Crystal Writes A Blog

A Recipe for Writing Haiku

Pleading for Symmetry (Balance)

I know not all my readers are fans of any kind of poetry—especially haiku. But I’m going to ask you to do me a favor and try just once to let this lesson speak to you and create one stanza in this simple poetic form. I think that once you try it, you’ll understand how the restrictions used for patterns and symmetry can be grounding and relaxing. It’s actually a good way to battle anxiety. Whatever you’re going through, write a haiku on it.

For example... 

A thunderstorm poured.
Lightning danced to thunder's beat. 
We needed the rain. 

That is the basic 5-7-5 syllable form of (American) haiku. And it made it so simple to record what was going on around me. If it were a stressful type of scenario, it might have read …

Notifications! 
They keep invading my space. 
Stopping my progress. 

But I asked for them. 
And I can silence them, too. 
So deep breath--relax. 

And I really do feel better after writing that because it made me think more about the syllables than the frustrations of a drop down notice and momentary freeze on my tablet. I challenge you to write your anxiousness as you count your syllables. And with that, here’s my recipe for writing it.

Ingredients and Instructions

Haiku Ingredients:

• Three lines.
• Seventeen syllables total.
• Five syllables in the first line.
• Seven syllables in the middle line.

Haiku Instructions:

• Consider a subject like … your day, something you love, or something as simple as a color.
• Describe your subject in five syllables like red is a color.
• Say something about how the subject affects you like, red makes me feel happy. Notice how the diphthong in “feel”  (where a vowel sound has two beats) gives me my seven syllables.
• Use the last line to describe something opposite or a conclusion. Like, I’m glad it’s not blue.
• Haiku are usually non-rhyming.

Here is an example using haiku to describe the contents of haiku. 😁 I’ll use underlines and dashes in this example to show the syllable breaks…

…..This is a hai-ku;
…..se-ven-teen syl-la-bles are
…..cap-tured in three lines.

When you write about subjects taken from daily life, it’s important to use your first impression.
Here’s another example from my main website full haiku lesson page…

.....Quiet all around (5)
.....Just a whisper here and there; (7)
.....People reading books. (5)

Between my website and a Haiku My Day post I put up in 2016, you can learn more details of haiku like the cutting technique and the seasonal and nature influence on most traditional haiku. (If you’re interested. 🤠) But I will challenge you to do a renga, which is a series of haiku, on good ‘ol “Roy G Biv.” In other words, write a haiku stanza for each color in the rainbow 🌈: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet.

A Final Encouragement

As a result of writing haiku…

• You will be more apt to notice, or be aware of, the present moment. And placing it in the boundaries of pattern and symmetry can make you feel a bit more in control.
• You will realize the POET-ential (😉) of each moment for settings to be used in stories and articles if you’re a writer.
• You can recapture some of the colorful perceptions you had when you were young and everything was new and exciting and worthy of further investigation.
• You will have a heightened and deepened appreciation of life & nature, how to paint them with words, and how to tell the world about all you see in a creative way. Or, if you keep them to yourself, I can tell you that old journals are way more interesting to read in some kind of verse.

November 11, 2026 Posted by Crystal A Murray (aka CrystalWriter) | About Writing, Creative Writing, Creativity, fun, haiku, Poetry | Creative Writing, haiku, haiku poetry, poetry, poetry lesson, words, write, writing, writing lesson | Leave a comment