writing Archives - The Cracked Door

Freedom Found by Leaving One’s Home and Traveling the World (A Life Snippet)

(This Life Snippet is about a young adult from Barcelona, Spain, also traveling the world. For her, this journey is about leaving the “prisons” of her hometown and finding herself in the process. You can see more of my Life Snippets of different people in different parts of the world here.)

Julia is a 29-year old Spanish woman from Barcelona who is traveling the world. She has spent most of her time so far (about a year) in New Zealand on the work-travel visa program doing various odd jobs (ranging from picking fruit to hospitality jobs). I met her on a short trip to Tonga in Oceania, where she went on a couple day vacation to swim with whales.

She likes aspects of Barcelona’s culture but also felt the need to get out. One reason is the city’s recent rise in cost of living (largely due to the increasing influx of tourists). More importantly, however, she felt constrained by the community there. She wanted space from her abusive, alcoholic mother, in particular.

She likes the fact that Spanish culture is communal, but as a young adult woman, she found those relationships constraining. In her experience, people there tended to have a prescribed model for how people (especially women) should live their lives: find a job, get married, and then build a family of kids. For example, when she tells people back home that she is currently traveling the world, their most common response is, “What is wrong with you that you are not building your life?”, as if the fact that she is not settling down with a job and family is the only way to build one’s life.

One of her most valuable lessons traveling is seeing how many different ways people live their lives in various cultures around the world. She sees a freedom in this that she can’t experience in her hometown. In her experience, in New Zealand, people leave each other alone, and she also finds a freedom in this. For example, she can walk down the street without having to talk to people or implicitly explain herself like she would back home.

She really enjoys New Zealand but sees it as a place to live for a year, not long-term. She plans to head back to Spain in about three months. She will travel to Southeast Asia and/or Micronesia first, though, before heading back. She plans to get her dive master training so that as she travels throughout Southeast Asia she can pay her way working at different dive centers along various beach towns as she goes. She may work at t one for a few months before moving on. To me, this seemed like her ideal lifestyle (at this moment in her life), and even though she said she planned to head back to Spain in three months, I suspected she would end up preferring doing this for several months longer instead before heading back. She seems to gush at the possibilities, clearly excited about it.

I have talked with many Westerners who want to travel the world by working at different dive centers like this. For them, it seems like an ideal way to make enough to get by for those who want to travel and really enjoy beaches and the beauty of the ocean.

As a college student, her first international trips were to other parts of Europe (such as London and Prague). That is when she first experienced how visiting a new country can free you to be someone else: she is not tied down by others in her community and their associations with her. She can explore new parts of herself.

She studied biology with a focus on animals and in graduate school, took a more extensive trip researching how tourists feeding monkeys influenced their behavior in Bolivia. In the specific part of the Amazon she stayed, tourists frequently fed a specific species of monkeys causing them to expect food from humans and become violent when a human they encountered did not feed them.

This reflects a wider concern she has about animal-based tourism. She talked about how many tour companies do not respect the animals, instead preferring to mistreat the animals so that they can guarantee tourists will be able to witness them. For example, she saw tour companies in Indonesia feed whale sharks to encourage them to show up and then bring large groups of tourists who then swarm and frighten sharks. This influences their behavior, causing problems and potentially harming them and the ecosystem in the long-run.

In certain situations, she has mixed feelings about this, however. For example, in Kalimantan (also called Borneo), Indonesia, she went on orangutan tours. Some tour companies seemed to feed the orangutans to encourage them to come, but at the same time, the tours were a key source of income for a relatively impoverished community. If they were not able to do these tours, the people would most likely have to cut down the forest to plant farms (the next option as a viable source of income). That loss of habitat would wipe out the orangutan population anyways. Thus, in this instance, she felt like the tours were a reasonable middle ground for both the local human and orangutan communities, allowing them to best meet their needs. This reflects a tension and complexity I have also felt about animal tours while traveling the world (maybe one day I will write about this topic in more detail, after I have had time to do some more research on it).

