Craft & Practice

How to Write a Haiku: Ten Simple Steps

By My Daily Haiku Staff · September 28, 2026 · 6 min read

We spend a lot of our lives looking without seeing. A screen lights up, we check it, something new appears, we read and scroll and move on. By evening we have taken in hundreds of fragments of other people's lives and can barely recall our own.

Haiku asks you to stop long enough to notice one real thing. A bird calling in the morning. Rain starting on a hot roof. A child's face at the breakfast table. The particular light at the end of the day. These are easy to miss precisely because they are ordinary. Haiku gives one of them your attention, then asks you to find the words for it.

That is the whole idea. It is a small poem, and writing one turns out to be a real exercise in attention, observation and language. You do not need to be a poet, or an exotic subject, or a grand feeling. You need to notice.

This guide is adapted, with permission, from Mark Stuart Farrar's Your First Haiku in Ten Simple Steps.

What follows is the how. If you want the case for why three small lines are worth your time, read the companion piece, Why Write Haiku?

1. Use plain words

Haiku is poetry, but it does not need to sound "poetic." Forget magnificent sunsets, glorious skies and eternal splendour. It works better in the words you would actually use for what is in front of you.

Instead of:

the magnificent sun
glows like a golden orb
of eternal splendour

try:

autumn sunset —
a child's shadow stretches
across the towpath

The second poem does not tell you the sunset is beautiful. It gives you something to look at. Haiku has almost no room to waste, and plain words leave more of it for the moment itself.

2. Think small, think now

A haiku catches a moment, not a whole story. Think of a camera shutter: one breath, one sound, one image. If your poem seems to span hours or years or a whole chain of thought, you have gone too wide.

Compare:

the whole day passes
as I think of my childhood
and dream of tomorrow

with:

dew frost —
a robin's call
breaks the silence

The second explains nothing. It catches something that happened in an instant, and that is the challenge: stay with the moment long enough to see it clearly.

3. Start with your own life

You do not have to travel to a mountain or wait for a spectacular sunset. Your life is already full of material: the garden gate, the sound of dishes being put away, morning toast, a dog barking outside, a train rounding a bend, a baby smiling.

These are not lesser subjects for being familiar. They are often better ones, because you are actually there to see them. Three small moments from an ordinary day give you three places to begin.

4. Show, don't tell

This is the most useful principle in haiku. Do not tell the reader what the moment means. Show the moment and let them feel it.

Instead of:

I was lonely
and the night made me sad
with its darkness

try:

winter's night —
last train's whistle
and an owl's hoot

The second poem never says "lonely." It does not need to; the feeling is in the images. So do not write "I am happy", look for what happiness looks or sounds like. Do not write "I am tired", find the image that makes tiredness visible. The feeling stays in the poem, and the poem trusts the reader to find it.

5. Keep it lean

You have probably heard that a haiku must be three lines of five, seven and five syllables. That is a fine place to start, but it is not a rule of English haiku. Economy and natural rhythm matter more. Many good haiku run about ten to fourteen syllables, with lines of uneven length:

autumn leaves
float down
unheard

There is no reason to pad a line just to hit a count. Read the poem aloud, then ask what you can remove. The strongest edit is often the word you did not need.

6. Don't decorate the poem

Rhyme, elaborate metaphor, simile and cliché all pull attention off the thing you noticed. If the snow falls, you do not have to say it falls like a million feathers. If you feel lonely, you do not have to compare yourself to the moon. Look again and find the actual thing:

dandelion fluff —
child's breath
scatters with the breeze

The image does the work when the language gets out of the way.

7. Let the season into the poem

Traditional haiku often carries a kigo, a seasonal word. It does not have to announce "summer" or "winter." It can be anything that belongs to the season: cicadas, tadpoles, pumpkins, icicles.

Instead of:

springtime
I feel alive
once again

try:

plum blossoms —
a bee circles
the branch

The season is there without being named. This works outside Japanese tradition too. Watch the seasonal signs where you live: what appears, disappears or changes at this time of year?

8. Make the two images meet

A haiku often sets two images side by side. The first establishes a scene; the next introduces something that shifts or deepens it. The gap between them is sometimes called the cut. A dash, colon or line break can mark it, but the punctuation is not the point. The shift is.

summer heat —
again and again
the screen door slams

The heat and the slamming door are not the same image. Together they make a moment. Think of the first image as a stone dropped in water and the second as the ripple: related, not identical.

9. Revise

Your first draft is rarely your best. Read it aloud and listen for the awkward spots. Cut words that are not earning their place. Reach for stronger verbs. Try reordering the lines, then read it again. The aim is not to polish the life out of the poem, it is to get closer to the moment you actually had. Sometimes the first version wins, sometimes the fifth. Keep the drafts and learn from the differences. Revising is not a sign the first attempt failed. It is how writing works.

10. Share it

A haiku changes when someone else reads it. The reader brings their own memory and association, and what you noticed becomes the starting point for what they notice. So do not wait for the poem to be perfect. Share it. Read other people's haiku too, and see how differently two writers answer the same prompt, the same season, the same ordinary day. Writing develops through writing. Reading and sharing develop it as well.

That is the practice: notice, write, revise, share, and come back tomorrow. What that daily return does to your attention is the subject of the companion piece, Why Write Haiku?, and it is the whole idea behind My Daily Haiku.

Your day is already full of haiku. All you need is to notice.

Adapted, with permission, from Mark Stuart Farrar's Your First Haiku in Ten Simple Steps.