You splurge out all your energy onto the page, in maybe 20 minutes or so. Just, bam, out there, everything in one poem draft, and you find yourself exhausted but you still stay with it, tweaking, copying it down into another book or word processing file so you don’t lose track of it. Maybe you give it a first edit now, as you transfer it from one page to another, yawning or groping for your coffee.
I write my first drafts by hand, when it’s poetry or short prose. Novels generally go straight into the word processor, but for everything short, I like to be able to scribble notes as I go, cross things out, add arrows… to see my work. It feels like building a piece more that way. It feels structural.
I’ve a poem for you, but I don’t want to post it quite yet. It seems good, but I want to let it sit overnight, so I can look at it with fresh eyes and tweak it a little more. (I just looked at it now, to put it away, and ended up changing two lines.) I know it can be made better.
I’ve added a couple of things to the site. There’s a link to my twitter over there >> which is meant to be a widget but I can’t get it to work. There is also a link to my Patreon account. If you like my work, you can show your appreciation in monetary form and become a patron of the arts. (Fancy!) Payments are only for poetry and prose, not for posts like this about writing itself.
Now I’ve utterly exhausted myself. So I’m going to play Skyrim in bed. Cheerio!