Snowballing

A Snowball is a poem in which each line is a single word, and each successive word is one letter longer. If you're metrophobic, try writing a sentence. Though poetry might be easier since it doesn't need to make as much sense ;-)

I
go
now
into
under
ground
tunnels
carrying
bodacious
starstruck
jackrabbits
backflipping

Two sites that list words by length are Your Dictionary and Best Word Lists.

---

If you would like to see a prolific snowballer in action, check out Snowball Poetry on Twitter. (The beginning of mine came from one there.)

Snowball was created by the Oulipo (Workshop of Potential Literature). They gather together to create constrained writing challenges. It's also called a chaterism which Wikipedia defines as "where the length of words in a phrase or sentence increases or decreases in a uniform, mathematical way." (I'm guessing since snowballs get bigger when rolled, the word originally referred to poems with words that increased. Chaterism is a broader concept.)

There is a Snowball Poetry Generator for Windows.