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From the Mslexia Workshops Collection

New Writing Exercises for the Mslexia Women's Poetry Competition – Workshop #2

Devised by Jane Holland

It’s vital not to lose sight of the play element when redrafting.

Second Draft Onwards

Once you leave the first draft stage behind, you should be prepared to experiment. This is not merely a question of what to revise, but how. The redrafting process is not about removing extraneous commas or rejigging awkward lines. It demands that we lose our inhibitions as writers.

Our natural instinct is to hold fast to our original vision, feeling it must hold the key to the universe. Yet all redrafts can spring from the same well of originality if approached with enough vision and creative gusto. Dare to do the thing that frightens you: rewrite in an entirely new way. But how to loosen your death-grip on each manuscript?

Distance Yourself from your Own Creations

American poet and Creative Writing tutor, Annie Finch: ‘My favorite time to revise is when I haven't seen a poem in years or when it is defamiliarized in  some other way – put into a manuscript, printed in a magazine, or when I've just finished performing it at a reading.’

Don’t worship each poem as your personal creation. That is the fastest way to kill the instinct to redraft. If it helps, pretend someone else wrote it. Do this physically. Re-title the piece, put another poet’s name underneath – Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy – and post it to yourself by second-class post. Wait a few days after it arrives, then open it and read it with new, critical eyes. Someone else’s poem, someone else’s mistakes. Note what works, what doesn’t. Then get out your red pen and scribble all over it.

Alternatively, once you have a few publishable poems to hand, upload them to an e-reader and see how they might look in book form. This is especially useful for poem sequences. Consider white space, line-breaks, order of appearance, the overall feel of your work. Where can improvements be made?

Redrafting Exercises

>> Does the poem’s voice sound inauthentic? Recast from a different point of view – i.e. the child’s this time, not the mother’s. If you know another language, begin to translate the poem. See where words will not translate exactly and use that as a rewriting tool – should the original change there too? Are some parts facile, underworked, too easy to translate?

>> Sophie Mayer, poet and Commissioning Editor for Chroma: ‘Feed work through Google Translation or Babelfish (sometimes multiple times) and rewrite from the new meanings that arise.’

>> If a poem doesn’t end satisfactorily, try continuing in automatic writing. Don’t stop to consider what you’re writing, just free your mind and see what happens. Take dictation from your inner poet!

>> If the form clunks, try free-styling: turn verse to prose, then back again. If it’s a prose poem, find those invisible line-breaks. If your poem is about an object – say, an umbrella – can you change the form to echo that shape on the page? Sonnets can become odes, free verse worked into form – whatever liberates the poem and forces you to read it in a new way.

Spotting and Developing Potential Sequences

Sometimes there is simply too much material in one poem, so that it spills naturally over into new versions of the same idea or voice. This is how an organic sequence begins. Allow it to spiral out from the original spark into a series of connected poems. They may be linked very tightly or by a single common thread. But the sequence is one of the most fruitful ways of writing, so run with it and see where those new poems lead you.

Redrafting is about learning to be more inventive, trusting your instincts. Become a toddler again and don’t worry about making a mess – just play!

Remember that you can always return to your original draft if the compass starts spinning too wildly.

>> TRY WORKSHOP #1
>> TRY WORKSHOP #3
>> TRY WORKSHOP #4
>> TRY WORKSHOP #5

JANE HOLLAND is an English poet, novelist and editor, born in Essex, 1966. She won an Eric Gregory Award for her poetry in 1996. She lives in Warwickshire with her husband and five children, where she was Warwick Poet Laureate in 2008. She has published one novel with Sceptre, five collections of poetry, and is currently working on a rather lengthy Tudor historical. Her latest poetry collection is Camper Van Blues (Salt). She is the editor-in-chief of Horizon Review.

These workshops have been devised especially for the 2010 Mslexia Women's Poetry Competition, judged by Vicki Feaver, with a first prize of £1,000. Enter the competition.

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