blog about it

I’m always amazed by how much things can change in writing.

My Celebration Poem

For Mother’s Day, I decided to write a poem for my mom. Getting a jump on things, I started writing the night before. But, I thought about it for longer than that. Anyway, I had this bumpy, lumpy and awkward thing that halfway through, started to resemble what I wanted to say.

After a while, I put it to bed. The project was leading me to that area of my brain I didn’t want to go. The signpost reads:

r u kidding me? you say you write poetry? hahahahaha, tell me a nudda one

I loathe that area. That’s the CENSORS’s room and if I wake them too early, it’s really hard to shut them off—at least not when I’m tired.

It was the last thing on my mind when I went to bed. A few other random thoughts crossed my mind and then I was out. In the morning I jumped out of bed and wrote the thing. I referred to the draft to make sure I’d touched on the points that mattered the night before.

The words dripped down from my brain, fell out of my fingers, as they clicked away at the computer. I heard her stirring as I laid on the finishing touches. I had words on the page and I wasn’t sure they were the right choices. Definitions to check, revising to do, editing, then picking the write pictures, and one more edit.

An interesting thing, had I thrown the whole thing out, as almost happened anyway, I would not have missed much. I at least had the draft to refer to.

I guess it worked. My mom loved it. In fact she was so pleased by it, she decided that I can’t post it because she wants to keep it to herself for a while. She doesn’t know about my traffic.

My Understanding of Drafting

Drafting is the key. When I write to a project, I begin by listing everything that might be pertinent to the subject. This stage is where you unearth all your ideas and allow them room to run around with other ideas, make friends and change their clothes, if needed.

Willingness to let go is crucial. If you’re not willing to let go, then you’re stuck with the first thing that spills forth. That is way wrong. I usually know when a thing really blows. And these days, I’m very much willing to work on revising and editing.

Willingness to revise means more work gets done. When I first started writing I worked at it. That was in grade school. For a long while I stopped writing and then picked it up again. That was years later. In the time between those bouts of poetry, I forgot about revising as a viable step. I’d convinced myself that if I didn’t do it right, if it didn’t come out whole in the first draft, then it was to be scrapped.

Some people still write with that belief—poetry anyway. Fortunately for me I revised that way of viewing my work. And it’s a good thing too. Because if I were still thinking that way, mom would not have gotten her Mother’s Day poem. Even more, I would have a pile of stuff in the trash instead of saved for the revising stage.

All you need is editing sometimes. Having said all that, sometimes they do still come out whole, practically writing themselves. Instead of trashing it in disbelief that I can still get those, I snatch them up and run with them. From time to time, I will write a poem that just needs to be edited. Once or twice I can remember changing just a word. It’s a good feeling.