My Process

Yesterday I started working on a new poem. Wrote a pretty strong first stanza. Wrote a second stanza with a good image but too wordy, too loose, but nonetheless a strong image. Started a third stanza. Got stuck pretty quickly. Quit. The whole thing took me less than 30 minutes.

I had more time yesterday that I could have been writing, but I didn't. I was done. I used to feel guilty that I can sometimes only write for short bursts of time. I felt wasteful since there are very few days when I have longer than a short burst, and on those days I may still not write more than a short burst. But I've stopped feeling guilty about it and realized that in the early stages of my process, when I am still working with something formless, all I can do at a time is 20 to 30 minutes. That's it.

Later when I am reworking, rewording, revising, I can work for hours at a time. Once there is form, I can think about a word or a phrase or a line and rewrite it and rethink it for hours. But when I am trying to find form in formlessness, it's a short burst and then I'm done. At that time, my subconscious works pretty hard on the problem, and then my conscious mind sits down to try to hear what the subconscious has done, and transcribe it, and that's it. Then I've got to wait some more for my subconscious to do the heavy lifting.

So I woke up at 4:50 this morning thinking about yesterday's poem. I have a block of time this afternoon when I have to wait for a child to finish an activity, and it was at that time that I was planning to do my writing today, but here it was 4:50 on a Sunday morning no less, and the poem was calling.

So I got up and looked at it. The first stanza was still good. The second stanza, which differed completely in imagery (I had been going to do alternating stanzas of contrasting images that would come together in the end somehow) now was clearly a different poem entirely. So I moved it out--it's still a good idea but it doesn't belong with yesterday's poem. Thus the third stanza  became the second, and I worked on it, got further along. It's still flabby and missing something, but I made progress with it. That took all of 20 minutes, being that I'm still in the fairly formless stage, and I went back to bed.

I'll work again later today when I have that block of time waiting for my son. I'll probably get 20 or 25 minutes on yesterday's poem, and 20 or 25 minutes on the poem that will come from the old second stanza, and then I'll have more time to wait, so I guess I'd better take some reading with me. Or papers to correct. Or something.

Too bad I don't have a poem in the hopper that's further along in the revision process since I happen to have that kind of time today, but I don't. That's how it goes.

That's my process, and now that I've written in down, it'll probably change radically. Let's hope not. It may not be the most efficient process, but it's one I understand.