The Amazing Index Card Technique

This article is for: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced—i.e. ALL of us!

In 2020, I discovered a fantastic new way to draft.

How exciting, do I hear you cry? Was it a little-known app that will revolutionize poetry drafting? Is it some whizzy audio-visual translator thing that automatically sucks out thoughts and arranges them into a poem, preferably while I watch TV or sleep?

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No! It is: INDEX CARDS.

Little bits of rectangular card or paper: how very old-fashioned!

But, as I've found out, they are actually superbly suited to poetry.

Index Cards: simplify and expand

One day I was working on a new poem, and it wasn't going very well. I had a freewrite that was long and muddled—which is how freewrites should be, but I was having trouble figuring out how to select parts of it and start a more organized draft. Then, and I have no idea why, I suddenly thought of the essays I used to write back in college/university.

Those essays also started off chaotic and sprawling, with more ideas than I could hold in mind at one time. And I also found it hard to figure out how to arrange them into a structure that worked.

But then I discovered index cards.

I used to write out each fact, quotation, or thought that might go into the essay on a separate card. Then I grouped together cards that seemed connected, and finally, I arranged cards within each group into points that made sense—discarding anything that wasn’t needed.

In other words, it was a process of gradual simplification, that took an overwhelming task and broke it down into manageable steps.

And on that day, I suddenly realized a similar process might well work for poetry.

So, I ran to my wife's office (i.e. the other side of our attic), stole all her index cards, and started writing bits of language from the freewrite onto them, like this:

I didn’t write every part of the freewrite onto the cards: rather, I copied out only the words and phrases that interested me most. This then became the first step towards filtering my freewrite down.
I also didn’t think about if these words and phrases worked together: I wrote them out irrespective of where they appeared in the freewrite or whether they seemed connected.
Each phrase or part of a phrase got its own card—so I used a lot of them! (And had to buy my wife some more, pronto…)
Then I laid all the cards out on the floor, and set myself the challenge of making a poem draft out of some of them.

I wasn't sure it would have useful results, because the phrases hadn't related to each other in the freewrite. But to my surprise, it worked!

I spread all the cards out on the floor around me, then looked for a phrase that seemed to make a strong starting point.
After that, I went fishing for another phrase that could connect to the first. Then another after that, then another, and so on.
At some point I realized that the poem was developing different sections of thought, and so I began to create three or four little sub-groups, and then to arrange cards within those sub-groups, just as I used to do with my essays.
I removed cards that didn’t connect, that weren’t needed, or just didn’t “speak” enough to make it in.
Before long, I felt I had covered everything I wanted to say about that topic, so I stopped.

It all went very quickly. I was astonished at how easy it was to sequence phrases that struck sparks off each other, and to create a genuine arc for the poem overall.

I modified the draft a little when I typed it into the computer, and it evolved some more in redrafting, but the basic structure and method of the poem is still the way those index cards looked on the floor.

Since then, I've used index cards for almost all of my new poems.

It has become an essential drafting stage for me, though there are different ways that I do it:

Sometimes I've used that same method again: underline the best parts of a freewrite, write them onto cards, arrange some of the cards into a draft.
Other times, I've taken a draft that already exists, transferred it more or less unchanged to index cards, and then rearranged them (which also involves tossing a lot out!).
I especially like to go through a stage where I mix the index cards up randomly, and then lay them on the floor and see what surprising new conjunctions have happened.

Overall, I believe it has helped me create better poems, ones where I feel I’ve really considered radical alternatives, and have a very good reason for the form I end up choosing.

So it’s a technique that I strongly recommend.

Overall, index cards can have some really interesting benefits:

It's much, much easier to rearrange the structure of a poem

Too many poems stay in essentially the same “shape” from the first draft to the last—and that means they don’t have the chance to develop to their fullest potential.

But with index cards, it’s child’s play (pretty much literally!) to turn your draft upside down or inside out—often with amazing results.

It helps you hone down to the minimum

One of the main aims of poetry, usually, is to say as much as possible with as few words as possible. But this can be hard to achieve, because we tend to get attached to all the words we have in our drafts and the order we’ve put them in!

When you can just pick up words, phrases, or whole lines, and just toss them aside, it’s much more straightforward to see what’s no longer needed, and can be taken out of the poem.

The poem can take on a whole different trajectory

One of the most interesting facets of the index-card process is the way that new meanings and possibilities can emerge.

If you just shuffle the cards around a bit, phrases and lines that would never have met face-to-face in the full draft are now butting up against one another. This can totally change your idea of what these individual lines mean, and can even create a new direction for the poem as a whole—or an idea for another poem.

I particularly love this aspect of the process because it makes me seem much more creative than I feel I really am!

Interesting leaps and switches are easier to create

One of the features of good poetry is surprise—and one way to make it is by creating unexpected jumps and connections in your poems.

Also, as you’ll know if you read magazines and books being published now, poets and editors love poems that make associative or sideways connections from one idea to the next, not straightforward ones.

But many of the students I teach tell me, “My brain is too linear to do this!” And they struggle to incorporate leaps and jumps into their poems.

Well, the index card method makes it simple! Try just taking out a bunch of cards, and leave a gap in the poem—that’s likely to do it! Or shuffle the cards around and pair up phrases that weren’t together before.

You’ll soon be making as many outrageous connections as you want!

You can be physically “in” the poem

There’s something really special about the moment when spread out on the floor all around you:

you seem to be floating inside your words, and you can feel the poem in a whole different way.

You have the visceral sensation of the journey that you want your reader to take through your poem, and so it’s easier to see how you could change and improve that journey.

I find it also helps to deepen my thinking about the poem, because I feel more engaged with it.

You can “recycle” the cards

Finally, when you’re done with drafting a poem, the index cards may still be useful! You could make a whole new poem using cards from several other poems, or even out of cards rejected from other poems.

Ecological sound, thrifty, and fun!

Next Steps

Choose a poem draft that isn’t going so well.

Write this poem out onto index cards.

Break the lines up as you do this. A card might contain a whole line if it’s short, but more often it will be a phrase from a line, or even a single word
If you come to a line, phrase, or word that doesn’t seem worth writing on the card, leave it out!

Spread the cards out on a large surface—floors work well! Allow them to move around some.

Look for a card that contains a phrase or line that seems as though it would grab the attention of a passing reader. Put that by itself at the top of a new flat area.

Look for another phrase or line that could follow that first one. Let it not be the one that followed in the draft!

Keep on choosing cards this way for a while.

If your cards seem to reach a “stop,” start the process again with another phrase that seems arresting, leaving a space between the parts

Continue until you have what seems like a new draft—or even a new poem. Stop before you have used all the cards!

Type up your cards.