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From the Mslexia Workshops Collection

New Writing Exercises for the Mslexia Women's Poetry Competition – Workshop #5

Devised by Jane Holland

Strong Redrafts are New Poems

Second generation drafts can be vulnerable; how to validate their existence as ‘new’ poems.

Acknowledge your Strongest Redrafts

Every writer knows that one particular draft may sometimes develop beyond all expectations, so fresh a take on the original proto-draft that you barely recognise it. This is the point at which you need to step in and protect this latest draft from ancestor envy.

If it feels like a brand-new poem, treat it as such. Give it a different title, based on its unique identity, and file it away as an original ‘first’ draft – it can now be used as the gold standard from which all subsequent drafts descend!

Silencing the Inner Critic

It may seem fantastical to suggest that poems can be influenced – and even made insecure – by earlier drafts. Such identity problems, however, stem from a very real source: the inner critic.

Writers need an inner critic. Without one, they might erroneously assume that the first draft is always the best – which is only very rarely the case, and even then could probably be improved by some judicious pruning. But while our critical drive propels us from draft to draft, it can also prevent us noticing and celebrating the end stages of a work-in-progress.

One of the keys to silencing the inner critic is to stay flexible. Being open to flux will allow you to stop working on one poem and begin another without fearing the idea of completion. Another key is maintaining the free-flow of creativity: this is easily done by keeping a notebook of ideas, phrases, images, memories, first lines, etc. If you constantly have a fresh impulse for a poem to hand, releasing the older poem will become a liberation.

How to know when to STOP Redrafting

Your inner critic hates to let go, even if a work is as perfect as it will ever be. If you start working on a poem at this late stage of redrafting and become blocked, lost, stilted or confused, file that poem away as finished and begin another poem straightaway.

It may facilitate this ‘saying goodbye’ process to submit the final draft for publication. You can always return to it later if you still feel dissatisfied, even once it has been published.

Another pointer to completion comes when meddling turns to marring. If redrafting makes a previously clear poem cluttered, trickier to say out loud or harder to understand, then STOP. More is not always better; if it ain’t broken, don’t try to fix it!

But the most obvious way to spot when a poem is finished is when you become heartily sick of it. You cease to care whether that blasted comma is in the right place, and just want that poem out of the house.

Ready for Publication?

If you’re keen on self-organisation, create a new folder for drafts at this advanced stage of development. Label the folder ‘New Proto-Drafts,’ or ‘Drafts for Publication,’ or even ‘Safest’ as the late Michael Donaghy famously did – whatever name works for you.

It may still be useful to cross-reference final poems with their original drafts, however, by noting both titles in the individual file name or giving them linked numbers.

Well done!

So the redrafting process is officially finished. Congratulate yourself, dash that final draft straight off to a magazine or critical partner – and start work on a shiny new poem!

Celebrated and prolific poet, Alison Brackenbury: ‘Wasn't it Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, who composed endlessly and never revised? Is one word of her poetry read today?  A warning to us all….’

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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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