Now Let’s Edit!—Tips and Discussion

So April is National Poetry Month and the write-30-poems-in-30-days challenge, so May needs to be the month of editing. Editing can be a lot less fun than that initial burst of inspiration, but editing gets easier with practice. Many writers have a set of editing rules, some of which are helpful for everyone, and others that are really only helpful for a few people. Looking at what other writers, poets and editors advise is helpful so that you can find what works best for you. Joining a writing workshop and learning others’ processes has been incredibly helpful to me, but can be overwhelming to new writers still seeking to develop their own voice/style.

Btw, some of these tips are useful only for poetry; others can help with editing stories and essays too.

TL;DR version:

1. Set a first draft aside for a period of time before editing.

2. Keep a copy of the original so that you feel freer to cut and make extreme changes.

3. Read it aloud at least twice to find awkward phrasing (and reread lines while revising).

4. Try multiple forms—couplets, block form, quatrains, irregular stanzas, prose poem, etc.

5. Look for the “heart” or “emotional truth” of the poem.

6. Cut unnecessary words and images, clichés and abstractions and look for missing connections or undeveloped imagery.

7. End stanza lines on a strong image or word (verbs are good here).

8. Check that the first words of the lines aren’t all little words like “and,” “of,” “in” and other prepositions and rearrange if necessary.

9. Cut unnecessary repetition and “boring” words but avoid overly complicated language and words intended to impress.

10. Read aloud again, or, if possible, have a friend read it aloud to you to discover awkward phrasing and if another person can follow your punctuation and intended pacing

11. Check spelling and punctuation a final time. Know the rules and break them intentionally.

One suggestion that many recommend is to set that first draft aside so that you can look at it with fresh eyes. I also find this helpful. Sometimes writing out on paper or in a notes app and then transferring it to a word processing program in a day or two is enough of a break to allow me to revise well enough for at least a solid second draft. Sometimes I need more time, especially if I feel that something is missing but cannot pinpoint where.

Btw, It is during this transferring from my Notes app or notebook that I decide on the overall form, breaking the block into stanzas or couplets. I tend to use (or overuse) couplets because they are easier for me to read from a phone or tablet on stage and my imagery/conversational style often falls into shorter stanzas or couplets. I usually try a poem in both couplets, quatrains or irregular stanzas before deciding.

I always keep an original of a poem while editing, and I may have three or four versions of a poem saved in a folder until I have decided it is really finished. By keeping a copy of the original, I am less nervous about making drastic changes and cuts. I can always go back.

Another tip I use is to read the poem or story aloud so that I can see where I stumble, what feels awkward or just “heavy” to me. Sometimes even after reading a poem to myself and editing, I still find a rough spot when reading in front of an audience. The nervousness seems to make a slightly wonky wording worse (great timing, right!)

Once I have the overall form decided—which I still may change later—I look to see what seems to be the heart of the poem. What line/image is the poem’s “emotional truth”—what I want the reader to understand. Check a four or five lives above the ending if you are having difficulty pinpointing it.

From there, I see what can be cut: clichés, any adjectives or adverbs that are just filler, a line that adds nothing, an image that contradicts or doesn’t fit with the rest. I also try to see what is missing or unclear—this can be the hardest for me (I can get stuck in my head and assume readers will follow my line of thought).

Don’t forget to reread lines aloud as you are revising to check the rhythm and flow.

Next revise the ending words of lines to strong action verbs or to complete an image. I also try to check the first words so that the “and’s” and preposition aren’t stacking up. Here is when I also check for unnecessary repetition. I have been told that repeating a words three times is a deliberate choice but twice an accident.

While most poets first learn poetry through the classics, replicating the formal, often archaic language of those poems won’t connect with most modern audiences and won’t feel like authentic voice to them. Poems can be powerful using only common words. You can use a thesaurus to spice up your language and the more words you know, the more tools you have, but make sure you know the secondary meanings of the words you want to try out.

Read it aloud again, focusing on pacing, rhythm, tone and sound (alliteration, assonance, etc.) Use punctuation, line breaks and internal spacing to guide readers on the intended pace and pauses.

Do one last final check of spelling and punctuation. (Please do not apply this process to this blog post.)

Have fun editing! Remember it is all a process. Good luck!

Tense Times, Voice and the Partings of Speech—Editing Prompts

I’ve been thinking about the power of language to divide and categorize: the euphemisms used in war and violence by those with power; how passive voice hides the perpetrator of a shooting or a bombing; how one group of people are agents of their actions, but others recipients, innocent of deed.

