See my latest premiere contest, Curtains, for details of this fun challenge to write a mini closet drama in verse. The title of the contest is derived from a pun on plays and the curtains associated with it.
THE FIRST IMAGE
Carol Burnett’s outrageous ‘curtain dress’, worn in a comedy sketch that aired on her CBS TV series in 1976. Designer Bob Mackie created the costume (including the curtain rod!) for the sketch, which was a wild parody of the 1939 film classic Gone with the Wind. The sketch, by writers Mike Marmer and Stan Burns, was humorously titled ‘Went with the Wind’ and Burnett played a character named Starlett O’Hara, a name that lampoons the film’s heroine, Scarlett O’Hara. The iconic line ‘I’ll never be hungry again!’ accompanies this memorable curtain-to-dress transformation.
LET US RECAP (I HAVE PREVIOUSLY COVERED THESE POINTS)
Prose is writing distinguished from poetry by its greater variety of rhythm and its closer resemblance to everyday speech patterns. The word ‘prose’ comes from the Latin ‘prosa’, meaning ‘straightforward’.
An example of prose, where the line is all one sentence! (Quoted from ‘A Tale of Two Cities’, by Charles Dickens.)
‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season o darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.’
Verse uses line breaks creatively, while prose doesn't. Verse refers to both a line of poetry and a stanza.
An example of a verse (quoted from my mini closet drama, Curtains):
‘Two arms are meeting overhead,
but nowhere a leg in sight.
Watchful of what’s being said,
as it’s always in the right.’
RULES AND REGULATIONS
The contest entries must adhere to the FORMAT stipulated in the contest description, e.g. the dialogue between two people, etc. If not, the entry will be rejected.
Remember PoetrySoup’s rules of NO names, dates, titles (of the contest entries), etc, in the Poem Textbox, or all your hard work would have been for nothing and your entry WILL be rejected.
You are welcome to pose questions relevant to the contest here under the comments section as I can’t regularly attend to soup mail.
Happy quills!
Suzette
Postscript: Before you ask; I use the British notation rules for the quotations