This great tip comes from Caroline Adderson who teaches the self-editing course in the Southbank Writers program:

To most effectively edit your own writing you have to change the way you read and respond to it. You have to take off the Writer Hat. When you’re wearing the Writer Hat your experience of writing, positive or negative, imbues your perception of the text. On a good day, when the words pour forth and the characters are obedient to you, you feel that the writing itself is good. On bad days, when each word you put down seems to fly back off the screen and smack you between the eyes, when your characters ignore you and open doors you didn’t even know were there or lean over and kiss a stranger on the bus, creating implications that you suspect are merely useless tangents, you feel the writing is terrible. A mess. You’re the worst writer ever.

The truth is that the process of writing is completely separate from the finished text. To actually see that text for what it really is, you have to take off the Writer Hat and put on the Reader Hat. You have to engage with the text as it is without the emotional baggage that belongs to the wearer of the Writer Hat, not the story. You have to read it as though you didn’t write it.

Not so easy. The best way to do this is to put the darn thing away. File it. For how long? Six months is a start, but some people don’t have six months to wait. You can speed up the hat-switch by immediately writing something else. This way, you begin to attach to the new text and gradually forget about the other one. When you finally come back to the other after a month or two, the hat-switch is as natural as pulling off the toque at the end of winter and putting on the ball cap.

Image: Flickr.com (creative commons license)

You’ve just spent hours, days or months finishing your first draft. Now, put it away and forget about it. Don’t look at it. Don’t read it. Don’t show it to anyone. Just let it simmer. Give the work, and yourself, some time to breathe.

In a few weeks, pick up your draft and read it. Being further removed from it, you’ll be able to see what works and what doesn’t. You’ll be able to cut redundant sentences, fix grammar mistakes and slash those beautiful lyrical sentences that unfortunately just don’t belong.

Editing is never easy, but putting away your first draft is.

Post by Erica Simmonds (TWS 2012). Erica likes to let her first drafts sit, and has been letting one sit for maybe just a little too long now.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

During Jami Macarty’s Sounds Like, Looks Like, and Feels Like Poetry, a core course of Southbank Writers’ Program, Claire DeBoer, a program mentor, and this blog’s coordinator, asked the following excellent, multi-part, and compelling question:

“On the few occasions when I have felt moved to write a poem (and have been afraid to do so because I had no clue about process) I have worked from the emotions I felt at the time and built words and images around that. What I am left with is lines on a page that don’t seem to reflect any particular type of poem or process. So – do I continue with this method and then try to shape my first draft into a processed poem (sestina, free verse, whatever format I choose)? Or do I leave the poem as is instead of trying to force it into a particular format?”

Here’s Jami’s response:

As I got half way through my response to Claire’s questions, it occurred to me that other writers may be interested in this topic. In fact, Toni Levi, another Southbank mentor, had a similar question a few days after Claire’s. With that in mind, though I am addressing Claire and her question directly, I offer all of you my response:

The way you describe the beginning of your process “when I have felt moved to write a poem” is, as far as I’m concerned, the perfect first step. That is, to allow for an arising movement within you to lead you to words and then paper/screen. And, yes, it’s often par for this course for fear to debilitate that movement.

Fear is one of the many manifestations performing the Inner Critic’s biding. When you “feel moved” to write a poem in the future, I invite you to focus as fully as you can on the energy within that feels “moved.” Write from there. If fear crops up, respectfully ask it to come back later for tea, because right now you’re busy writing a poem. Say it as loudly and as proudly as needed to get the critic to back off for a bit. I’m serious!

Now, it seems to me, dear writer, that “being afraid” to write a poem because you “had no clue about process” is in the category of putting the cart before the horse. It’s pretty common for writers to worry about process and form before they have material to process or form. From my point of view, as a creative writer, your number one and most important focus is to get the material out on the page/screen as authentically felt as possible. That’s first and foremost. So, your “worked from the emotions… felt at the time and built words and images around that” is exactly right.

Then, right! What you will be “left with is lines on a page.” That’s just the first movement. The process continues as revision occurs. Again, worrying about what’s there—”that doesn’t seem to reflect any particular type of poem”— sounds a lot like you’re putting high expectations on yourself to know what’s there before you know what’s there. This takes time. You cannot write a Shakespearean Sonnet (14 lines in iambic pentameter) before knowing what you feel compelled to say. Put the horse in front and let it run.

So, yes, I vote for continuing with the method you’ve been following. I urge you to go as far as you can with the content—getting it to be as true to heart as absolutely possible before the focus shifts to form. I believe content shapes form. In Black Mountain poet Robert Creeley’s words, “form is never more than an extension of content.”

In a way, the writer doesn’t have to concern herself with form. Content takes care of it. I don’t think there’s a “trying” to shape. I think that happens organically from within and out of the poem. I don’t believe the writer chooses a form for a poem.

What if the writer takes as her first task to listen, patiently, for the poem to assert its form and shape? Now, that’s not to say that you can’t create a formal constraint for yourself, and say, choose to write a sestina, as an exercise—to get to know the form experientially. This is an excellent practice. Much is learned about the form, and in the process, the left brain (the Inner Critic’s territory) is highly occupied, which frees the right brain to run and skip and jump and cartwheel as it so desires.

It’s probably clear by now that I am not a proponent of “trying to force it [the poem] into a particular format.” A poem is like a butterfly caught in the house and cupped in the hands to set free outdoors. If you close your hands or hold too tightly, you’ll crush it.

Lastly, reading broadly, exposing yourself to as many different styles and types of poetry will offer you examples of and possibilities for form. Through reading, you’ll gain a sense of how form and content work with and for each other.

To your world of words,

Jami Macarty

Faculty, SFU’s Southbank Writers’ Program

Image credit: AJU_photography flickr.com

Night thoughts are different from day thoughts. The late-night mind is less constrained, less rational. Not everyone rises early and writes for hours before noon. Let your mind slip into an altered state, and riff. Let your hands type lists of images, metaphors, one-liners, drafts. Then, in the logical light of day, choose ideas you can build on. Trust day light for the clarity to revise and edit your draft. Trust the night imagination to generate–when your inner editor is too dozy to stop the flow of sensation, emotion, and thought.

Post by Tanja Bartel (TWS 2012), a poet who teaches English at an alternate school and trades college in Mission, BC.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

There are basically two types of writers, the “first draft or bust” type, or the “perfected page” writer.

The first barges to the end of a draft without stopping to change much, producing a first draft that may be crude, sketchy or a complete mess.  Now her work begins.

For the ”perfected page” writer the language often propels the story as much as the plot.  This writer revises the preceding day’s work before moving on, digging out unexpected leads, images, implications, producing a very polished first draft.

The reader, who is not privy to the first draft, never knows which type of writer wrote the book in hand, but the writer should have some self-awareness of his or her own process.

Post by Caroline Adderson, writer and instructor of Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, which starts on Tuesday, April 3rd at SFU Harbour Cenre, Vancouver. For more information about the course, or to register, click here.

Photo: Flickr

Why are people in your workshop so much better at spotting when you need to “show, don’t tell” or when narrative would work better re-written as dialogue? Distance.

We know our stories too well to really stand back. One option is to put away your draft for a couple of weeks.

Here’s another trick: read your manuscript page by page, backwards. This allows you to isolate each page from the flow of the story. Even though you know the story, your words will seem unfamiliar and you’ll read with fresh eyes.

Post and photo by Janie Chang (The Writer’s Studio 2011).