What voice do you use in your poems; in spite of the constant reminder to use strong, active verbs does the passive slip in? Is there a poem or story in which your speaker denies agency? Would passive voice demonstrate that stance? As always, who is your speaker/narrator, some version of you, or another persona entirely? Some critics denigrate the use of “I” in a poem or story, but I distrust anyone who believes they can be fully objective in their own life or perform as some omniscient observer neutrally accounting an event even if I enjoy the stories written in third person.

For the first editing prompt, take an unfinished or discarded poem or short story and adjust the voice of the speaker/narrator—changing syntax and tone—to one different from the original or from your own habitual style. In Eric Morago’s workshop series, we are often asked to write in another poet’s style. Focusing on someone else’s voice taught me much about my own and offered more directions for me to move within my writing.

Even verb tense can illustrate as much as it obscures.

I am unsure how helpful such focus is in the initial draft of a poem or story, but I think such considerations are necessary in the revision and in developing as a writer.

For the next prompt, again choose a poem or a short story that feels unfinished to you, and (making a copy of that document) change the verb tense—yes, I know past tense is traditional for prose. What happens to the pacing? What other changes do you need to make for it all to fit? Does a story or narrative told in first person feel as “factual” or “recorded” in the present tense? Can the reader—or will a reader other than you—feel the weight of prior events influencing the present moment you describe?

Again, this is just for experiment, so you will probably change the tense back to your original, but it may offer insights in revising rough areas or lines/sections that don’t fit together.

Let’s move from tense to parts of speech. Since reading Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red I cannot stop thinking about this particular section:

To me, adjectives also are a way of further dividing and separating into categories. Sometimes the particulars are needed to express your meaning, setting a scene or creating an imagistic poem. While writers are often told to avoid adverbs and focus on active verbs, adjectives can build up.

For the next exercise, take a poem or story, and strip it of all of its adjectives. What happens? Do you need more nouns? Does the piece become too stark, empty or even vague? Add back an adjective one at a time but pause to consider how each one allocates the place a character/speaker or object within the described moment or place. What positions are you assigning to your subjects (objects)?

I hope these exercises will be helpful.

Bonus prompt: write a brief description of this photo of Cleveland Clinic

Now reconsider that description or combine it into a poem or the setting of a story after seeing the black and white photo of the same building (and different angle/location). What draws your eye?

Good luck writing! Have fun!

Let’s Start Editing Those 30/30 poems!

So you’ve written 30 new poems or five or none or you have a backlog of poems you’ve set aside. Great! It’s good to let them sit for a while and look at them again with fresh eyes.

There are all sorts of “rules” to writing and editing. But rules are often annoying and unnecessarily restrictive. Look at what others recommend and find what strategies work best for you.

This shirt sums up my attitude towards prescriptive guides, but I thought these recommendations were good guidelines to consider as well as Carmen Giménez Smith’s suggestions. Honestly, I love learning about the processes amazing writers use.

For me, reading poems aloud, particularly to other people (sorry, Don and friends!), helps me find the rough spots—the convoluted wording, problematic line breaks, missing words and confusing grammar/syntax. Even better is to have someone else read your poem aloud—that will really show whether the line breaks and structure work on the page for a reader.

Perhaps the admin for the UN’s account should have had someone read over the hashtags. Oops!

Btw, I once used IUD instead of IED in a poem—not the kind of imagery I’d intended—so I can sympathize.

For line breaks (my weakest area for years), try to end on a strong verb or image. If you are rhyming in your poem don’t let the end rhyme dictate the entire line, or you may lose the necessary surprise. With all the focus on the end words, it’s easy to let articles and prepositions build up for the first word of your lines. See what you can rearrange or cut.

Titles, oof. Remember that they need to hook readers. Ask yourself if you would choose to read this poem if its title were listed on a table of contents with other poems. Try to use the title to give additional context to the poem without giving spoilers. Yes, this can be difficult to balance. It’s all practice and developing your own voice/style and strategies. Some poets use the title as the first line of the poem, which can be fun. It can be helpful to look to the center or maybe three or four lines from the bottom of a poem to find its “heart” (I am unsure who recommended this, perhaps Alexis Rhone Fancher, but I heard it in Eric Morago’s workshop).

