Editing/Arranging Process

I'm a minimalist at heart. (Not so much in practice, but I think that's mostly my daughter and husband's faults. Just sayin'!) This is why I think I like writing poetry so much. Don't get me wrong! I really love writing lots of things and will one day actually finish a full-length novel, but that's something that doesn't really come to me easily. It's not already resting on the tips of my fingers the way poetry is for me. But that also doesn't mean that working on these manuscripts has been without pain either.

Like I mentioned in my last post, I didn't know what to do with what I wrote for a long time. My poems sat in individual documents on my phone for years, with no real agenda or direction, and that left me feeling a bit like a failure of a writer. I think a lot of writers feel this way when it's a hobby or if they don't often share their work for feedback. And I had stopped sharing my work with anyone - I'd even stopped looking at it entirely, unless I was adding something new. Which, I know, doesn't make a lot of sense, but I put it all off until I was ready to face the massive job I knew it would be.

So when I finally did get motivated to consolidate, edit, sort, and arrange . . . I was horrified.

I had more work than I realized, and all at various stages of completion. But I was committed, so I began the process. And it was painful, which is actually saying a lot, because I LOVE editing and proofreading. My work, friends', acquaintances' - doesn't matter - I will do it with a smile. But this sucked. I was pretty sure I sucked. But I found enough redeemable pieces that I was hopeful.

I stayed up late every night for a week (no mean feat when you have the energizer bunny for a three-year old child), polishing, editing, or straight up deleting piece after piece. Everything made it into one document with each poem having its own page. Then I started sorting. I figured I had enough pieces that there would be more than one manuscript, but I wasn't sure the extent of it. So I read through each poem and tried to categorize them by book ideas, which meant new documents - one for each book idea.

Once I had divvied up every poem I had, I printed out each of the other documents I had and hid in my room so my two dogs wouldn't get any ideas. I plopped my daughter on my bed with instructions to stay there and watch her favorite show, then shut the door and warned my husband about my probable propensity for homicide if he opened it. Then I got to work.

I cut out each poem, carefully sorting them into piles of strips. (In an attempt to save paper, I'd stuffed as many poems onto as few pages as I could while keeping the integrity of the formatting.) I read through them and decided on some sub-categories, handwriting a list for each document / sub-category / poem within that. Then I switched to working on individual documents.

I decided which categories would go where and began to arrange them from there.

I thought through which pieces to open and close with, how different poems would look and interact with the one on the page across from it, how they should flow and progress, which ones had themes that seemed cohesive, what pieces could act like a back and forth discussion, etc. It was long. And I drank a lot of coffee and my daughter probably watched too much tv. I did this three times (But really, I did this process in nine phases, because limited floor space, lol!), writing everything down so I had a clear idea of what I was doing, where everything was, and just in case of emergency.

The poems that didn't make any of the cuts were saved for the next manuscript to come along (which, I already actually have in the works), and I went back to the computer to set and finalize some things. By the end of it all, I had my three manuscripts.

Luckily, the process got me over some of my reluctance to share. I was pretty proud of the effort, if still questioning the work. So I sent them out to some close friends and trusted family members. I entered them into contests, and submitted the rejected ones to publishers. Which leads us to today. I'm not sure when my books will be available to you, but I'm really working hard to make it happen. It's long and exhausting, and I'm still writing and doing normal life stuff too.

But I'm loving it, and I can't wait to be able to share this with you!