I’m still sorting through old poems and that work has churned up some fun pieces made using writing prompts including the one listed below. I think this originated as a class assignment for a writing constraint called “snowballing” or just “a snowball poem”. As writing prompts go, this one is pretty straightforward and almost tailor made for writing poetry.
Produce a piece where:
- Each line contains a single word
- The next line contains either one more or one less letter than the previous
Following this prompt, you will end up with a triangle-shaped poem that either grows or shrinks in width. You could always do something fun by “snowballing” up to a line with, say, 10 letters, then “melting” your way back down to 1. However, for this writing prompt I was focused on making the biggest snowball in existence, and I feel like I got pretty close to the limit.
I must have had a lot of free time on my hands because I ended up writing a 20-liner about a bisexual two-toed sloth hanging out with con artists deep in discussion about matters of national (and psychic) security.
A
bi
two
toed
sloth
walked
amongst
hellbent
hucksters
flagrantly
masticating
mockingbirds
imaginatively
deconstructing
paraprosdokians
conversationally
intellectualizing
ultranationalistic
counterintelligence
pseudohallucinations
Full disclosure, I did use a word-finding tool to help me get words of the appropriate length and type to keep the snowball growing. That said, I’m not sure how much longer I could have gone on.
Is this the biggest snowball poem out there? If you have a longer snowball poem or even just a snowball poem that you’re proud of, I’d love to see it and compare notes.
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