Also remember that your first lines will determine whether someone will continue reading. It’s often hard to really get a poem started, and I often need an on-ramp to the “real” poem. If this is the same for you, see what you can cut. And try not to include too much in one poem.

While you need to pull a reader in, don’t forget that the last lines are the lens through which the entire poem will be remembered (this is I heard in Brendan Constantine’s workshop).

Back to cutting, you will often hear the phrase “kill your darlings.” It may ease the pain if you keep a document of cut lines to use later.

Make sure the form fits your message. If you are using a single column, perhaps try couplets or quatrains. Experiment to see what works best for you.

Most of all, keep reading and find what you like. Try to expand beyond just a few poets or one style of writing and borrow techniques from many writers so that you develop a unique voice. And listen to yourself. In a recent workshop, I received conflicting advice on what lines to cut for an editing exercise (cutting from a 40-line poem to a 20-line poem to just 10 lines). I listened and appreciated the suggestions, but I was the one who decided. At other times, I just hand a poem over. I learn a lot that way too.

Ultimately, you need to listen to yourself. Some of the advice I’ve received was counterproductive because the readers/listeners didn’t understand my intent. As I’ve developed as a writer, I’ve found that unhelpful advice is often a sign that I hadn’t succeeded and need to rework a section. Sometimes people just like different kinds of poetry, and that is the beauty of writing and reading: there is something out there for everyone.

If a poem or story still isn’t working for you, remember everyone has had that same experience at least once—this blog post for example.

For today’s exercise, create your own cheat sheet for editing. Knowing your own strengths and weaknesses, make a list of what you should consider first for a deep revision and then a final check for grammar and minor issues. Take that list and use it to revise a particularly rough poem that you wrote at least a week ago.

As with refilling a beanbag chair, things can go all over the place. Good luck with pulling it all together.

Have fun editing!

Revising and Recreating—Prompts

April was the month for writing new poems, and this month is for editing and for recreating.

Using Kristen Baum’s cutting-up method of revision (see here for her explanation and demonstration), print one of your poems that you feel needs to be rearranged and cut it up into the phrases you want to keep together and into individual words. Give yourself plenty of space—a table or even the floor—to play around with the order. Find out which words and phrases you can leave out. You may need to add more words into the mix, so make another printout, cut them out, and include them. See what works. Experiment and play.

For a writing/editing prompt, let’s cento a new poem out of those you’ve left sitting in folders. Take several of those 30/30 poems that you are unhappy with and any older poems that you have also given up on further editing and cut each line up into separate strips of paper. Since these are your own poems, you of course can add words and punctuation as needed, but first try to use each line as is to see if that constraint can push you into a new direction.

I hope these suggestions help you give new life to a poem you’ve abandoned.

For a bonus prompt, write about a place you had left behind but discovered it grown new life when you returned. Perhaps you visited a childhood home and saw new trees and flowers planted in the front yard or maybe a tire swing or play set. Has the tree limb you broke climbing it grown another branch? Describe these new possibilities, or look for the ghost of your child self and those of your family that seem to remain. Is your name carved somewhere?

May You Edit All Month Long—Editing Prompts

So you’ve completed the 30/30 challenge and have aa April-full of poems. Or perhaps you are like me, never finished even two weeks’ worth of poems. Now what? Continue writing. Maybe make the first half of May your time to finish the poems you started, or had planned to. I didn’t get out blog posts regularly either. Sorry!!!

So you can catch up on writing, or you can start editing. Some poems you may need to set aside for a while. You may instead want to edit old poems. You may find that some poems—those from April and others from years ago—are unfixable. If so, pull what you like from them and start collecting those lines and phrases in a document for later use.

For those poems you’re ready to dig into, try some of the techniques discussed in previous posts. To find the heart of the poem, try looking at the fourth or fifth line from the bottom. Begin the poem there and continue.

You could try switching the first half and second of your poem, and either begin writing after the original ending or try to create a beginning for the former first half. See what happens.

You could play with the structure. What happens if you take a prose poem and divide it into stanzas and shorter lines, or vice versa, make a prose poem from the original. Experiment with line length and stanzas. What works?

Perhaps the structure works but the language is imprecise or bulky. What is redundant? Look at your verbs. Do they stand out? What about the last word in the lines? Conversely, are small words stacking up at the beginning of lines? What can you cut? What images are you conveying? Are they relevant? Does the poem need a clearer sense of time or place?

