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From the Mslexia Workshops Collection

New Writing Exercises for the Mslexia Women's Poetry Competition – Workshop #3

Devised by JANE HOLLAND

Building a Family Tree

You place the initial poem at the top, then produce several 'children' from each draft.

Writing as Genetics

When beginning to redraft, think of your first draft as the original gene-bearer, and look on each new draft as a member of the same family: an individual in its own right, but sharing at least part of that first draft’s gene pool. This approach helps those who find extreme redrafts too much of a wrench, fearing that their original inspiration may be lost.

If you see that original spark of inspiration as genetic code, and all subsequent drafts as sharing that code, it may encourage bolder redrafting. Though sometimes we need to uncover what is different rather than what is similar between subsequent drafts, and not be afraid to follow a new scent.

Building a Family Tree

To build a strong family tree, you first need to produce a powerful alternative draft to your first. You can build a family tree from one parent alone, but two provide a more dynamic mix. Stay physically in touch with this process by printing out your various drafts, then placing your first draft and your strong alternative draft alongside each other. Then rewrite using elements of both these drafts.

The result is a ‘child’ of these two parent-drafts. You can then produce further drafts from this ‘child’, or more children from the parent-drafts direct. Set these alongside or below each other accordingly to start constructing a family tree.

New Blood

As everyone knows, too much inbreeding can result in serious genetic disorders. Accordingly, in search of fresh blood, you might want to incorporate elements of other writings in your work – discarded lines from your own poetry or fiction, something ‘found’ from a shopping list or technical manual, perhaps even some oddity like a fragment of another language or code.

Leave such poems to bed in, then come back and consider the result with new eyes. You may be surprised how well some disparate elements fit together.

Editor of Poetry Wales, Zoe Skoulding: ‘I sometimes think of redrafting as a kind of translation, which works better if I've left a poem long enough that I've forgotten some of the circumstances of writing it. But translating doesn't have to mean taming - it might mean looking for what makes it feel more foreign.’

Mix and Match

At some point, a wholly new idea may emerge in your redrafts, creating a draft strong enough to stand as a new bloodstrain. This can be ‘married’ to a ‘child’, or to one or both of the parent-drafts, to produce a new branch of the family tree altogether.

Poet and Editor of poetry magazine Seam, Anne Berkeley: ‘Keep drafts if you can bear it. You can cut out whole stanzas but put them back next year if you prefer, even in a different order. That's one advantage poetry has over sculpture: you can see how it looks without arms, and then change your mind. Sometimes, after dozens of drafts, I go back to the first and find a deleted line or a word that helps get me back on track.'

Alternatively, mixing it up with a little incest may be the most profitable way forward. You can then combine elements of two or more descendants to produce a closer match with the parent-drafts, but without any weaknesses you may have been trying to eradicate in the redrafting process.

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

>> TRY WORKSHOP #1
>> TRY WORKSHOP #2
>> 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. This competition is now closed, though you can enter our Women's Short Story Competition, judged by Jackie Kay.

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