How to Write a Haiku for Dummies

Mostly everyone learned how to write a haiku in elementary or middle school, but in case you forgot and want to learn again, this is for you!

First of all, you need to know what a haiku is. A haiku is a poem in unrhyming verse form, that communicates a complete feeling to the reader, in only three lines of syllables.

In all, there are seventeen syllables in a finished haiku poem. The first line contains five syllables, the middle line has seven syllables, followed by five syllables in the last line.

Before you begin writing your haiku, you need to choose a topic. The topic you choose should be general. Most haiku poems focus on nature and do not usually tell a story. Try to use smaller vocabulary to give the sense of simplicity and make the poem easy to understand for your readers.

Since nature is the topic of most haiku poems, try to compare a feeling that you want to convey to a season. For example, to represent sadness, you could relate it to winter, to represent happiness, use summer, so on, and so forth.

To make your haiku poem engaging, you are going to want to use contrast between either the first two lines and the last line, or the last two lines and the first line. Simply put, convey one idea and then switch it up either at the beginning or end, to communicate whatever idea or ideas you would like.

Don't want to write a serious haiku about nature? That's okay, you don't have to! Haiku poems can be fun and humorous also.

Here are a couple examples of serious Haiku poems:

So glad as a bird,
I sing and chirp in good mood...
If I just had wings.

Winter freezes trees
Like hate freezes the young heart
And turns your love cold.

Here are a couple examples of not so serious Haiku poems:

Luke I am your fa-
-ther, No it cannot be true,
My father is dead.

The cat is awesome.
Oh how I adore my cat.
He smells like litter.
(I made the last one up haha)

Thanks for reading, and I hope you effectively learned how to write a haiku poem!

Sources: 1, 2