Writing an English sonnet in ten steps or seven euro steps
Step one. You stare at the blank sheet of paper. Possibilities run anew through your head. Anything can happen. Art is in the making, and history pauses with baited breath anticipating your words as they shape the very foundation.
Step two. You look up “English sonnet” on Wikipedia. It sounds challenging but it’s nothing you haven’t vaguely done before.
Step three. You find a good introduction line. You write it out. Boom! Iambic pentameter on the first try!
Step four. You move to the fourth line. Uh-oh. You can’t seem to write your thought in the proper form. You go back to the first line for inspiration. Eleven syllables? You hastily recount. You try to rework the first line, but it turns to rubble.
Step five. You start marking unstressed and stressed syllables in a desperate attempt to salvage the first line before it’s two late. You give up and start doing the same to the second line, compromising your previously pristine grammar for rhythm and rhyme.
Step six. Third line. It has to rhyme with the first line, you think to yourself. Nothing works. Even more accent marks. You look up “sonnet generator” on Google; alas, no fruition.
Step seven. Soon, accent marks fill the page. You Google that phrase again.
Step eight. The entire paper after the third line is black, black with dots and prime mark, with failed rhymes, with thoughts unhatched. The paper drips and oozes with ink, squirm uncomfortably away from your now-revoked poetic license. You stare at the page, and it stares back. After a few minutes, it blinks and licks its lips in defeat.
Step nine. Satisfied, you go to bed.
Step ten. When you wake up, you can’t find your sister, but there are ink stains on the bedsheets, on the walls.