My Writing Process

Jackie ♦ February 13, 2009 ♦ 4 Comments

Recently my husband came upstairs to find me snug under the covers and scribbling in my current favorite poetry notebook, a lime-colored clothbound hardback with lined pages, stuffed with drafts and about a quarter full of poems. “How are the poems coming along?” he said, kind of like you’d ask a gardener about their tomato crop.

“Good, I think,” I said. “I think there are a few that are ready to come out of the notebook.”

“Oh,” he said. “Does that mean you’ll be sending them out to be published?” (his faith in me is touching, isn’t it?)

“Oh, no no no,” I said. “That just means I’ll type them up, and maybe do one or two more revisions. Then I’ll show them to a few people, and probably bring them to poetry group. Then maybe I’ll send them out.”

“Oh,” he said, clearly amused. But that’s how my poetry-writing process has evolved, especially over the past few years, when I started getting more serious about poetry.

I always begin a poem in pen, on paper, and it always goes through a few drafts that way, with words crossed out and new words and phrases scribbled on the sides with big arrows and asterisks everywhere. Once a draft has gotten too messy, it’s time to recopy it on a new page and see if I need to do any more messing with it. Once I’ve done that a few times, with appropriate intervals in between, I let the poem sit for awhile. Sometimes I go work on another poem in the meantime that needs to be messed with. If I come back to the poem, and only make a few minor adjustments (a comma here, a synonym there), then I know it’s ready to come out of the notebook. This proces speeds up somewhat when I have a workshop deadline, like I did for my museum workshops, but is still essentially the same. During the notebook period, a lot of the adjusting and revising happens in 5-10 minute spurts, easy to do before bed or when I’ve just woken up, or if I can steal a few minutes on the weekend in the middle of the day. Some poems spend a week or two in the notebook, some spend a month or two, and there are at least two still in there right now I’ve been kicking around for a year. A poem recently came out of the notebook prematurely, went to poetry group, and then went back to the notebook to get totally revamped.

Once I’ve typed a poem up and printed it out, I usually do one or two more polishes before I’m finally ready to show it to someone else, like my workshop or poetry group. I have two poet friends who can also be counted on to be a pair of eyes, but I really like the instant feedback of a group, so I’m glad to have found one. I also like to think that I’m pretty valuable in these settings as a pair of eyes for other poets. Years of reading voraciously and grading hundreds of student essays, not to mention working with my own words, has given me a pretty good eye for what works and what might not.

After all that, a poem feels ready to be sent out, unless of course, that poem has looped back for some reason and needs to repeat some stages. I have a few poems right now that need to be sent out, but I need to sit down with my market list and decide exactly where to send them. A workshop I went to last summer talked about setting up a tracking process for poems, which I have tried also, so I need to set that back up before I send anything out. It’s good to be able to keep track of where a poem is and where it’s been.

So there’s my writing process– it’s a little messy, a little elongated, and not very scientific, but it works for me. How about you?