She really loves New Zealand, but she does not like how the country seems built on the labor of immigrants, particularly those who come on a work-holiday visa like her. She gets to see New Zealand, but she is also stuck working low-pay, temporary jobs while those in New Zealand who own and manage those businesses receive all the benefits. New Zealanders don’t like to work, instead preferring to rely on immigrant workers such as the pool of young adults on work-holiday visas. Many on this visa are paid close-to break even, especially since rent in New Zealand is high. Thus, they cannot save. She could only save when she bought a camper van, deciding to live camping outside even for several months when it was cold. This allowed her to avoid the high rents, though.

Overall, she seems to enjoy her life. She is not only discovering the beauty of New Zealand but also seems to be finding herself. This experience is giving her a break from her family (especially her mercurial mother) and her confining community back in Barcelona. She seemed content just being and seeing where life takes her.

I Want Papaya Salad (A Short Story)

One day Lalana was walking down the streets of New York City. She had just moved there and was looking for some fermented fish and papaya salad.

She came across a lovely Chinese grocery store. “Do you have fermented fish and papaya?” She calls to the clerk as she enters.

“No,” she answers. “But we sell seafood.”

“Oh okay,” and she bought a little bit of seafood to try.

At the next Chinese grocery store, she asks, “I’m looking for fermented fish and papaya salad. Do you have any?”

“No, but we sell dragon fruit.”

She buys some to try. It’s the year of the dragon after all.

She then goes to a Mexican store in the vain hope that they may have some. But, all they had is barbacoa, so she got some to try.

Next, she goes to a Yemeni store. No fermented fish or papaya salad, but they did have fresh mandi.

She spotted a Jewish store, without what she was looking for, but she did get some homemade sweetbread that was fresh out of the oven.

She eventually got frustrated. All she wanted was some fermented fish and papaya salad! She pauses, and being a little hangry, starts munching on the food she discovered along the way. Only to realize that they would make a fine dinner as well.

How to Write a Piece when You’re Tired

When you write a post a week, some weeks you must crank something out when you are exhausted. Here are my approaches to writing a piece on days when I am busy or otherwise tired:

1) Write something the day before:

If I know I will be busy one week, I often will make sure to complete two pieces that week just to get it done. Generally, if I do this, I combine that with my second strategy and…

2) Have writing ideas in your backpocket that are easy to write:

Some pieces require a lot of work, but having a few ideas be something relatively easy to crank out helps when you’re tired. For example, I have whole sets of writing projects that I find much easier to just write out without much thought.

3) Use something you have already recently written a while ago:

Can you submit something that you already wrote for some other reason? As long as they aren’t too personal or confidential. All I have to do is write a few quick sentences explaining the context and submit them.

4) Work on long-term projects

In addition to writing a piece a day, I spend 10 minutes working on long-term writing projects. This helps me slowly complete essays and stories that take longer than a single day to work on. Some days, after finishing it, I hold onto this longer piece for a busier day when I don’t have time to write a piece from scratch.

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Those are my strategies. Maybe you find yourself in a similar position and would find them useful to consider as well.

The Freezer (A Short Story)

There it is, the Cooler. The place I’d have to go. My boss asked me to do an inventory to count every single thing in that cold dark room.

I walk into the huge fridge. The door automatically snaps shut behind me. It’s a long corridor with one bend, which leads to another narrow sliver of a room. A passageway to nowhere. On all sides are piles of boxes of frozen foods, almost squeezing me shut at any moment. No matter how many times I come I can never get used to this space.

I begin my inventory count with boxes of canned peas. For each box I see, I make a mark on my little notepad. Then I move onto the next item. It’s pretty boring. Why did I even accept this job? I had little choice at the time. It offered a paycheck after I graduated, the only way I could find to pay my student loans and afford rent. I can still picture my father’s dejected expression when I told him about the offer. My dad was too polite to say what he thought, and just gave me a blank congratulations, but I could tell he was realizing that all his dreams for what his son would amount to would come to nothing.

Anyways, where was I? I was now counting ice cream carts. If only I could eat one. There’s a new cart. I mark a check on the page, but wait? I check where I marked it. Was that the group for ice cream or one of the other foods? I can’t remember. My little notepad is becoming filled with little groups of marks, too many to remember which is which.

I’m such a fuck up?! I can’t even count carts of ice cream. No wonder I can’t find a good job. I’ll be stuck working here until the day I die.

