I have been working on my book and have spoken to a few different people and although I only have about 50 pieces drafted so far (I hope for around 150), I asked if it was necessary to have a theme. If you have checked out my work on IG, all of my pieces are different. Here are my questions: Is a book theme necessary? I've seen so many books that are "love" poems or focus on one specific topic. My pieces vary from love (happy), love (doomed), grief, and the others are pure randomness. I have a piece in there about the stars falling from the sky and one about missing the sunset at Huntington Beach, and another about cold coffee (so yes, quite random). Chapters. Again, this would be a tough one for me for some of them. Poems from IG. I have some pieces I would like to pull from my IG page for the book, but don't know if others have done this. If you have, do you archive the poem? Any insights will be so helpful to me. I am taking a bit of a break from posting on IG to focus on the book. Thank you so much!

I love a good prompt on Instagram to write a poem. I have a question regarding them though - just say a poet posts prompts for the month of June or has a list of prompts and you create a magnificent poem with them. Can you later on publish that poem in a book? The reason why I ask is I have a few poems I have written that I absolutely love, but a couple words were from a prompt. In that instance, should I ask them for permission? Another poem has a line out of a song lyric that we were supposed to use and I feel like especially for that one I will need to reframe the text, so it is not looked upon as plagiarizing. Let me know your thoughts. I'm sure you all know the answer and can educate this newbie. 😂