The Joy of Editing

Poetry process

To have an idea feels like everything, but in hindsight it is only the essential 1%. Ideas are common as air. It’s what you do with the idea that makes it live.

To write a draft is 10%, even if it takes hours or weeks or months. That’s to see if it has legs. Is it worth pursuing? Not if it won’t run.

To edit is 80% by time and by fun and fascination. (To get it published is the rest and another story.)

You can, to extend my analogy, break the legs of the work by editing, especially if it’s too soon and you overwrite.

But if the idea reaches into your core as something that matters, it can’t really disappear. You may have the perfect phrase that eludes later but it’s still in you, or a better one.

Yes! is a sensation. Creating is a sensation. Editing in a groove is a sensation. Poem is a sensation.

Get enough stimulant and take away enough sleep, add enough stress and you’ll addle yourself into invoking a sensation, but labelling it poem doesn’t make it one.

Sometimes it’s as if the muse exists and you channel something into something close to final form. Some dark half of your brain has been working on that while you were doing the business of life. Sometimes these poems are your best that people like the most and yet they took the least effort while what you laboured over, invested in consciously, took pains to perfect, receive a meh.

Frustrating but not useless effort. While you edit consciously, while you actively read and write, considering the why and how you are learning to better express. Your unconscious takes those lessons and apply them to later poems.

I’ve seen workshops where the only edits are copyedits, or to change order of lines or stanzas. This I find unsatisfying. Are the foundation of concepts valuable? Is the type of expression fitting the intent? Is the basic worldview coming across?

Editing, I like to get into the roots and blossoms that might come and go deeper and wider until I get a full grasp of a thing. Anything can become anything. Firming up too early and you miss potentially rewarding directions.

Editing is partly exploration. What if this went in suchasuch direction? Is that irrelevant bit actually the hidden lede? Was I working through my fear to get to the final line which is where I can start?

You are the therapist to you manuscript and ask, what are we here to talk about today? Give yourself a lot of slack to rove through deflections and castigations, being the class clown of this workshop of 1. Sit with yourself and just listen, taking notes. Don’t overdirect with leading questions; you may intimidate yourself or give appropriate answers. The old adage if you don’t suprise yourself, you can’t suprise the reader. As known punchlines ruin the joke, unless it self-satirizes by repetition back into humour, if you know where you are going, why go?

Perhaps to go deeper? To excavate, what’s under that, what’s behind that, what’s that built on. Why, why, why? Embrace your inner toddler? How? How? Embrace your inner scientist. And play. Writing feels high stakes while you are in the burn but less you live in Afghanistan or China, or other similar countries, writing is low stakes in effect. If may change you. It should change you. It can suggest how you should change. But ultimately, writing is learning, and becoming. It is time to rebuild what you know or how you want the world to be. That sounds high stakes, doesn’t it. But writing is one word at a time.

You have to start somewhere. Where do you start when you could start anywhere. A wirerframe to start the shaping might be helpful. Check out  Writebulb 1.2 at the Apple store to kickstart your writing. My partner Brian and I spent much of the early year developing the app. On feedback we rebuilt part of WriteBulb to make a free trial version of 30 free prompts for people to see what it's about. Try before you buy. Like it, buy it. Dozens of people around the world are giving a try to this new tool.

Yes, that is a plug, but it is also part of my process. For months I have been in editing mode, switching among various manuscripts (two of which are coming out as chapbooks soon; news soon) and I wasn’t making new material.

I like to keep poetry at all stages of creation so when the editing muscle is tired, I can make new rumination, or when I’m fatigued of creation, I can consume poetry and when I’m fatigued of the density of poetry I can read fiction or non-fiction. It’s about following the flow of what nourishes. Editing allows something in its time of reflection and contemplation and mechanical brute shifting of cognitive weights.

The joy of editing isn’t nostalgia but keeping relevancy. Some of my memories being processed in manuscripts are twenty or forty years old. Poetry is the link between now and some old anchor. Or a line thrown out to a dock you may tie off at. But it is also who you are now.

First draft can also offer a kind of get out of jail free card. You can write whatever you want for 5 minutes, or 15, or 30, whatever you can cleave off from life maintenance and relationships and responsibilities. You can take that time to do one polished hook of a sentence or like a potter, throw many pots and not send any to the kiln. Whether you edit by repetition or by refining one thing, you find forward momentum to see what next, what next. And then, and then…the biggest reward is the act to choose engagement.