I guess I never really liked my job anyways. It’s so boring. That is the real reason I can’t keep anything straight. I just don’t care. If I had a real job, I would do it well, or at least, I hope I wouldn’t find a way to mess that up too.

A loud crash in the other passageway snaps me back to reality. What on earth is that? Something must have fallen. Was that me? I’ve been shifting boxes around to do this count, but I hadn’t touched anything over there. Why would something have fallen over there?

I place my clipboard down and walk over to see what happened. There’s nothing. No strewn boxes. Maybe I just heard something. Maybe someone dropped something on the other side of the wall.

I come back, and I can’t find the notepad. I thought I had just set it down on this one box. Where could it have gone? I look around. It’s not on the other boxes. Did it fall somewhere? I start rummaging through a few boxes, moving some around and looking through them. No notepad. I can never seem to find anything anyways.

Kneeling before a box, my butt accidently knocks the stack of boxes behind it. A couple of them crash loudly onto the ground. Just another example of me failing. I begin to look over to see the damage.

But several more boxes fall. This time, they’re in the other room. I shoot straight up. That can’t be me. I hear a growling noise. Something is there.

I don’t have time for this, and I run straight to the door, but it’s locked. I try to pound against it, but no one is outside. The door is pretty thick to seal in the cold. It’s not like they could hear my knocking anyways. My phone has never worked in this deep part of the basement. The creature moves as I knock, as if the noise is stirring it.

This can’t be happening. I do the only thing that makes sense, and that is to go back to work. It’ll keep my mind off of whatever is going on on the other side. That’s all I am here to do. I count the boxes of items. I don’t have my notepad, but that’s okay. I can keep track of the numbers in my head. I hear it moving about. It knocks over boxes, and its breathing grows strained like it’s choking on its own droll. I desperately cling to counting my canned mangoes.

WHACK! It sounds like an entire shelf of stuff has fallen over there. I completely lose track of my count. The bang seems to dig into my very bones. “I’m so dumb?!” I shout reflexively. The creature stops for a few seconds of eerie silence. Then it makes its way towards my room. It must have heard me!

I instinctively dive behind a set of boxes in a vain attempt to protect myself. I’m too much of a wimp to take it on. This is why I deserve death. I wasted my life; why wouldn’t I also waste my death, just sitting here waiting for it to come pounce on me. And what a way to go? In the very bowels of my employer, who doesn’t care enough about me? I bet they’d just clean up my body, make an insurance claim about the goods my blood got spilled on, and move on like nothing happened. Why did I waste my life here?

I hear the monster on the other side of my tower of boxes, gurgling and foaming. That’s it. If I am going to die, I might as well do something. I knock over a box of cans on the top of my stack so that it falls directly on top of it. I hear it whimpering in pain. That slowed it down, but it’s still making its way up my tower.

I plunge my hand into another box and the first thing I can find. It’s a small metallic can of tuna about the size of a fist. This will work. I can use it to punch the beast. Its ugly head rears the top of my fortress as it climbs down, coming straight for me.

I draw back my fist when I realize that it nuzzles its head against my leg. What does it want? I don’t know, but it seems friendly. It looks at me, whimpering in a high pitched voice at my shaking body that I have curled up in the fetal position. I feel an immense compassion towards it: it was simply trapped in this dungeon just trying to get by, like me. When it realizes that I’m not going to give it food, it wanders over to the puddle of food that fell out of their packaging all over the floor in another part of the freezer, slurping it up desperately.

I seize the moment and rush to the door, trying to jiggle it open again. It turns out it was unlocked the whole time. I guess in my panic before, I couldn’t get the latch at the proper angle. I rush outside and don’t look back.

Screw this job. I’m going home.

Is the T-Rex a deux machina at the end of the first movie: A Defense

A fearsome beast or a deux machina savior?

I have heard others bemoan how the T-Rex shows up randomly at the very end of the first Jurassic Park movie right when the raptors have them cornered. They call her a deux machina, that is a common trope in movies where some big force inescapably arrives at the last moment and saves the day for the characters.

Whether something is a deux machina is usually subjective, generally labeling something as a “deux machina” if it goes against their expectations for the story and its themes and thus takes them out of the story. What I find interesting about calling the T-Rex a deux machina is that it really demonstrates the tensions between many viewers’ expectations of the movie as an action film and the fact that Jurassic Park is a really horror film. Based on this, it’s actually the second deux machina that no one talks about that I think breaks the story.

