Taking Your Ideas Further
This article is for: Beginner and Intermediate poets
As a reader, you’ve probably looked at poets that you admire and thought, How on earth did they come up with those ideas?
Maybe you’re amazed at how unique and fresh their ideas are. Or maybe what’s stunning you is how they get so many different ideas into one poem. Or there again, it might be how they manage to make such original connections between different topics or situations.
Is it magic? Some gene they have and you don’t? Or a secret that only gets taught on MFA programs?
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None of these! You can learn to make your ideas as unique, varied, and connected as any poet out there.
And in this article, I’m going to talk about one vital stage for making that happen: deepening your ideas after you first get them and before you start writing.
Deepening your idea before you draft will hugely increase how far the poem can go.
Got a good idea? Great—now keep working!
There are dozens of ways to get a good first idea: observe the world, observe yourself, read another poet, listen to music, have a conversation, eavesdrop on a conversation, look back at your notebook, cut up some words, ask a friend for a prompt, look at a picture…. Endless! No doubt you use a few different strategies yourself.
And if you’re like most of the poets I’ve seen, once you have an idea you go straight to working out a first draft.
I’d like to suggest a change to that.
As well as a drafting process, you should also have an idea process. And the idea process happens before the drafting process even starts.
You see, I think the first idea is only the beginning. Whether your first idea is really just an idea, or whether it’s already a full-blown draft, I think that the next thing you need to do is explore what other ideas you can add to it.
And this early on is the perfect time to do it. For one thing, it’s still “hot” in your unconscious; and for another, it’s still new to you, so you can still be flexible about what kind of poem is going to come out of it. Later on, after you’ve done a few drafts and gotten used to it being a particular way, that will get harder.
Five ways you can deepen your first ideas
1. Freewrite
I have another article on the value of freewriting, so I won’t go into detail here. But you should definitely, for sure, do at least one freewrite around the ideas that you already have.
You just never know what else is lurking in your unconscious, ready to transform your idea into something even more marvelous! Do a freewrite, and find out.
2. Compost, Think, and Wait
When we get a great idea, it’s natural to want to rush right to a first full draft. But maybe we can wait a bit, too.
Perhaps, if you create some time between the idea and the first draft, and keep thinking about it in the meantime, you’ll discover a whole lot of new aspects and features. Just keep pondering on your topic, turning it over in your mind a few times a day, and it will start to offer you new ways to think about it.
One excellent way to do this is what Natalie Goldberg calls “Composting.” Instead of just thinking about your idea, try writing notes and prose about it in your journal. Just see what comes up. Try not to be planning your poem—just let things come to you, especially things you didn’t expect, directions for your thoughts that surprise you.
3. Find some comparisons
This is a very “poet” way of doing it!
Take your first idea, and find some comparisons (that is, metaphors or similes) for the whole idea, or parts of it.
Write down a lot of them—far more than you could use—and do it quickly. Then look back at your list, and see which comparisons have added new dimensions to the ways you could draft your idea.
The answer should be, all of them!
Why does this work? Because any comparison links two ideas together—your original idea, and a new one. So each one adds that second, new idea to the list of thoughts that might enter your poem.
If you create enough of them, and choose the best, you’ll discover that this gives you a ton of possible new directions for your poem.
4. Find your associations
Our minds learn and think by making connections: physical connections between neurons, and mental connections between ideas.
This means that, for any idea we have, there is already a web of other ideas connected to it in our minds. If we can uncover that web, we’ll have a rich source of linked topics that could enrich your poem.
Luckily for us, this is not too hard to do. For any idea you’ve got, you can ask yourself questions like these:
What physical things does this idea make me think of? What objects, plants, animals?
What people does this idea bring to my mind?
And what places?
What memories are linked with this idea for me?
Are there dreams or fantasies that I connect with this idea?
What colors seem to fit with this idea, and what do I think of when I think of those colors?
Repeat the last one with sounds, and smells.
Use these topics to see what connections you’ve already got for your idea, and then think about including some of them in the poem.
5. Find outside connections
Finally, you can also seek connections between your idea and topics that are “out there” in the world. (This can be a great way to broaden the scope of your writing and make it more socially or politically engaged.)
Ask yourself, which of these kinds of topics could your idea connect with in some way?
Historical events
Political questions
Recent news, local, national, or global
Social trends or problems
Technology and its effects
Art of other kinds (not poetry)
Academic subjects—math? chemistry?
Religion
You might like to try some internet research—look up things related to your idea, and see what happens!
As always, look for lots of possible connections, then select the best, the ones that really seem to enrich your idea. Sometimes there won’t be anything: other times, you’ll amaze yourself with how something you thought was purely personal turns out to connect to another country, another time, or another field of thought entirely.
Next Steps
When you have your next poem idea, STOP—don’t draft right away.
Instead, choose one of my 5 methods, and use it to make your idea bigger, wider, connected to other ideas.
Then try another one of the 5 methods, in case a different approach yields something even better.
Then draft the poem, using your new, richer understanding of how deep and wide it could go!
