How to write a haiku: 5-7-5, season words, the cut and examples

To write a haiku, take one moment you noticed with your senses and put it in three short lines, usually short, long, short. Set two images side by side with a pause between them, called the cut, and place the moment in a season. The 5-7-5 pattern is a fair starting point, but it comes from Japanese, which counts sound units called on rather than syllables. Seventeen English syllables carry more than seventeen on, so many poets writing in English aim for about twelve.

What a haiku is

The haiku began as the hokku, the opening verse of a linked poem that several Japanese poets wrote together, one stanza each. Bashō (1644–1694) made the hokku an art of its own, and in the late 19th century Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902) renamed the standalone verse haiku. Yosa Buson (1716–1784) and Kobayashi Issa (1763–1828), the other two classical masters, came between them.

The Haiku Society of America's current definition describes a short poem in imagistic language about an experience of nature or the season, linked to human life, in which a cut suggests a relationship between two or more images or ideas. In practice that gives you four things to aim for:

• One moment. Something you saw, heard, smelled or touched, in the present tense. Not a summary of a season or a life.
• Concrete images. Nouns and verbs you could photograph or record. Abstract words such as love, time and sorrow do the reader's work for them.
• A season. A word that places the moment in the year, which a Japanese poet would call a kigo.
• A cut. A pause that splits the poem into two parts and lets the reader find the connection.

Haiku usually have no title and no rhyme. Japanese haiku never rhymed. Some early English translators added rhyme anyway, and it forces word choices the poem does not need.

5-7-5: what the numbers count

A traditional Japanese haiku has 17 on in three phrases of 5, 7 and 5. An on is a beat of sound, and it is shorter than an English syllable: a long vowel takes two beats, a doubled consonant takes one, and a final n takes one. The same word can count differently in each language.

Bashō's poem about the old pond, written in 1686, shows the pattern exactly. Translate it word for word and the English comes out at 11 syllables, not 17.

This is why the Haiku Society of America has said that about 12 English syllables approximate the length of 17 Japanese on. Padding an English haiku out to 17 usually means adding words like "so", "very" or a second "the", which is the opposite of what the form is for.

The practical rule: if a teacher, contest or journal asks for 5-7-5, write 5-7-5 and make every syllable earn its place. If no one does, write short, long, short, and let the poem be as long as one breath.

The season word (kigo)

Japanese poets choose season words from a saijiki, an almanac that lists kigo season by season, with sample poems for each. The words are conventions: the moon alone means autumn, the frog means spring, the cicada means summer. A kigo does two jobs at once. It sets the scene, and it brings the feeling of the season, so the poem never has to say "lonely" or "hopeful".

Poets writing in English rarely work from a saijiki, and many write haiku without a season word at all. Regional lists exist (one Southern California group lists June gloom and smog), and the most useful season words are the ones you actually live with.

The cut: two images, one gap

Japanese haiku mark the cut with a kireji, a cutting word. Tradition lists 18, and the ones you will meet most are ya, which stops the poem after a word and sets it apart, kana, which closes a poem with a note of wonder, and keri, an exclamatory verb ending. English has no equivalent, so poets use a dash, a colon, an ellipsis or simply the line break.

The cut creates juxtaposition: two things placed next to each other without an explanation. Most haiku follow a fragment-and-phrase shape. The fragment, often one line, sets the scene or names the season. The phrase, the other two lines, gives the detail. The reader supplies the connection, and that small act of completing the poem is what makes it stay.

Buson never says how wide the field is. The cut after the flowers, and the moon and sun at either edge of the sky, tell you. Ezra Pound's two-line poem of 1913, which the editors of Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years call "the first fully realized haiku in English," works the same way. The semicolon is the cut:

Haiku examples from Bashō, Buson and Issa

Read the masters for technique, not just mood. Each poem below is given in Japanese, then in a plain word-for-word translation of our own, with a note on what it does.

How to write a haiku in six steps

1. Collect moments, not topics

   "Autumn" is a topic. Steam rising off a wet dog's back is a moment. Keep a running list on your phone or in a notebook of small things you noticed, with the date. Many haiku start as a note like that.

2. Write it as one plain sentence

   Say what happened as you would in a text message, feelings and all. You will cut most of it, but you need to see the whole moment first.

3. Cut to the images

   Strike the named emotions, the judgments (beautiful, peaceful) and the explanations (because, like, as if). This is show, don't tell at its most extreme: what is left should be things and actions.

4. Find the two parts

   Look for the setting and the detail, or two details that belong together without being the same thing. Put the cut where you would pause if you said it aloud, and mark it with a dash or a line break.

5. Place it in a season

   If the moment has a season, let one word carry it: frost, a school bus, a box fan. If you already have a season in the images, do not add a second one.

6. Shape the lines and count last

   Break it short, long, short. Read it aloud in one breath. Count syllables only now, and if you need 5-7-5, add a precise word rather than a filler one. Then leave it for a day and read it again cold.

One haiku, from notebook to final

The draft hits 17 syllables and says everything twice. The final drops "sad" and "getting old" and lets one word, "still", carry both: he has not been back to the car. "October dusk" is the fragment and the season, the dash is the cut, and the glasses are the phrase.

Original haiku to study

Five more, written for this guide, each showing one technique.

Haiku vs senryu

A senryu has the same short shape but turns to human nature instead of the season: vanity, office life, families. It is named after the 18th-century poet Karai Senryū and is often wry, though it does not have to be funny. The group photo above has no season and no nature in it, so most editors would call it a senryu. If your poems keep landing on people, you may be writing senryu, which is a fine thing to write.

Common haiku mistakes

• Padding for the count. "Very", "so", "now" and doubled articles added to reach 17 syllables. Cut them and accept a shorter poem, or find a more exact word.
• Naming the feeling. Sad, lonely, peaceful, beautiful. If the images are right, the reader feels it. If they are not, the word will not help.
• A moral in the last line. "Life is short" or "nothing lasts" explains the poem. Stop at the image.
• Simile instead of juxtaposition. "Leaves fall like tears" tells the reader how to connect two things. Put them side by side and let the reader connect them.
• A sentence chopped in three. If the lines read as one statement with no pause, there is no cut and no second image.
• Too much in one poem. Sunset, birds, wind and a memory of your grandmother is four poems. Keep the one that surprised you.

Keeping a haiku notebook in Strokes

Haiku come out of a habit of noticing, so the notebook matters more than the software. If you write in Strokes, one document per season in a project folder keeps the dated notes and the finished poems together, as files on your own machine. Version history saves drafts as you revise, so you can preview the poem you had last week with the changes marked and restore it in one click when the newer version turns out worse. You can also open the AI Assistant beside the page and ask it which lines name a feeling or lean on an abstract word. Count the syllables yourself: language models are unreliable at counting them. When a set is ready, export it to PDF for a class or a contest.

If you already keep a daily journal, end each entry with one haiku about something you noticed that day. For longer forms, see how to write a sonnet, and if you need a starting image, try our poetry prompts.