The major theme of the first Jurassic Park movie is that life/nature always finds a way. Life goes on because individual organisms are able to take advantage of lucky opportunities/breaks that happen to come their way to survive. The ability for particular species to adapt emerges out of this. Through this, life itself continues on, expanding beyond any boundary humans may set for it. For example, being able to make sex changes because of the frog DNA used to make them was a lucky break that allowed the dinosaurs to survive, and the electric outage was another that the T-Rex took advantage of to remake its world.

With this theme in mind, the characters spend the final act of the movie desperately trying to survive the coming advance of life/nature, specifically the raptors hunting them. The central question is whether they can use their human ingenuity and tools to stop this advancement, and the answer is no. No matter what they do (using a gun, locking the door, escaping through the vent, etc.), the raptors still continue to surround them. It’s all over. That’s when the T-rex comes in, causing the raptors to fight the T-rex, allowing the main cast of characters to escape.

This moment demonstrates the movie’s central theme about nature. Can they use their ingenuity, skills, and technology as humans to survive against nature’s ascension? No, they are ultimately subject to the whims of nature for their very survival. This conclusion to the fight illustrates the final dominance of nature over humanity. The sudden lucky break the T-Rex presents still reinforces this theme. Their only hope for survival lies in a lucky break presented by nature that they must take advantage of, and they do, using it to flee. Just like every other species, their only hope for survival lies in taking advantage of a lucky break.

This differs from regular deux machinas. A typical deux machina is a problem because it undermines the story’s themes by providing lucky coincidences or some overly powerful saving character, technology, or other entity as the reason the characters succeed. Did love save the day, or the grit of persevering, or whatever other central theme the story is based on? No, it was the divine superhero who showed up out of nowhere and fixed the problem. Whether the T-Rex came or not, they are completely subject to nature in that final moment. Thus, surviving based on a lucky draw from nature only reinforces that theme.

The deux machina in the next scene is the bigger problem, since it undermines the theme: the wealthy billionaire somehow arrives outside, with no dinosaurs around, ready with a helicopter to whisk them away to safety. (And for that matter, if he was out there in a car, why didn’t the T-Rex eat him and Malcom in an open convertible before coming into the building? They were easier prey presumably right where the T-Rex was right before.)

The implication of the theme of being subject to the whims of nature is that sure, they survived a few more moments, but they are forever trapped by this new emerging world. The dinosaurs are taking over the island, and outside there are endless more threats for them, whether that be other raptors or some other threat. The best they can hope for are lucky breaks, but you can’t expect that each time. But instead, the billionaire arrives and magically whisks away to the safe human world far away from this nightmare.

This gets to the heart of the tension as to what genre this movie is. In the US, people often categorize Jurassic Park as an action movie, and action as a genre tends to run counter to fatalistic themes. Action movies, at their core, center on how humans can develop and use their skills to surmount improbable odds and achieve success. This makes them inherently achievement-oriented, with viewers expecting the main characters to use their grit and skills to win the day. Hence, in such movies, a coincidence or lucky break being what causes success undermines the key theme of action as a genre and hence a deux machina.

Although officially classified as an action movie, Jurassic Park opposes this common theme of action movies. I would categorize it a horror film, which tend to explore how death is all around us. In the movie, in addition to being awe-inspiring, the natural world produces death. In these movies, survival is the key, but using one’s skills to achieve survival is always how characters survive depending on the film’s themes.

This reflects one of the major tensions in the movie. It wants to show how we should both marvel and fear nature, but it also wants to give regular people good clean fun. Obviously, it would not be as graphic as some horror films can be given that it was intended to be a family film. That’s fine, but horror films can still explore fatalistic themes in a child-friendly way (just look at the number of horror stories written for children).

Instead, though, we see the characters whisked off to safety. They wanted viewers to both feel the horror that the characters are now victims of the new natural world they accidentally unleashed but still receive the action-movie catharsis of seeing characters survive this apocalypse and literally fly into the sunset. These contradict each other and make the viewer feel cheated.

