A formless form

I've found a new way to write.  It's something I've been doing from time to time for several years now. I gallop along in a free-swinging prose dropping in rhymes here and here and over there, too, just for fun. It could almost be called free verse except that free verse specifically doesn't use rhyme.

My first picture book to be published using this oddly formless form was In Like a Lion, Out Like a Lamb published by Holiday House in 2011 with delightful illustrations by Emily Arnold McCully. 

March comes with a roar.
He rattles your windows
and scratches at your door.
He turns snow to mud
then tromps across your floor.

Another passage shows the variation in rhythm and in rhyme placement better:

No, never!
This fellow is much too clever.
He finds himself a sunny spot.
He stretches, yawns,
and curls into a knot.

I didn't have any name for what I was doing. I just liked doing it. When I used this formless form again in Halloween Forest, just out this fall, (with wondrously spooky illustrations by John Shelley) an interviewer asked me if I had a pattern in mind as I wrote. "No," I found myself answering. "It's more like writing by the seat of my pants." And, in fact, the hardest part of writing this way is avoiding falling into any specific pattern for too long so that the reader won't be too disrupted when I move on to an entirely different rhythm.

And hanging from
the branches
are bat bones.
Climbing the trunks
are cat bones.
Snarled in the roots
are rat bones.
Bat bones,
cat bones,
rat bones,
and all are
looking at
you.

And a little later:

And together they'll cry
"Take care!
Beware!
Despair!
You can bet
you've just met
your worst nightmare!"

The first time I wrote this way my choice seemed to drive reviewers crazy. One complained about "off rhymes." There wasn't an off rhyme to be found in the entire text! It would have been more fair to say the rhythms were "off," if it's fair to use the term "off" because the pattern keeps shifting until there is no pattern at all. 

My editor, Grace Maccarone, became proactive with Halloween Forest. She named this new form in the jacket copy. "Unmetered rhyming verse." The starred review in Kirkus repeated that descriptor. A Booklist reviewer said, along with praise generous enough that I shouldn't complain, "Bauer's rhymes are bumpy, sometimes purposefully so" and I wanted to holler, "It's not the rhymes that are bumpy, it's the rhythm that keeps shifting! Can't you see?"

But it doesn't matter. It's fun to invent a new form. And it's fun to sit down with the end result and swing through the text with a lilting gallop as though there were no other way to tell a story. In fact, I so enjoyed the end result when each was coupled with its art that I almost forgot how much work it was to make my newly devised formless form work. I got to thinking it hit the page that way on my first try … until I went back to my computer files and counted one, two, three … fourteen drafts of Halloween Forest. And that doesn't count the many changes, large and small, that were made in each draft before I thought to rename it and save it again.

In fact, I was reminded how hard I'd worked to create those texts when John Briggs, the Publisher at Holiday House, asked me to write a companion book for Halloween Forest. I'm not sure whether it was the idea I came up with that didn't work or if this formless form I devised was too hard to do again, but I'm still struggling. 

I'm ready to go back to the safety and comfort of formlessness or a tightly defined form … at least until the next time rhymes come blasting through demanding to find their own continually shifting place on the page.