cleaning / morning / writing and revising

[supercheesegirl]

Last night I got serious and cleaned the apartment. Vaccuumed the whole place, scrubbed the bathroom, mopped the kitchen and bathroom. And then put everything back where it's supposed to go. Then after that I got to feeling really really really sad, most of which was cat-related. For the record, talking to my mom about the cat is Not Helping. So I stared blankly at the TV and the internets for a while, then remembered that I still had Buffy comics to read. So I read them, and fell asleep happy.

This morning I was supposed to meet with a woman from the Chestnut Hill Historical Society to talk about me volunteering with them, but she canceled. After I was already awake and showered. But it was better that way, because I worked on a poem revision for over an hour. The Space Princess of Numbers is freakin' awesome now. I love it. I dropped a full stanza's worth of syllables, and it's much better for it. Thank you for all your suggestions, writer folks.

And, for the record, I wasn't in some conundrum crisis or anything when I asked what you guys do with line breaks and stanza breaks. I was more like taking a survey. It was really interesting to see what you all said, and I feel like I have more ammunition in my arsenal now. I do have my own methods for tackling line breaks, which I didn't get into in that post, but now I have more to think about. So, thanks again.

Comments

[birdmaddgirl.livejournal.com]

i was wondering about your methods, actually.

[supercheesegirl.livejournal.com]

It has a lot to do with rhythm. If there's a line in the poem I especially like, or that seems particularly solid like there's no other way I could break it, I'll listen to the rhythm of that line--not anything specific like iambic pentameter, but how many beats in the line, and how the words sound together--and then see if that rhythm wants to be in the rest of the poem too. Usually it does. I tend to write in a four- or five-beat line, I've found. And then if there are other line breaks that suggest themselves (I'll find maybe two or three line breaks per poem that want strongly to be that way), it's interesting to see how those breaks resolve themselves around the rhythm, or don't, and then I have to find a way to preserve the break that I want and the rhythm that the poem wants.

That's partly why the syllabics was really fun, because I don't usually work that way. Working rhythmically, the lines tend to come to around the same length, but that wasn't necessarily true in this poem. It was a fun new thing to play with. Oh, and the line that set the syllable count at 12 was the last line--I knew that couldn't change, and 12 seemed like as good a number as any to try for. It was a fun experiment to try.