Poetry Writing Workflow
We all have our way of being creative and what works for one person might not work for anyone else. That said, I am sharing my process here.
Ideas
Collecting ideas for poems is what notebooks have long been used for. What about those people like me who don’t use a physical notebooks? Incidentally, I moved away from a physical when I lost one. All those notes and drafts gone forever. Nowadays I am fully digital.
I collect ideas on the fly. Through trial and error I have learnt it works best to have just one way of holding onto the incoming ideas. For a while I was using Bear. This is a great markdown app and I like its simplicity. No folders, just tags.
But after a while I felt like something was missing. I have now moved over to Craft. There are a couple of reasons for this.
You can link ideas together in Craft. To do so just type in’@’ followed by the title of the note containing the idea you want to link to. These are bi-directional: each note recognises there’s a link. You can hover over the link and get a preview, or just click through.
I noticed some of my ideas were visually inspired, like art or photographs. While I can get images into Bear, the way Craft handles them is better for the way I like to work. Now, I can add a cover image to the note to the image that inspired the idea is always on view.
For a while I worried about tags. Craft doesn’t use tags natively. I did want to be able to see a list of all my notes tagged a certain way. For example, every new idea is tagged ‘poem idea’. It’s great to be able to pull this list up and see what’s there in one place. Top get round the tag problem is actually quite easy. I just create a new note with the title:tag: poem idea. Then I can tag every new idea by writing ‘@tag:poem idea’. As I start to type after ‘@’ a list of possible notes appears. This makes it really quick to do.
When I am ready to start writing I may already have an idea I want to write about. But sometime I don’t and I can just pull up my list of ideas and pick one.
Drafting
All of my first drafts are written in Obsidian. I have the theme set to dark. The theme I use has a nice deep green background and an easy to read cream font. This is much easier on my eyes than constantly staring at a white screen.
I can create a link from the original Craft idea note and the Obsidian note where the drafting happens. Craft notes all have a link (as do Obsidian notes). This is great as I can go backwards and forwards to the idea by clicking the link. I add a link to the Obsidian note on the original Craft idea note. This means I can zip backwards and forwards between them easily.
I like doing this because on many occasions the ideas links to other notes and working this way means I don’t have to copy all of them into Obsidian.
I use Obsidian because it is very plain, no bells and whistles in the editor. Each new line does not automatically capitalise. This is a bug bear in Pages of Word, which can be fixed in the settings, but Obsidian just works this way out of the box.
I also like Obsidian because each document can be as long as it needs to be. This is great when it come to editing.
While I’m working I have a browser open to a dictionary and thesaurus, because, you know…
Editing Stage 1
All my stage 1 editing happens in Obsidian. As already noted, each document can be as long as it needs to be. There are no pages, it just keeps scrolling.
When I start a new editing session I draw a line under the last edit by writing ‘—-’ return. Then I write a date by typing “.dts” which is my Rocket Typist shortcut for today’s date and time.
I then copy and paste the last version. This means I never lose an edit. There are many times when I’ve killed a poem by over editing. Doing my editing this way means I can just scroll up and find an earlier edit I like.
Editing Stage 2
After I’ve let the ‘final’ stage 1edit rest for a while, I copy and past it into a Pages document. This has its appearance set to a white page and black type. This means the poem suddenly looks different. This can help with achieving some further distance from the early draft and can make it easier to spot howlers and ways to make improvements.
Collating
If I’m working towards a pamphlet or a collection, I will setup a Scrivener document. The main reason for doing this is Scrivener has what it calls a ‘corkboard’ which is an area where each document is represented by a card. That makes moving the order of the poems around very easy to do. When the time comes to send it to a publisher, you can send the document to Word and polish it up from there.
That’s it. I find having an idea handling strategy is helpful. As poets we know a poem is never finished, only abandoned. Having a workflow like this makes it simple to pick up where I left off.