Write your love a real Shakespearean sonnet! It's easy. Here's how!

Looking for a unique, fun, and quite possibly funny way to express your love?

Write a sonnet! Chances are you'll impress him/her just by knowing what a sonnet is, let alone how to write one.

A sonnet (there are several types, but we'll go with Shakespearean to keep things simple) is a 14 line poem written in iambic pentameter (10 syllables per line, and every other one is accented, or stressed, or said more loudly than the others, eg. forGET, not FORget). It also has an a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g rhyme scheme. It's written in three quatrains (four chunks of four lines), with a couplet (two lines) in their own little chunk at the end.

If you write three quatrains followed by a couplet, and the lines are ten syllables each, you will already have a pretty little poem that looks like a sonnet, and you could stop there. That in itself is already quite impressive.

To make it an official sonnet, however, you need to do a little more work. My advice is, as opposed to trying to write in iambic pentameter, which if you're not Shakespeare is a huge headache waiting to happen, write the poem free-style, stopping your lines at around ten syllables. Then once you have a poem, you can squish the words and syllables around in each line to get the stressed, non-stressed thing happening. Contrary to common logic, this may actually improve your poem by making the language more interesting or at least a bit unexpected or surprising. And as far as the stresses, well don't stress too much (hahahahaha. Ahem, sorry). You're allowed to skip a stress now and again--the trick is to say you did it on purpose, for emphasis.

OK, we're almost there. Now that you have 14 lines written more or less in iambic pentameter (pentameter, in case you haven't caught on, means 10 syllables), you need to squish, prod, add, and rearrange some more until you get the rhyme scheme to match what I've outlined above. And here again, you're the poet, you're in control, if you choose to not so much rhyme according to the above...emphasis, you were going for emphasis. Slant rhymes count too, e.g. count and font (not very romantic, sure, but gets the point across...oh wait, I have a good one: love and live! Go ahead, you can use that. You have my official consent).

OK, now all you have to do is copy it over in pretty handwriting, or type it (for those of us who know not handwriting in the pretty how to doth make...or something like that) and find your loved one and casually hand it over and act shocked when he or she says, "I didn't know you could write a sonnet?!" To which you reply, "Are you kidding? I do it all the time."

And if you come up with a sonnet you'd like to share, please paste it into the comments section below. (All work posted in the comments section is also copyrighted and cannot be copied or used without the author's explicit consent.)