hello i saw the post where you turned a tumblr thread into a Shakespeare play and i have to inquire, how in the world does one learn to write in iambic pentameter?
for the life of me, i cannot figure out what syllables are stressed or unstressed. I AM STRESSED THATS WHAT
hm... to be honest, i'm not sure how well i can explain it, but i'll give it a shot.
when we talk, we naturally give some syllables of a word more emphasis than others. consider the word "syllable", for example: if you've heard someone say the word, they've almost certainly said "syll-a-ble", not "syll-a-ble" or "syll-a-ble", which sound strange when said out loud.
when it comes to iambic pentameter, it's just a matter of counting out syllables. "iambic" means we're using a pattern of one unstressed syllable and one stressed syllable, one-two, and "pentameter" means we do this five times per line. so:
shall i compare thee to a summer's day?
thou art more lovely and more temperate.
writing your own stuff is just a matter of learning to notice the natural emphasis that most people will place on which syllables of words, and tweaking the phrasing until it fits the pattern.
there are also other poetic meters you can experiment with, differing in the pattern of syllables and the length of lines - for instance, dactylic tetrameter, which sounds like this:
old mother goose, when she wanted to wander
would fly through the air on a very fine gander
"dactylic" means it uses a pattern of one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed, one-two-three, and "tetrameter" means we do this four times per line. an interesting thing to note in the above example is how the last dactyl is split across the two lines - this is a little trick you can use occasionally in iambic verse too, to improve the flow of the spoken verse and change things up a little.
there's a lot more to the subject - i didn't even get into alliterative verse, which was commonly used in old english and old norse and is extremely fascinating - but hopefully this is enough to get you started.