Lesson Learned Through Failure: Each Draft Requires Its Own Intentions
I am at a point in my practice of poetry where I am no longer super conscious about how approach successive drafts of a poem. I use revision strategies that I discuss with my students—cutting a poem up, moving its stanzas around around, injecting it with found language—but those have become so second nature to me that I often work automatically, only vaguely aware of the steps I am taking.
Throughout the process, I save it at random intervals, so a “draft” does not necessarily reflect a specific stage or set of strategies in the poem’s development, and I am revising language, image, structure more-or-less all at the same time. What makes this kind of simultaneous revision approach possible is, of course, the poem’s relatively short length. Even in revising a poetry manuscript, while I might nominally make different “passes” for language or structure, I am still making changes to multiple other elements throughout the process.
Enter the 80,000-word manuscript first draft in need of a second draft. It’s impossible to approach it in the same holistic, unconscious way I am used to approaching an individual poem or even a poetry manuscript. I had been made aware of this before I started the second draft. A mentor told me I should focus on structure before working on any other revision of scenes or language. I had read about the idea that it is best to apply separate goals to each draft rather than attempt to take on multiple revision tasks at once.
But, used to my auto-pilot poetry process, I obsessively began to do just this, trying to tackle narrative structure, characterization, thematic continuity, language and grammar edits, and reflection. And I had somewhere acquired the belief that this second draft should also come sort of quickly (if it does, lucky you! But usually it does not), only to get completely stalled in the process when those expectations crashed head on with reality.
Oddly, it took me a while (like months) to recognize that I was attempting to do too many things at once. Then, I realized—yes, of course, the problem was that I was not approaching the revision with enough purpose. For a project of this length and complexity, I needed a more conscious plan. I would need to set intentions and boundaries for my anxious revising-mind in a more direct way—or even set one main intention for each draft.
I will have a lot more to say about the second draft, the most confounding stage of writing I have encountered. There are different ideas about what the intention of the second draft should be, and it probably depends some on the individual project. Most commenters seem to agree it is the draft (and this is a common observation for novelists too) where you figure out “what your story is about.” The excellent Seven Drafts: Edit Like a Pro from Blank Page to Book by Allison K. Williams provides an analysis of each draft’s function from the perspective of a writer and longtime editor. For her, the second draft is called “The Story Draft,” where a writer clarifies the narrative elements of conflict, action, obstacle, stakes, and the like, by refining the first and aptly named “Vomit Draft.”
I eventually decided that narrative structure should be the focus of my second draft—and it is a testament to my mentor’s good nature that she never said “I told you so.” I needed to make clear decisions about how I was breaking into scenes and sections and chapters. In the process, I “figured out what my story was about” to some degree, and gained an insight that I could apply to the writing of the book and to my other writing as well: I had to temper my expectations about what I “should” be accomplishing in each draft. My frustration with myself and refusal to accept the process were the main stumbling blocks. Acknowledging the what-is of it, that stages of the process are going to take as long as they take—and then relaxing into that knowledge—is the only way I can make progress.