I will try to post more editing suggestions later this month, along with generative prompts. And remember some poems (and revisions) won’t succeed, but the process of writing is to keep practicing and experimenting (and continue reading and learning from others too). And if you end up with an epic failure of a piece, you can take comfort in your shared experience.

Break Hearts and Prompts—Prompts and editing tips inspired by John McCullough and Lucille Clifton

For years, I struggled most with line breaks. I know I have improved now that I second guess as much with other parts of the poem (or regressed in other skills, hard to say). So much of progress seems to be retracing steps and back pedaling assumptions.

Thankfully, so many writers share their insights and poems (their own or of others) for me to learn from.

Something that stood out for me was how the interplay of the last word of the lines—“yesterday” followed by “backs” and then “tomorrow,” the logical connection of “circulation” and “blood,” but the contrast between “round” and “edge” and ending on “now” after “mistakenly.”

Those ending words themselves are a story (carried along on the lines of course but could themselves create meaning. For the first prompt, write a poem from the last word from each line and of the title but in reverse order or in a different sequence from the poem: “now,” “mistakenly,” “time,” “edge,” “round,” “water,” “past,” “blood,” “circulation,” “tomorrow,” “backs,” “yesterday,” “anything,” “forth,” and “gulf.”

What I also loved about the poem (ok, one of many things) is the motion. I felt the rocking back and forth in that initial “so forth,” the forward momentum and then that abrupt stop at “edge” before falling into the next line and finally ending on the swaying “only here. only now.”

Of course, John McCullough explains this so much better than I could:

For the next writing prompt, take a poem that just isn’t working for you and break the lines so that you have a momentum that pauses and then rushes forward. If possible, try to revise the title so that it continues into the first line.

Choose a poem that’s content fits the movement; obviously, time, oceans and rivers all work well. Let the form reflect the metaphor: time as a road with the travelers moving atop it, or the river rushing past and splashing the stones submerged in it. What other themes would mesh equally well with the movement: birthing, breathing, falling into a kiss, a falling out of a relationship, stalking, dancing.

For the next prompt, use the line “every day someone is standing on the edge” as a ghostline. Remember to acknowledge the poet with “After Lucille Clifton” for this poem.

Kill Your Darlings—It’s Editing Time

So I am even less productive with covid. I am better but still foggy. I would like to write surreal poems since the world seems so hazy, but the words keep slipping off the page onto the floor.

Since nothing is bubbling up, let’s take an old poem and make it better or maybe just break it for fun. Perhaps it’s time to take a scalpel or an ax, possibly dynamite, to a poem that just isn’t working for you.

The advice “kill your darlings” is one you may have heard. Often it refers to overly flowery language that while beautiful doesn’t push your poem or story forward. For me it is often the stumbling at the beginning of a poem before taking off or editorializing phrases or hiding behind poetic conventions.

As discussed in a previous post on editing, try splitting your poem into two halves, using the bottom half as the beginning and writing a second half and writing a beginning for your previous first half. Sometimes the heart of the poem is four or five lines from the bottom line; find that line and start there. Or you can take your last line and use it as your starting point. Replace all of your verbs with their antonyms. See what happens.

After you’re finished, see what you think of the new version. If the edited version is a lurching Frankenstein’s monster, put it down. Walk away. You are still writing even if what you got was practice rather than a poem. And if that doesn’t seem enough, ask for suggestions from a reader or writing group you trust. Or from another entity.

Beginnings and Endings—Editing and Writing Prompts Inspired by Ruth Awad

Good editors can show you new directions that you cannot see while in the middle of your poem, but you can use the same strategies for your own editing process. I have been told that some of my poems seem written to get to that last line or image. If you have received the same comment—or if an existing poem simply doesn’t work—take the last line, move it to the beginning, and edit from there.

For the first writing prompt, take either the first line—“And the lie is that I survived because parts of me / didn’t”—or the last line—“None of us got what we deserved”—as a ghostline. Remember to erase the line and give credit to the poet.

For the next prompt, make a list of sorrows that you, or others, have carried. Be specific. Are you still carrying them? How did you release them? What now?

For the third writing prompt, write a poem using the following word list: “lie,” “take,” “mirrors,” “look,” “listen,” “light,” “lost,” “worry,” and “remind.” Try to switch the verbs to nouns and vice versa where possible.

For the last editing prompt, take a poem you’re unhappy with and change the verbs to their antonyms. What happens?