Most viewers blame the T-Rex as the source because they expect the characters will come up with a way to get out of their mess like a typical action hero. But if after the T-Rex accidently saves them, the group were still trapped in this hostile world instead of having the cavalry arrive to pick them up, viewers’ expectations based on action films would be firmly pulled out from underneath them, and they would have to confront the key theme that they are really subject to the whims of nature.

The Tower of Hattan (A Short Story)

One day a man of Hattan said, “We should build a giant skyscraper up to the heavens. It would be the perfect city, heaven on earth, with everything we need all in one place: our homes, our businesses, our shopping, our schools, our worship, our recreation. We would be able to do everything inside without ever having to leave.”

Many people in Hattan liked this, so they elected him mayor. They began construction immediately in the city’s center.

God saw their desire to build a wondrous tower just like the heavens and decided to help them. As construction demands grew, they needed more and more workers, so God brought people from all corners of the world to help create, build, and dwell in this new heaven, and they settled in the areas surrounding the tower.

As these workers started to build, some became weary of how these foreigners were hurting the city. Even worse, they started to incorporate their own thinking, their own concepts into the building. As the building became larger, these became parts of the foundation of this skyscraper.
The mayor tried to counter with an even more ambitious, unified plan to build over and around the deviations, which had become too embedded into the tower’s structural integrity to remove.

This required even more people with even more language and ideas. They moved into the ever-expanding communities surrounding the tower. Eventually, these peoples became weary of constructing the tower for the ungrateful inhabitants. Instead, these communities elected a new mayor who cancelled its construction once and for all to focus on the economic development of the now sprawling city and its residents.

At a press conference after her inauguration, she announced, “We will preserve the remains of this site as a memorial to our attempt to build a tower over the heavens.”

“The past mayor promised to build a heavenly place for us to live. What do you say to criticism that you are stopping this attempt to construct this heaven?” A journalist inquired.

“We are still going to try to make this city into its own heaven,” she replied. “But God’s Heaven is just wide before it is high.”

Haikus as a Three Line Story Part 4: Blurring the Distinction between the Lines

This is the fourth and final chapter in a four part series about my friend and my experience writing a haiku a day for six years. In each part, I outline a different type of haiku we often write. Other parts of the series: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

In all the previous types I have discussed, each line is a single, unique thought, but we also wrote haikus that blur the distinction between lines. Here thoughts, phrases, or even words straddle multiple lines. This often gives the haikus a distinct cadence or rhythm, as if the previous line falls or bleeds into the next line.

My words keep hyphen-

Ating. My eyes always dash-

Ing to the next line.

(This poem is about blurring the distinction between lines, intentionally hyphenating between lines. The “ing” verbs give it a feel of rushing around the corner at each line break.)

The moon shed tears of

Happiness. Hours to her-

Self in seclusion

(In this poem, breaking the word “herself” allows the read to simultaneously think about the phrases, “Hours to herself in seclusion”, “Hours to her”, and “Self in seclusion”.)

Swelling patrio-

Tism and pride: cancer in our

Body politic

*In this one, the sudden shift mid-word to the second line helps represent the disorientation when thinking about patriotism in our country.)

Considering the

Strange world we live in, why choose

To stay in one place?

(Originally published here. Here, the phrases in the sentence jump between lines, representing the desire to travel.)

Conclusion

There are many, many more ways to use a three-line haiku structure to tell a story. The four types of haikus discussed over this series are only some of the styles of haikus we have written over the years, but they give a sense of the complexity and adaptability this form can have. Three lines may seem simple, but there are a lot of options.

Haikus as a Three Line Story 3: Connections, Juxtapositions, and Non-Sequiturs

This is the third chapter in a four part series about my friend and my experience writing a haiku a day for six years. In each part, I outline a different type of haiku we often write. Other parts of the series: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 4.

Sometimes we combined several unconnected ideas. Maybe, we drew some kind of parallel or or juxtaposition like some traditional Japanese haikus. Other times, we intentionally merged unrelated ideas to create non-sequiturs. I often even took three phrases from books, articles, ads, or other poems and put them together to see what kind of poem would emerge.

Here are a few examples of each:

Connections and Juxtapositions

Tick tock of the clock

With the faint trickle underneath

Of a gushing stream

(Originally published here. This juxtaposes the noises from the clock and the stream. It was a reference to the noises I heard when visiting a clock store next to a stream in Kyoto, Japan.)

