practice, practice, practice, read the grades. And in this case, I'm not saying read my stuff but read the grades. The Shakespeare's, The other poets get inspiration from them. And then with that inspiration, create something really beautiful for other people who are next and who are hopefully when they read your poetry. With that, thank you again for taking the course.