some systems from my writing life

confessions of a type A poet

Over the years, one of the main things I’ve learned about myself as a writer is that I am incredibly prone to distraction. And one of the main things that distracts me, whenever I eventually do sit down to write, is any type of mess or clutter—it’s one of the reasons why my desk faces the wall, with my back to the rest of the room. So I tend to run a fairly organized ship when it comes to all my writing shit—documents, keeping track of poems, etc. Because this system is like 15 years old at this point, I haven’t adapted it to anything modern like all the cool things you can apparently do on Google Drive—this is just me and my computer and a largely offline system of keeping my things organized.

First off, with a bit of embarrassment, my filing system:

A folder for each new year, a folder within that for each month, containing anything I’ve written that month (if it’s a month where I’m submitting work to journals or anthologies, I’ll make an additional folder for just my submissions, and if it’s a month where I have any work stuff like commissions or letters of recommendations or editorial letters etc etc, those all go into a folder labeled “work stuff”). I just like knowing where everything is at any given moment, because I know that I tend to spiral when I reach for something and realize I’ve misplaced it. So now if, for some reason (you’d be surprised) I need to find a poem I wrote in 2008, there’s a good chance I’ll find it. This was particularly helpful while I was working on Bright Red Fruit and needed some points of reference for how I was writing poetry when I was the same age as my speaker in that novel.

And then I have a big monster document (on Pages because I didn’t have Microsoft Word until a couple years ago) called “poem tracker” where I keep track of everything I write and/or revise each month. Obviously some months I don’t write or revise anything, so I just skip those. Here’s a section of it from April to November of 2021, when I was revising some of the final poems in Girls That Never Die, revising my Harper’s Bazaar essay, and turning in a first draft of Bright Red Fruit and the final draft of Girls That Never Die. Anything in bold is a poem I’ve submitted to a journal that was accepted for publication, and any poem in that submission that wasn’t chosen, I make note of as well:

Most of the first draft of Bright Red Fruit was written as part of a writing group that met weekly over Zoom, with my sweet friends Liz and Clint. Every week we’d send each other up to 10 pages of the project we were working on, and then get on a call on Fridays to talk through our notes on each other’s pages. We met for a total of 24 weeks over the spring and summer of 2020, and Liz’s book was released last week!

I kept track of their notes on my pages via this folder system:

Speaking of Bright Red Fruit, here is my next monstrosity: the outline for the first draft of that novel. Home Is Not A Country more or less followed a Hero’s Journey type structure, but BRF was an entirely different kind of book, one I didn’t necessarily know how to write at first, so the main role of this outline was to 1) track the cause and effect to make sure the plot was moving and that I was following through on the things I’d set up, and 2) make sure that I didn’t forget to include an event every once in a while, because my impulse is to just write descriptions and vibes and forget that something eventually should happen. This one is particularly ridiculous because of the color-coding, but the heart wants what the heart wants (putting this part behind the paywall because it contains a lot of details and breakdowns of BRF):