One realization I got from the experience of consistently writing in a Writer’s Notebook is just how important a specific revision process has been to me:  writing multiple drafts without looking back at the previous ones.  

Now, this may seem counterproductive.  Why go to all the trouble of writing a poem draft, after all, if you won’t even let yourself refer to it while doing a rewrite?  And yet I cannot underestimate the benefits it has had for my poetry.  In fact, I consider it the single greatest contributor to any of the poems that I am proud of.

This is because of the refining and clarifying power that this has — something that happens naturally and that is facilitated by the lack of earlier, less accurate terms to ‘put you off the scent’, so to speak, of the more accurate ones your brain is constantly grasping for.  Lines that I thought were clear, phrases that I thought expressed my purpose, and words that I had deemed sufficient to their task, have all been revealed to be so far from that — as understood in the context of better ones that appeared only through this process of rewriting without looking. Why It allows for what could be termed a ‘telephone’-like process, except instead of the meaning being lost or distorted, it is actually approached and strengthened.  And, if worst comes to worst and there was a phrase that was genuinely effective and simply got left back during one of these rounds, in all likelihood you’ll probably remember it anyway because of the strength of the line, but if you don’t, all you have to do is flip back a few pages — it’s not going anywhere.

As Penny Kittle and several others have pointed out, students have access to plenty of examples of finished pieces of literature, but not to drafts that are currently in progress.  Showing students the messy reality of this multiple-’round’ redrafting process could be a great way for them to realize that everyone’s pieces, famous literary works included, need to undergo this at-times confusing and sloppy process, but that it is beyond worth it since it brings your piece so much closer to where you want it to be.

For the image above, I ended up having almost ten drafts of this poem before I felt satisfied with it, but the process took it from a form that was “so-so” to one that I felt I could be proud of.