The Hermit

To stand here alone

In the desert that’s my life

In search of a path

(This one establishes a connection between the hermit’s life and the narrator’s life.)

I’m like a glacier:

Slow-moving til you get to

My ice-cracking tip.

(Originally published here.)

The cold wind howls

Blowing leaves off the trees, that

Are my inner soul.

(These use a direct simile, metaphor, or analogy to make its comparison.)

Setting up a Premise

The first line of these haikus establish a premise that the final two lines then define or in some way comment on, another strategy to connect thoughts together:

Joys of sleeplessness:

You get to marinate in

Every useless thought

Shores of Babylon:

While the just weep for Zion

I’m finally home.

Conjure the devil:

You better know what you want

He certainly won’t

Tragedy of life:

Everyone is fighting for

What they think is right.

Non-Sequiturs

I frequently cobbled together interesting five and seven syllable phrases from newspaper articles, billboard ads, books, etc. to see what kind of narratives or meanings would emerge by putting them together into a poem. Normally, when writing a haiku, we have a feeling, idea, or narrative that we are trying to convey, and we figure out how to mold that into the haiku’s stringent “requirements.”

But sometimes, I enjoyed turning that process inside out. I would start with words themselves and see what kinds of meanings could emerge from putting them together in different and interesting ways.

Do more than see. Seek.

The assent to the finite.

Desire to create.

The hustle is real

You will need experience

Ride for free after

(This second one is originally published here. I pulled each line of these haikus from ads I saw on billboards around town. To me, they represent the artificial, consumerist language common in the ads that bombard our daily lives.)

Desire to create

Nothing mattered except life

Self-interest undermines

The forgotten fire

Took almost nothing along

The road not taken

Hello to radiant

You could be solowaving

Get your FYP

(This final one is originally published here. These next two are compilations of phrases from articles and books to see what new narratives emerge when taken out of their original context and put together in this order as a haiku like this.)

Ineffableness

Immeasurability

Deification

(Another form of non-sequitur: three words, two five syllables long and one seven syllables long. I put them together into a haiku poem to see what kinds of narratives emerged in that process.)

Haikus as a Three Line Story Part 2: Twists

This is the second chapter in a four part series about my friend and my experience writing a haiku a day for six years. In each part, I outline a different type of haiku we often write. Other parts of the series: Part 1, Part 3, and Part 4.

The first two lines of these haikus set up an initial pattern and the final line breaks this pattern. This follows the broad Rule of Threes, a common technique used for jokes among many other forms of writing.”My three favorite things are breakfast burritos, listening to vinyl records, and getting a call from a number you don’t recognize.” This last one completely breaks the pattern established by the first two. The twist at the end could be funny, ironic, express the depth of an emotion, or have all sorts of other effects.

Here are a few examples of the types of effects we have used twists for:

For Humor

Cherry blossoms bloom.

Pink pedals cover the ground,

And sneeze out my nose

(In this one, the two lines establish the beautiful cherry blossoms, recalling traditional Japanese haikus, but the final line breaks that poetic pattern completely. On the block in Brooklyn where I lived, people planted cherry blossoms. When they bloomed in the spring they were gorgeous, but they also caused me horrible allergies. This poem describes the contrast of loving to see the flowers but at the same time, being made sick by them.)

Let us venture forth.

Hoist the anchor. Sail into

Abysmal failure.

(The first two lines invite the reader to join the narrator on an adventure with an implied hopeful energy, but the twist at the end negates that. Is the narrator pessimistic about the trip or just prefers to head straight into failure? That’s up to interpretation.)

Rugged pointillism

Imprinted onto my feet.

I must sweep my floor

(In this one, each line adds new meaning to the poem significantly building its meaning. The first line establishes that the poem is about abstract art. The second line puzzlingly indicates that it’s on my feet, and the third line explains what happened: I must sweep my floor because it’s so dirty that it’s caused dirty impressions on the soles of my feet.

For Contemplation

After finally

Catching you here in my trap,

Why do I feel bad?

(The first two lines establish a kind of glee in the victory of catching someone in their trap, but the final line twists this, showing that the narrator finally caught the reader, they feel guilty instead of victorious.)

