[You can listen to the audio of me reading the haiku at the top of the page.]
Hey Overthinkers!
If you’ve spent any time on Artist Twitter or Writing Twitter (and if you haven’t, you beautiful innocent unicorn—please never change), you’ve seen posts about the creative process that make it sound about as fun as pulling out the nails from roof shingles with your bare hands.
I get it. Even creativity is work, and sometimes work sucks. But why spend so much time doing something unless you find joy in at least part of the process?
I’ve never identified with writers who hate writing but love having written. I love writing the first draft of something. I love creating something whole from disparate scraps of language and fragments of ideas.
The part of the process I used to hate was the rewriting. This was a holdover from my early copywriting days, where every requested revision meant I was earning less on a particular project and had to keep space in my workday (and brain) for the old project while so many new projects were beckoning me.
However, as I’ve matured as a writer, and perhaps as a person too, I’ve found a better way to frame rewriting. I now see the completed first draft as a puzzle. My job is to figure out how to make that draft the best it can be. For some reason, this framing melts most of the resistance to making a piece of writing better.
Here is an example of how I edit poetry.
On January 19, 2021, I wrote nine haiku. One of them was this one:
She thought of email
As electric messages
Drifting in bottles
I rediscovered this one when I was looking for some haiku to turn into comics this week. I love the concept, but the poem was still a fixer-upper.
The first problem that jumped out to me was that the word email is almost immediately followed by electric message. The line is redundant. It’s as poetic as saying a wheelbarrow is a cart with one wheel.
The word message takes up too much space. It’s a three-syllable word. That means it uses up 60% of the space in a first or second line or about 43% of the space in a second line. There’s not a lot of room left to get creative.
I also dislike the pairing of electric and message since an email is more properly an electronic message. Electronic and electric overlap in common usage but have distinct meanings. I liked the sound of electric better than electronic (and it’s a syllable shorter,) so if I was going to keep that word, it couldn’t be paired with message or whatever replacement I decided on.
Lastly, poem’s first line doesn’t move anything forward or give you any valuable information.
This meant that the entire structure of the poem needed to change.
After some significant noodling, I came up with the idea of messages floating in virtual bottles. Virtual is another three-syllable word, but it sounds cooler than messages. Note is a simpler way to say message. Now I had a note in a virtual bottle.
I could see it floating in my mind—but what was it floating in or on?
I knew I had to keep the word email in the poem to give context to what I was describing. I also wanted to keep the word electric. That led me to this:
Emails are notes in
Virtual bottles drifting
On electric waves
It was a much better poem, but the first line still bothered me. Perhaps, email wasn’t necessary.
I added a character back into the poem.
She set notes adrift
This meant I could get rid of drifting in the second line and do something more interesting.
But, in virtual bottles is six syllables! Only one word left! Plus, upon further consideration, adrift isn’t the word I wanted.
Her notes floated in
This is passive voice, but it gives me a syllable back. One more last tweak gave me:
Set notes to float in
I lose specificity with this but gain active voice. Plus, notes and float are a near rhyme, and it makes the line fun to say.
I now had this poem:
Set notes to float in
Virtual bottles across
An electric sea
I didn’t like it. I can’t articulate what’s wrong, but it doesn’t feel right.
I added she back in and ended up with this poem’s final form:
She floats all notes in
Virtual bottles across
The Electric Sea
Here I get specificity, active voice, and a perfect rhyme with floats and notes instead of a near rhyme. (Haiku are not supposed to rhyme, but they’re also supposed to be about nature—just don’t rat me out to the poetry police.)
Also, The Electric Sea is easier to say, sounds smoother, and is more ominous than an electric sea.
Somewhere along the way, the meaning of the poem also transformed into something else. This haiku doesn’t read as clearly being about email. Its surreal feel fits more closely with my typical style and voice. However, the art and the meaning of the poem are enhanced if you know it started out as a quirky description of sending an email.
For me, that’s the magic of the rewrite.
One last note on capitalization. Over the past two years, I’ve changed my convention for haiku. I write haiku in all lowercase letters. However, in my comics, the font I use is all capitals. This makes the poems easier to write. In my drafts and this letter, I start each line with a capital letter to make it easier to see when there is a line break.
If you’ve made it this far, you’re a masochist, someone fascinated with the creative process, or extremely kind.
No matter why you persevered, thank you!
Creative Challenge:
You guessed it. Today’s creative challenge is to rewrite something and make it better. Write a haiku or other short poem today, and then leave it for at least 24 hours. Then rewrite it and see how you can make it better. If you’re brave, share your first haiku and your revised haiku in the comments.
A note on haiku. I write three-line, 17-syllable haiku where the first and third lines are five syllables, and the second line is seven syllables. I do this because this is the way most American students first learn how to write haiku, and I want to make my poems feel familiar to people. I want to make poetry comfortable and not intimidating.
But, according to the Haiku Society of America, English language haiku don’t have a syllable count or even a line count. Instead, they should be poems that can be read in one breath. The Haiku Society of America also holds that haiku should be about nature, have a word that signals the season, be in present tense, and not rhyme.
Since the Haiku Society of America does not currently have a law enforcement arm, and it’s not monitoring this newsletter, feel free to write your haiku any way you want.
Be the poetry you want to see in the world!
Cheers,
Jason
I love the process your poetry goes through. An evolution of words.
Great process.