Rhyme and reason: subverting the familiar

Fun flashy prompt series: Roses are red

Read time: 2 mins | Prompt time: 15 mins

I never used to ‘celebrate’ Valentine’s Day. I told myself because it was all of the commercialism, and the forced pressure. I said, ‘let’s celebrate love at any other time of the year. Just NOT Valentine’s Day.’ But we all know that something with no date, often doesn’t get done at all...

But if I was being truly honest. I was protecting myself from disappointment. If I engaged my expectations, I knew they felt they might be too high and too easily dashed. Unfair, perhaps. But life is too short, and February is too bleak to let an opportunity to make it a bit brighter, slide.

Love is a complicated endeavour. And expressing it can be an absolute shit-show! But it makes for a rich and interesting topic when it comes to writing fiction. Don’t you think? All the different opinions and ideas on how to go about it.

Roses are Red is a love poem and children’s rhyme, which people have parodied over the years. It can be traced back as far as 1590 in Edmund Spenser's epic The Faerie Queene.

She bath'd with roses red, and violets blue,
And all the sweetest flowres, that in the forrest grew.

Today we are going to draw inspiration from this nursery rhyme to allows us to add another layer to our storytelling that runs deep into the narrative as a motif.

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