How to write an acrostic poem

An acrostic is the easiest poem to write badly and a surprisingly hard poem to write well. The reason is the same in both cases: the letters tell you where to start, so you never have to decide anything. That is a gift when you are staring at a blank card, and a trap when you take the first word that fits.

This is the method that produces poems people keep. It takes about ten minutes for a six-letter name. If you want a poem in ten seconds instead, the generator is upstairs.

The four-step method

1. Choose your word, and check its length

   A first name is the classic choice, but a spine can be anything: THANK YOU, OCTOBER, a team name, a shared joke, the name of a house. Six or seven letters is the comfortable size for a first attempt — long enough to build something, short enough that you are not still going at line twelve.

   If the name is long, consider spelling only the first name, or a nickname. A fifteen-line poem needs fifteen genuinely good lines, and most subjects do not have fifteen things to say about them.

2. Write the letters down the page and stop

   One capital letter per line, down the left margin, with the whole width of the page to the right of them. Do not write anything else yet.

   This step looks trivial and is not. Seeing the spine before you write converts one impossible task — write a poem about my sister — into seven small, solvable ones. Look at the letters for a minute before you fill any of them. You will usually find that two or three suggest themselves immediately, and those are the lines to write first. Nothing requires you to work top to bottom.

3. Fill each line with one thing, not one compliment

   This is where acrostics are won or lost, and it gets its own section below. The short version: each line should contain a picture — an object, a habit, a place, a piece of speech — rather than an assessment. Mornings you refuse to acknowledge does more work than Marvellous and kind and true, because the first one could only be about one person.

   Do not worry about the poem sounding like a poem yet. Get seven true things down.

4. Read it aloud, then cut the weakest line and rewrite it

   Read the whole poem out loud from top to bottom. You are listening for one thing: the line that exists only because the letter demanded it. There is almost always exactly one, and you already know which it is.

   Rewrite that line. Then check the last line: an acrostic ends when its word ends, whether or not the poem has finished, so the final line has to do the work of an ending. If it does not land, swap it for the strongest line you have and rebuild around it.

The one rule that fixes everything: be specific

Almost every weak acrostic fails the same way. The writer reaches the letter M, thinks of a positive adjective beginning with M, and writes it down. Repeat six times and you have a poem made entirely of praise, which is the one thing a poem cannot be made of.

The second poem never says Sara is kind. It is impossible to read it and think she is not. That is the whole technique, and it transfers to every other kind of writing you will ever do.

A practical way to force it: before you write a single line, list ten things associated with your subject. Not qualities — things. A coat. A phrase they always say. A route they walk. The state of their car. A meal. A song they will not admit to liking. Then assign each thing to whichever letter it can start with. You will usually find seven of your lines already written, and the remaining letters are the only real work.

Four mistakes that give an acrostic away

1. The adjective stack

Every line begins with a positive adjective. Covered above. The fix is nouns and verbs.

2. The line that is only there for its letter

You needed a U, so you wrote Unbelievably lovely. Every reader can hear this, because the line has no content beyond its own first letter. The fix is either a better U (see hard letters) or a restructure — move the idea you wanted into the previous line and use the U for something else entirely.

3. Forced rhyme

The acrostic already constrains your first letters. Rhyme constrains your last words. Doing both at once means almost every line is decided for you before you have thought of anything to say, and it shows in the syntax: inversions, filler adverbs, sentences that end where the rhyme is rather than where the thought is. Most good acrostics are unrhymed. If you want music, use rhythm and repetition instead.

4. The uniform line

Seven lines of exactly the same length and shape read like a list, because they are one. Vary them. Let one line be three words. Let one run long and spill. A very short line after three long ones is the cheapest and most reliable effect available to you.

Getting through the hard letters

Six letters cause nearly all the trouble: J, Q, U, V, X and Z. Three tactics, in order of how often they work.

1. Reach for a proper noun. Places, names and brands are the deepest well in English for awkward letters. Xanadu, Zanzibar, Quito, Utrecht, Venice, January. A specific place name is also, conveniently, exactly the kind of concrete detail the poem wants anyway.
2. Start with a verb. Verbs make better line-openers than adjectives at any letter, and the hard letters have decent ones: juggles, quotes, quits, unpacks, vanishes, zigzags. A line that opens with an action is already moving.
3. Use a small function word. Under, Until, Up, Xerox aside, the letter U is easily solved by Until or Unless at the start of a clause that continues an idea from the line before. Enjambment is allowed. A line does not have to be a sentence.

There is a full bank of openers for every letter of the alphabet, sorted into nouns, verbs and places, in the A–Z word lists. The letters most people search for — Q, X and Z — have the longest entries there for a reason.

Long names, short names

Short spines (3–5 letters) give you no room to develop anything, so make each line count double. A four-line acrostic is closer to an epigram than a poem: one image, one turn. Do not try to tell a story.

Medium spines (6–9 letters) are the sweet spot. There is room for a beginning, a middle and a line that lands, and not so much room that you have to pad.

Long spines (10+ letters) need a plan or they sag in the middle. Two structures that work: divide the poem into sections (first name / surname, or morning / evening), or run one long sentence across the whole thing so the reader is carried by syntax rather than by each line individually. For very long names, consider giving each letter a two-line stanza and writing fewer, better images.

A worked example, start to finish

Spine: JONAH. Five letters, including a J.

The ten things list: a bike with one working brake; says “fair enough” to everything; hates the beach; a green army coat; makes terrible coffee, constantly; laughs before the joke lands; keeps receipts; the one who drives; birthday in November; a whistle you can hear across the car park.

First pass, assigning things to letters:

Read aloud, two problems. Line three does two unrelated things and neither gets room. Line five is flat, and it is the last line, which is the worst place to be flat. The whistle and the laugh are both better material than the coffee.

What changed: line one gained a challenge to the reader, which sets a tone; line three dropped the beach and let the coat carry it; line four turned an observation into something with a small ache in it; and the last line moved from a statement to a sound and an exit, which gives the poem somewhere to stop. Same facts, same letters, ten minutes apart.

A checklist before you write it out

• Do the first letters actually spell the word? Read the margin downwards, slowly. This is the most common error in finished acrostics, and the most embarrassing.
• Does every line contain at least one concrete thing?
• Is there a line that only exists for its letter? Rewrite it.
• Are all the lines roughly the same length? Break one.
• Does the last line feel like an ending rather than a stop?
• If you read it aloud to the person it is about, would they recognise themselves in it? That is the only test that matters.

When it is right, write it out by hand. An acrostic on a screen is a nice message; an acrostic in ink, with the spine letters slightly larger, is an object someone keeps in a drawer for twenty years. The form was made for the page.