More Fibbery

Fibs.
Terse.
Defined.
As your tools,
Twenty syllables;
How you use them is up to you.

In my first post on Fibs, I mentioned rules and guidelines. I'm gonna talk about some of them here, but the most important thing I can say is that other than the syllable count of 1/1/2/3/5/8, all rules can be broken. The goal is to WRITE. That said...

Since I started Fibbing to focus on word choice, the one rule I've held myself to is "no articles in the one syllable lines." I also try not to use conjunctions, though part of that is that when I use them, I start singing School House Rock and annoy the neighbors.

After those rules, it really gets more subjective. There's definitely a difference between my best Fibs and my ones that read far more like I found a 20 syllable sentence and broke it into Fib form. Often, that difference is in focusing on those two one-syllable lines. "Worms./Gross." is, to me, a stronger start than "I/was." If there's a natural break between the lines, in general it reads better to me. If a thought can finish at a line end, that's great. And I, personally, love using the eight-syllable line in counterpoint or as a thought of its own.

I also have found that my Fibs tend to fall into subsets: Pop Culture Fibs, Rhyming Fibs (traditionally, by the way, Fibonacci poetry is not a rhyming form. But it CAN rhyme, as some who have posted have shown), and Fibs that fib are three examples. I'm gonna post one (or more) of each in the comments below. We've also seen political Fibs and math Fibs... plus my very own Spam Fib. That should be a big category, based on the 19,000 Spam haiku collected here.

Thanks to the Third Carnival of Children's Literature, I now know that April is also Mathematics Awareness Month. This makes Fibbery doubly divine in April.

Also, a special tip o' the hat to the Word Freaks for their excellent Fibbing.

If you spot any other Fibs online, please drop word to yours truly. But this is long enough, so I gotta book.

(For those entering in via this post, there is much more Fibbery to be found all around the blog these days. Besides the post The Fibs mentioned at the top and this post, both of which have comments filled with fun Fibbery, you might want to journey up to the top of the blog or look over on the right hand side for some links collected under the headline The Fibs. As always, feel free to leave a Fib here or elsewhere. Fib on!)

(And a further edit: please click here for news of a Fib-related book deal!)