Revising your own draft, and reading it as a stranger
Revising a poem
Revising a spoken word poem is 4 cuts and 2 decisions: cut the run-up, the explanation, the adjectives and the line you are proudest of, then settle where the lines stop and where the poem ends.
A line break is where the line stops before the sentence does, and moving one changes how the whole draft sounds without changing a single word.
That is the reason this stage exists, and it is the stage most often skipped. A first draft is a pile of material with a poem somewhere inside it, and revision is the work of finding that poem's edges: what comes out, where the lines stop, and where the thing ends. Spoken word poetry gives the writer one extra instrument here, which is the mouth. A line that cannot be said in one breath is a line with a problem, and the draft says so the moment it is read aloud. How to write a poem places revision at stage 3 of 11, directly before the first reading to a circle.
Why can nobody revise a poem they wrote an hour ago?
Nobody can revise a poem they wrote an hour ago, because the writer still has the original event in their head and the head fills in whatever the page is missing. Revision becomes possible only once the draft has gone cold enough to be read as a stranger reads it, with nothing available except the words that are actually there, and that takes 24 hours at the very least, 3 days for preference. Four moves make a draft strange again, and each works by changing the way it arrives.
- Print it, or change the font: a draft in a different shape stops being the thing you remember writing.
- Read it out loud from the page: the ear catches repetition, dead weight and the line with no breath in it before the eye does.
- Have somebody else read it to you: their pauses land where the punctuation and the breaks actually put them, not where you meant them.
- Read it from the last line upwards: taken out of order, a line has to justify itself on its own.
What do you cut first?
Cut the run-up first. The opening 2 or 3 lines of a first draft are almost always the writer clearing their throat, and the poem usually begins at the first concrete noun. After that, cutting proceeds in a fixed order, and all 4 cuts are subtractions rather than rewrites, which is what makes them possible in a single sitting.
- Cut the first 2 lines and see whether anything is missing. Usually nothing is.
- Cut the explanation that follows an image. If the image works, the sentence after it is telling the reader what to think.
- Cut the adjectives doing the feeling's job. Sad, beautiful and amazing are instructions to the reader, not descriptions.
- Cut the line you are proudest of, read the poem without it, and put it back only if the poem got worse.
The last one is a test rather than a rule. A line a writer loves is often a line written for its own sake, with the poem around it bent to keep it, and comparing the 2 versions out loud settles the question in about 40 seconds.
Where does the line break go?
The line break goes where you want the listener left hanging for a fraction of a second, because that is all a break does: it holds the last word of the line up to the light and puts a small silence after it. A stanza does the same job at a larger scale and behaves like a paragraph. Breaks made to produce a shape on the page do nothing at all when the poem is said out loud, and that is the commonest fault in a revised draft.
| Break after | What the listener gets | How it fails |
|---|---|---|
| A concrete noun | The object stays in the air for a beat | Every line ends on a noun and the rhythm goes flat |
| A verb, mid action | Forward pull into the next line | Used too often, the poem sounds breathless |
| A word that changes meaning in the next line | One small turn, and the reader re-reads | The turn is a pun and the poem stops for it |
| Nothing in particular | Prose with the return key pressed | The draft reads the same broken and unbroken |
The check is quick. Read the draft aloud with the breaks, then read it as continuous prose. If the 2 readings sound the same, the breaks are not doing anything and the lines can be re-set from scratch.
What is the difference between poetry and a poem?
A poem is one finished object, poetry is the practice of making them, and the word carries a third and looser sense as well: the quality people mean when they say there was poetry in something. All 3 senses are in ordinary use, which is why the question keeps coming up, but only the first is any use in revision. Nobody can revise poetry. Anybody can revise this poem, which is 22 lines long, has a weak ending and repeats the word light 4 times. That narrowing is the point of the stage: a writer working on poetry defends the draft, and a writer working on one object measures it.
How do you end a poem about yourself?
End a poem about yourself before the moral, not after it. The commonest weak ending in a first draft is a final line that explains what the poem was about, and it fails for the same reason the diary sentence fails: it does the reader's work and takes the poem away from them. Three endings hold up when the poem is said out loud.
- The image again, changed: return to the object from the opening, altered by what has happened in between.
- The smallest fact: end on the least dramatic detail available, which is nearly always stronger than the most dramatic one.
- The question left open: stop on the thing that was never resolved, without announcing that it was not resolved.
Two practical signs that a draft has found its ending. The last line does not contain the words and that is why, and it survives being said to a room without the writer adding anything afterwards. Starting from a prompt is worth revisiting at this point if the ending will not come, because an ending that refuses to arrive is often a poem that never had a door in the first place.
What does the adult do about the stage everybody skips?
The adult gives revision a session of its own, because a stage that shares time with writing loses that time every week. Collecting drafts at the end of one session and handing them back at the start of the next, 7 days later, manufactures the distance a young writer cannot manufacture alone.
Three failures are worth naming in advance. The adult revising the poem, which produces a better poem and a writer who has learned nothing and can no longer say it with conviction. Revision treated as correction, so the spelling gets fixed and the run-up survives. And a room deciding that revision means adding, because adding feels like progress: a session ending with every draft 6 lines shorter has usually gone well. Nerves, and what to do with them is easier later when the poem being performed is one the writer cut themselves, because they know why every line is still there.