After writing 30 poems during the past six Novembers, my December project is always to clean them up before sending them all–the good, the unfinished, and the hopeless–to the people who have so generously donated to this fundraiser to support the Center for New Americans.

Center for New Americans: cnam.org

I wrote about this process last year in a post called Poem Wrestling, but each year, I come to the table with a bit more learning, and also more compassion for myself as I work on shedding the egotistic aura of perfectionism and the numerous ways it sabotages my life. So what, if someone reads a not well rendered poem of mine and thinks badly of me or my writing abilities. I’m a big girl. I can handle it.

If I’m taking the time to revise these poems, it shouldn’t be out of preserving some image of myself whose truth is already questionable. Instead, revising should involve getting down dirty with each poem and asking myself, as Northampton Poet Laureate Franny Choi said so succinctly and enigmatically in a recent workshop I attended, what does the poem want?

And there is little that gives me more joy than when a poem bursts open into exciting new directions I had never anticipated, or when I can see in a pile of mud, a glint of a hidden sparkling stone that needs to be excavated and polished.

But enabling poems to find those pathways to self-realization can be difficult, especially when there are 30 of them that were quickly drafted.

Here’s what has helped me:

First, I read through all 30 and sort them into three categories which I label: Close (has integrity but could use tweaking), Medium (there’s something here, but still needs substantial work) and Mess (which means either huh? or yuck! depending on how self-deprecating I’m feeling that day).

Then, for each work-shift, I try to work on one poem from each category, reading through a few until I find one that appeals at the moment. For those in the Close pile, I read the poem out loud and listen for jarring word rhythms to eliminate and sounds that resonate. Then I pick through, taking out words that feel prosaic and flat, or images that feel worn and tired. I especially look at where I can replace a common verb with a stronger more evocative one, and if there are places I can substitute a word with a different number of syllables or slightly different sound to keep the internal “music” more consistent.

For a poem in the Medium category, I will eventually do all of the above, but first I’ll ask myself which parts are the sparkling rocks and which parts are mud trying to disguise itself as a sparkling rock. I’ll often chop off sections, and then add to the sections remaining to see if that brings me closer to what the poem wants. 

The poems in the Mess category are the hardest to work with. These are the ones I’d likely toss if I hadn’t made the pledge to send all 30 poems to my funders. And often, I will file them in my Inactive archive after the whole process is complete. But sometimes a poem in this category just needs to emerge. For these poems, I first try to ask myself what the poem is really about, or remember what I was trying to say when I wrote it. Then, I look at what’s on the page and see which parts help reflect that message. I cut out all the parts that don’t seem relevant, (perhaps saving some of the images I might like for future poems) and start with what’s left. More times than I’d expect, I manage to rescue these poems once I’ve cut out the prose-laden, irrelevant and didactic places, and then continued revising according to the steps above.

Of course, my piles are fluid and sometimes a poem I first peg as Close gets demoted to Medium or even Mess. But this is counterbalanced by the Mess poems that eventually end up in the Close poems.

Does anything ever get finished? I’ll probably keep revising stuff until I die, but eventually poems fall into an additional category of Good Enough, and I offer them for publication.

And regardless, at the end of December, I send all 30 poems to my audience of funders, shoving aside any residual embarrassment. My revision process is effective enough that most of the poems by then are in the Close or Good Enough categories, with a few stragglers still in Medium and Mess. Most people don’t read all the poems, anyway, and I’m totally fine with that, giving them blanket permission to peruse or ignore. Life is short. We all have a lot to do.

And out of the 150 poems I started during these 30-poem Novembers between 2019 and 2023, 32 have been published. So, I guess someone somewhere also thought they were Good Enough. 

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If I’m at a beach or a lakeshore, I’m one of those people who inches my way into the water, one excruciating shock of cold at a time. But with writing, even when I have no idea what I’m going to say, I just grab my pen or my keyboard and dive in!

Tim Marshall timmarshall, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

That’s what this week has been about, as I’ve now committed to exploring the murky idea I have for another YA novel. My goal has been to write two handwritten pages every day. I try not to edit as I go, even as shoddy writing dominates and the plot/character contradictions pile up. I even try not to read what I’ve written the day before when I begin, because I know that if I do I’m going to get bogged down in trying to revise it–and I may not even use the scenes I’m generating. I only read enough to jog my memory so I can continue to go forward.

Some people love first-draft writing because they can make up whatever they want without worrying about it. I find doing the first draft of a prose piece the hardest part of the writing process. Conjuring people and situations out of wisps of my consciousness always feels daunting, and outlines feel even harder. I need to actually write to discover what I’m going to say.

Eventually, I hope I’ll come to a point where the ideas will feel more clear and I’ll have a better sense of the characters and overall trajectory, even if I still might not know exactly how the book will end. This will be when I’ll start typing up what I have, revising as I go, but likely saving anything I’ve cut in a different file in case I want to refer to it later. Then, I’ll probably keep writing two-page segments until I get to a possible end, but likely I’ll do this on the keyboard and allow myself more leeway in polishing what I’ve written before continuing.

This won’t nearly be the end of the process.

After I’ve written my way through beginning, middle, and end, I’ll put the manuscript away for a few weeks. Then I’ll read the whole thing through with a fresher eye to get a sense of it, making notes to myself on what needs to be added, cut or changed. Then the more intensive revision will start. This is the part I like–when I finally emerge from the thick woods and can see a thin path leading me on, as long as I’m willing to chop away the overgrowth and do some bushwhacking.

Once I get that draft done, I’ll share it with my fiction-writing group (and perhaps a few other people) to get their perspective about what is working and what isn’t. Likely, their feedback will inspire me to rethink the entire novel, generating another revision, which could focus on structure, character development, plot points etc. Depending on how confident I feel about that revision, I may ask my writing group to read the book again.

And again. And so it goes.

Eventually I’ll get to a point where I’m ready for micro-editing: searching for overused words, clunky phrases, wordiness, etc. I do some of this throughout my revisions, but considering not all the prose I generate will ultimately make it into the final draft, it’s been time-efficient to save focusing on this until the end.

When the book is as good as I can get it to be, even if it isn’t perfect, I’ll test the waters by sending it out. If it’s accepted, I’ll likely have more editing to do. I’ve been lucky in that every editor I’ve worked with has helped me make a book substantially better.

And if it doesn’t get accepted for publication, I may revisit and revise from time to time, if the book still holds interest for me. Or, I might just need to be satisfied with my enjoyment of the process. And yes, I do ultimately, enjoy the process of writing long prose. Why else would I have written 11 novels and one non-fiction memoir?

Time once again to brave the cold water and dive in.