Camp NaNoWriMo Day One Progress

I’m not going to write a daily update every day this month, but I wanted to talk a wee bit about my poetry writing process. I’m new to poetry, so I’m learning as I go. Documenting it on this blog will allow me to look back some time from now and see what I’ve learned.

I’m a night owl, so I was up for a midnight start for Camp NaNoWriMo. With a fresh cup of peppermint tea and my phone out of reach across the room, I sat down with the huge five-subject notebook I write everything in. This notebook contains drafts of poems and stories, notes to myself, quotes from books or song lyrics I like, and anything else I want to remember. I have a brand new Leuchtturm 1917 notebook I had planned to use for this poetry project, but rather than just dive in, I wanted to start by talking to myself on paper to figure out the direction of this story.

Basically, I was doing the kind of outlining I should have done ahead of time in June.

I like to know what form or shape I want a poem to take before I begin it. As I’m still developing my style, I like to play around with traditional forms as well as free verse. I want each poem to have some substance to it. While it is possible to write a powerful poem in only a couple of lines, I want mine to fill at least one page.

The pressure to start off with a good poem stalled me for a while. I had a few false starts, but the sets of lines I wrote are still there in my notebook for me to revisit and add onto later. After I’d been working for about an hour and hadn’t made as much progress as I had hoped to, I read for a while to get some inspiration. When I came across a word I liked, I wrote it down. A few phrases popped into my head, and those made their way to the page as well.

For me, poetry involves a lot of list-making. I’ll picture a scene or an image in my mind, and then list everything I know about it, focusing especially on concrete details like scent and texture. I don’t remember where I heard it or read it, but someone said writers rely too much on visual details in description. While vision is important, I’m trying to move beyond that.

By the time I went to bed, I had two full pages of lines and lists of words. I had hoped to have a completed poem by the time I fell asleep, but I felt like I had a good start. To fulfill the obligation I set for myself to post a poem on Instagram every day, I expanded a section of one I drafted. Without the context of the book’s narrative, I worried this section would be too pessimistic, so I gave it an optimistic ending.

I have to remind myself that since this is a Camp NaNoWriMo project, what I write this month does not have to be a final draft. I can (and should) revise these poems before I call the book finished. And while I would never post anything to my poetry Instagram account that I wasn’t proud of, there’s nothing that says I can’t rework those later on for the book if there’s something I wrote in May or June that would work well. Almost every poem I write is in the persona of this unnamed woodland narrator anyway.

I draft everything by hand, but I shape the poems on the computer, where it’s easier to move lines around and look up words in the dictionary to make sure they actually mean what I think they mean. I set up a Word document with sixty pages (one for each poem I want to write this month) divided into the three sections of the story arc. By using headings in Word, it’s easy to rearrange pages by dragging and dropping if I want to change the order later on.

I have a couple hours left of Day One, but I have one poem as “done” as I can hope to have a poem done for this book this month, another one done enough to post on Instagram with three more stanzas to flesh out for the final version, a couple lines that will make a perfect ending to a poem in the last section of the book if not the final one, and almost the two full pages of words and phrases I haven’t used yet.

This project might be more work than I had anticipated for this month, but the most important thing I’ve learned in the last six weeks of writing a poem every day is that nothing gets written if I don’t sit down and put pen to paper.