From Draft to Draft to Draft

Poetry Prompts #23 plus talk of editing.

Here’s what we did at the last Zoom poetry workshop:

More of a Comment Than a Question #44 - 8.24.23

Read Don Paterson’s “The Lie”

• List five parts of yourself that you are currently, or have in the past, kept hidden 

• Pick one and write a poem about it 

But let’s talk about EDITING.

• Take a poem you have already written (maybe the one above) and read it out loud to someone who you can be reasonably assured won’t be an asshole about it

• Afterward, talk through with them what it felt like to read it - was anything awkward? Did any words automatically change as you read them? 

• Make little notes on lines or words you might want to change later¹

• Have that other person then read their poem to you and do the same thing

• Keep doing that, back and forth, until you both have finished, error-free book manuscripts

I think I have talked about this on here already, but here’s how Lynda Barry edited her novel Cruddy. She first wrote it all out by hand, with a watercolor brush, on pad after pad of legal paper. She then took that stack of legal pads and transribed the words from them through an old, loud-ass typewriter. She said, in the transferring, if she wanted to add things or clarify things, she would just let that come in. She also let stuff that wasn’t working for her drop away. No red pen, just a well-curated gut. She then typed up THOSE pages another time, doing the same thing - doing more when you want, dropping away what isn’t needed. And voila! a masterpiece.

I have heard that there are two kinds of editors of their own work. The first is very meticulous, drafting a million drafts, continuously scraping away the bits of marble until their sculpture is complete. The other kind spends a lot of time hemming and hawing, thinking or dreaming on the ideas and shape of the piece, maybe getting distracted or burned out on it, but when they are finally “ready” to start writing, it all just falls out, more or less complete. Of course you can combine various pieces of those drafting strategies, but if we accept the general conceit of the two kinds of self-editors, then I am definitely the latter.

Which is not saying that I’m a genius that just continuously poops out finished products. But rather, after I’ve sat with the idea or wording of a poem, after I have spent the time playing with the words of it while creating, it’s either mostly done or it’s a bust. I will definitely go back and tweak things, but I never do the Whitman thing of just re-writing the same piece over and over.

Perhaps some of you are thinking “yeah, it’s pretty clear no one is actually editing your content.” But, in part, I feel like some of the immediacy of creation and communication gets lost with too much fussing. I worry I’m gonna keep effing with it until it looks like

Hahaha. Man, that’s still SO GOOD.

I will say that, as an editing tool, reading my work aloud is very helpful for me - doubly so if I’m able to do it to real humans in real time.² As I mentioned above in the editing prompt, just talking through the poem with someone who is kind can help you get to a purer piece.³ One of the most rewarding experiences of my wirting career was when a fellow poet was also putting out a manuscript at the same time as me and we both read through every piece of each other’s books and went back and forth on the phone talking through our impressions of them. Opening up your work to let others sprinkle their goodness on might complicate your idea of authorship, but it also might make you create things you love that you are incapable of producing on your own. Which I personally prefer.

So yeah, editing man. What a trip!

1. For expediancy, we just put the lines in bold in our docs and that was good enough to remind us later to take a second look at that word/line/image.

2. Perhaps the topic of another post is the method of “stage editing,” where performing your pieces live over and over again naturally morphs them into something more preferable to the first draft. Stand-ups will do it with their material all the time. And there’s also the beauty of performance poetry that is adjusted to the very specific crowd in each place, but yes this is starting to be its own post so NEVER MIND.

3. Oh, perhaps something else that deserves its own post is talking through actual strategies for giving feedback to others on their work. I have sat in many workshops where it didn’t seem like anyone was getting very much out of the experience besides anxiety. I have had people say to me “you CAN’T hurt my feelings, tell me what’s wrong and stupid about all of this and I will change it!” But I don’t comprehend giving feedback like that - all I can do is try my best to think about what the author was going for, and offer suggestions to try out. Unless you accidentally type “duck” instead of “fork” I don’t think there’s a ton of feedback that is useful that’s like “WRONG, CHANGE THIS NOW.” Even that can be said kindly, of course. The sad truth of it is that you saying “it’s done” is the only right or wrong way to make a poem. Which is to say, how can you keep working on your writing until you can become more and more confident in your work’s doneness?