To have faith is to

Live in the constant fear

That you will lose it.

(Originally published here. The twist at the end establishes a key characteristic of faith: that it is built on its opposite fear that one would lose that faith.)

Healing emulates

Even from what might be the

Most painful venom

(Originally published here. The twist at the end is that venom of all things is the source from which the healing emulates from.)

Haikus as a Three Line Story: One Way to Write a Haiku (Part 1 of a New Series)

This is the first chapter in a four part series about my friend and my experience writing a haiku a day for six years. In each part, I outline a different type of haiku we often write. Other parts of the series: Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

As I have already discussed in a previous article [], my friend and I have written a haiku a day for the last six years. This has been an incredibly transformative experience, and here I will focus on how we use the haiku format to tell stories.

At the end of the day, haikus are a way to use three lines to tell a story. Each new line provides an opportunity to transform the previous line, whether that be a twist or punchline breaking an already established pattern, continuation or intensification of the theme in the previous line, or something else entirely. At the same time, different haikus emphasize the first, second, or third line as the most important line in that story. The opportunities are truly endless.

Over the next few articles, I will discuss different forms of stories we might tell. This article will start with telling a story through the continued revelation of a theme.

Haiku Type 1: Continued Revelation of a Theme

The most obvious style or narrative to tell in a three-line haiku is one of continuation: introduce the theme in the first line and in each subsequent line reveal further details to make the theme clearer. This forms the most basic or bedrock version of a haiku that you compare the other styles against.

Sometimes, the new lines can further reveal the details of the theme or topic being explored. For example, the later lines could abstract the tangible observation in the first line. If the first line is itself abstract, later lines might instead provide specific examples or imagery of that theme. Or, it could provide the context in which the writer (or at least the narrator) was thinking of the items established in the first two lines. Here are a few examples of each:

Going from detailed to Abstract

The lone seagull fades

Into the vast thundercloud’s

Forceful harmony

(Originally published here. These first two lines provide specific imagery, and the final line connects the seagull’s moment with the concept of harmony.)

This winding dirt road

What wonders I must go see

To explore the world

(Originally published here. The first line starts with a vivid image of being on a road, and the second two lines connect it to a theme of exploration.)

All this background noise

Droning all around to sell

Yet another myth

(The second line provides more context for the scene, establishing that the noise is caused by sellers, and the third line connects the theme to the abstract idea advertisement as a form of mythmaking.)

New job, new projects

New toolkits, new people with

New idols they serve

(As a list poem, the final line is a continuation of items on the list, but it also establishes and summarizes the poem’s theme of work as a form of idolatry.)

Drop the heavy box

Shards of glass fly everywhere

Hope is laid to rest.

(The first two lines describe a moment, and the final line connects that imagery to broken hope. This summarizes the key theme of the poem.)

From Abstract to Specific Examples

In this type of poem, the final lines that provide specific examples or imagery of an already abstract initial lines:

I lie in the shade

Of your blistering haiku

No rest from the heat

(Originally published here. This haiku’s final line concludes with a new piece of imagery; this time about the feeling of heat.)

Always bursting through

The cracks of your perspective,

The light will shine through

(Originally published here. The second two lines add visual imagery of what is bursting through from the first line.)

My thoughts could kill me:

The sea of despair tugs me;

They hold me under…

(This final line concludes with the vivid image of despairing thoughts drowning the narrator.)

Emotional case

But I can’t talk about it

A weight inside me

(Originally published here. This final line also concludes with what it feels like to have such intense emotions that one cannot talk about.)

Reflecting on the Experience

In these poems, the later lines that provides the context in which the narrator or author is thinking about the earlier lines:

The half moon window

Betrays the glow of night sky

Comforting my thoughts.

(Here the final line shows the narrator’s perspective on and relationship with the moon they have been looking at.)

A blink of an eye

Everything can change so fast

For the good or bad

(In the final line, the narrator evaluates their stance on the sudden change described in the first two lines.)

Joys of sleeplessness:

You get to marinate in

Every useless thought

(The final two lines demonstrate the narrator’s stance on sleeplessness.)

These are all different techniques where the final lines continue to reveal the theme of the first line or lines, whether that be by broadening or abstracting the theme, narrowing it, providing rich imagery, or providing a type of reflection.