Write More Than You Need
This article is for: Beginner and Intermediate poets
One of the things that everyone knows about poetry is that it doesn’t use many words.
Poetry books are usually fewer than 100 pages, an individual poem rarely fills a whole page, and in individual lines and sentences, poets often leave out the words that prose would leave in.
And you probably have a favorite poem that is six, four, or even two lines long (one of mine is Heaney’s ''An August Night,” which has three lines).
Basically, one of the main ways to give your poetry power is compression, concision, brevity.
So, if that’s true—
Why on earth am I telling you to write a lot?
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Writing a lot gives you options
Suppose you want to write a regular length poem—about 25 lines or so, short enough to fit on a page.
Suppose that in order to do this, you create a draft that is about 25 lines long. That’s logical, right? Why would you write 50 or 75 lines if you are only going to delete most of them? Why would you write more than you plan to use?
Well, let’s think about what happens at the next step.
You want 25 lines. You have 25 lines. So naturally, you’ll keep all of those lines, more or less, and work on making them as good as you can: taking out clichés, strengthening your verbs, adding images, cutting out words you don’t need. And so on.
When you’ve done that, it’s job done: poem ready!
Hmmm—maybe. Maybe you also have the sneaky feeling you could have written a better poem about this topic, but you didn’t quite get to the best ideas.
And maybe the way you could have done that was by writing far more than you needed in that first draft.
You see, if you write only as much as you need, you have to hope that everything you write is good!
And frankly, that’s not all that likely—even for a genius.
Whereas, if you’d written 100 lines to start with, you could choose the best ideas from those lines, and cut out the rest. Then the odds are much more in your favor: you only need one-fourth of your original writing to be good or promising, to have a great draft to work with!
If you play the numbers game, by writing more than you need at first, you’re much more likely to get to the good stuff you want.
This applies at any stage of the drafting process. For example:
Creating first ideas for ways to approach the poem (see also my post on Listing for Creativity)
Writing the first full draft
Choosing what comparisons (metaphors/similes) to use
Selecting an adjective that creates interesting sound connections with its noun (alliteration, assonance, or long/short vowel patterns, for example)
Choosing rhyme words
… and so on.
When making anything new to go into the poem, it’s good to assume that first you’re going to write a whole lot more than you need, and only then reduce it down.
In other words, yes, concision and compression are essential; but very few poems start that way. It’s a goal to aim at, not a place to launch from.
Writing a lot eases your worries about making “good work”
Another big, big reason to write more than you need is to help yourself be more relaxed about the process of writing.
If you are the kind of poet who frets about the quality of your writing—and we are all that kind of poet sometimes—then it can be super comforting to know that you can just keep on writing until some interesting, workable material comes out!
Never beat yourself up for the first ideas you put down—just keep going, and going, until you get to stuff that does excite you and make you delighted to work with. It WILL happen.
Writing a lot helps you be creative
Playing the numbers game is also way to help yourself generate fresh, original ideas.
The more that you write at first, the more chance there is that you’ll give your unconscious mind the space and time it needs to come up with its best material. The unconscious doesn’t like to feel rushed or pre-programmed: it’s much more likely to cough up its gems if it knows from the beginning that you’re going to write for a while, until it’s ready to share.
Also, if you set out to spend quite a bit of time writing, you have a chance to “seed” ideas into your unconscious. The topic that you start writing about gets transmitted into your unconscious mind, which then starts accumulating its own ideas about it. Then it will send those ideas back up to you—provided you write for long enough! If you stop too soon, they may get stuck in your unconscious, and never make it into the light of the page.
Two quick examples
Here’s a poem of mine, published in 2020 in the Maine Sunday Telegram:
Under The Bridge, A River
Late February: the whole of one winter
white on the rocks, and between runs
black water. Gray snow beneath
is translucent, a breath.
In the shallows, black stones
shed ripples. One quivers,
dips, then
raises its head, opens its wings.
8 lines of poetry. Want to guess how long was the first draft for this poem?
90 lines.
I also have a poem, “Imogen Plays Outside,” that was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize.
It’s 28 lines long. The first draft of this was 220 lines long—and that doesn’t include some freewrites I also used for the final draft.
Around 90% of both these poems ended up in the trash!
But having that 90% there in the first place made both of these poems much, much stronger.
Next steps
Take an idea that you’ve been kicking around for a while. Or else use one of these:
—The yellow ladder
—Behind the smile
—Hot stuffWrite about this idea—more than you usually would. A lot more!
Look back over your notes and highlight the parts you find most interesting.
Make a poem of 30-100 lines based on your notes.
Cut this draft down to a poem of no more than 10 lines.
