Dear SunWinkers:

A few years ago, my daughter brought a boy home and the three of us played Scrabble. Hannah had been boasting on me, and as usual, I pulled no punches. The young gentleman asked me, “How do I get to be as good a Scrabble player as you?” My reply: “Stay in school.” I don’t think it was the magic bullet he was hoping for.

I was just watching a feature story on a college football postgame show. I didn’t catch the name of the student-athlete, but the story was about how when he came to college on a football scholarship, he could barely read at the junior high level. So he resolved to do something about it. Do you know what he did?

He read. He devoured one book after the next. He was never without a book in his hand. Now he’s flourishing in college and his teammates call him “Nerd.” Asked how he felt about his mates calling him “Nerd,” he replied, “I wear it as a badge of honor.”

There are lots of techniques for boosting your Scrabble score. Learn “handle” words so you can tack a word onto the end of another word and make two words in one play, especially ones your opponent might not know, such as “bittern,” and “abettor.” Memorize the 102 legal two-letter words so you can play alongside another word on the board and get credit for three or more new words.

There are lots of techniques to writing better poetry, too, and our goal with this column is to cover every single one of them. (Just kidding. Sort of.) At the most basic level, however, there is simply no substitute, in poetry as in Scrabble, for knowing more words. The more diseases you know, the better doctor you can be. The more stars you know, the better astronomer you can be. There’s just no way around it. Having more words at your disposal gives you more choices.

How do you build your vocabulary? Read. Read lots of poetry. Read lots of good literature. Read the New York Times. There are no shortcuts—not reading the dictionary, not buying a word-a-day desk calendar.

That said, today’s prompt is not a substitute for reading, but it will help you have a greater selection, and livelier variety, of words at your mental fingertips when you write. (Adapted with gratitude from Susan Wooldridge’s poemcrazy [NY: Clarkson Potter, Inc., 1996]):

The Prompt

Get a roll of raffle tickets. You can get one at any office supply store, usually under ten dollars. Sometimes they show up in thrift stores. Your church may have some left over.

Get out the glue stick, scissors, and several of your favorite magazines. Newsweek, The New Yorker, National Geographic, People would all be fine choices, but think outside the box as well: Mental Floss, Real Simple, Better Homes and Gardens, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone.

Get the kids or grandkids to help. Go through the magazines and cut out interesting, fun, colorful words and 2-3-word phrases. Have fun with it. Don’t think about it too much, in terms of poetry, but Wooldridge does suggest favoring strong and colorful nouns and verbs.

Glue each word or phrase onto the back of one of the raffle tickets.

When you have a basketful of these word tickets, there are all kinds of things you can do with them. Pick two or ten or twenty out of the basket at random and use them in a poem. Pair them into two-word phrases and use the phrases in a poem.

If you have a cork board, get out the thumb tacks or dress pins and make poems by tacking up the word tickets as you would make magnetic poetry on the refrigerator door.

If you’re going out of the house, grab a handful of word tickets. When you have a free moment, pull some out and use them in a poem which you write in the little pocket notebook you always carry. (You do, don’t you? You can use your smartphone, too, but there’s something about a pencil and notebook.)

Never be at a loss for words again! Make it an ongoing practice to collect words, glue or write them on tickets, and throw them in the basket. (Laurence Peter, the organizational guru [The Peter Principle] collected interesting quotations for years and literally threw them into a basket, ultimately compiling them into his book Peter’s Quotations.)

This may be too much fuss to accomplish in a week’s time, but I’d love to hear if you started a word basket, and would love to see any poems you write using your word tickets at any time in the future.

Love,

Doug

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