How to Write a Haiku: A Beginner's Guide
A haiku is short, but a good one asks for patience. Here is how to begin, and what turns three plain lines into a poem a reader keeps.
Start with something you noticed
Haiku begins in attention. A shift in the light, a sound that stops you, the first cold morning of the year. The poem records a real moment, not an idea about it. Before you count a single syllable, find the thing you actually saw or heard. That is where the poem starts.
Shape it into three lines
In English the traditional shape is three lines of five, seven, and five syllables, with no title and no rhyme. That 5-7-5 form is the frame we honor at Haiku Journal. Keep the language plain and concrete. A haiku has no room for a wasted word, so every noun should earn its place and most adjectives can go.
Name a season
Classical haiku almost always carry a season word, a kigo, that roots the poem in a time of year: blossoms for spring, cicadas for summer, migrating geese for autumn, bare branches for winter. You do not have to announce the season. A single image can do it, and it gives the reader a whole world in one word.
Put two things side by side
Most haiku turn on a quiet pivot between two images: a wide thing and a small thing, a sound and a silence. The Japanese marked this with a cutting word. In English we use a dash, a colon, or just a line break. The reader's mind leaps across the gap, and that leap is where the poem happens.
Cut everything that explains
This is the hardest step and the most important. A haiku shows; it does not tell you how to feel. Delete the line that says the moment was beautiful or sad. Trust the image. If your third line comments on the first two, it is usually the line to lose.
Read it aloud, then wait
Say the poem out loud. Your ear will catch a clumsy count or a word that drags. Then set it aside for a day and read it cold. Haiku reward this patience more than almost any form, because so much depends on a single choice.
When you have one you trust, read a few hundred in our free online issues to hear how other poets handle the same problems. And when you are ready, send us your haiku.