Think

Annabel Lee

by Edgar Allan Poe


It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love-
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsman came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me-
Yes!- that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we-
Of many far wiser than we-
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride,
In the sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.

Confessions of a out-of-it Writer

I'm currently taking a creative writing class at BYU, and I have come to a sad conclusion:

I have become a very lazy writer.  The first class and first assignment in creative writing were all devoted to creating the getting to know a specific character.  Do you know how much thought I put into the assignment?  A lot.  I wrote 5 notebook pages.  

In the story I've been working on for a couple of weeks, do you want to guess how much effort I put into creating those characters.  Not very much.  I mean, I have an idea of who they are, and why they are like that, but it's very vague.

I think this will be a very good class for me.  What I think happened was when I decided I wanted to be an editor, I kind of dropped the writing thing, because I knew I didn't want to be an author for a living.  But I forget sometimes that to help other writers, I need to be brushed up on the techniques a writer uses.