People often ask about how I write my poems.  Sometimes they think I write everything perfectly the first time… well…

It takes a long time to write a poem and it’s hardly ever perfect on the very first ‘draft’.  It’s not unusual for me to ‘rewrite’ a poem 20 times or more!  Yes, that’s right!  In the world of writing, we call that ‘rewriting’ and all professional writers are used to doing it over and over again!

I’ll show you a few examples of what it looks like while I’m actually writing.  Most writers will never show you this stuff.  You’re only seeing a few pages out of thousands of pages of rewrites, but it will give you a good idea of my ‘writing process’.

All of these examples are from the book Swimming in Chocolate, but I assure you, the process was exactly the same for Lemon Drop Rain, Over the Top, New Pet and everything coming down the pike!

TIP: If you happen to have Swimming in Chocolate, you might want to look at it now and compare the finished poems in the book to what you see here.

I always start writing my poems using a piece of paper and a pen.
I never start a poem on the computer.  Here’s an example of the very first version of ‘Astonishing Ann’ (p. 124)

Yikes, what a mess, huh?  That’s how it looks!  As you can see by the boxes around several of the words, I was marking the rhyming words.  Early on, I was using the word ‘Amazing’, but that was later changed to ‘Astonishing’.   You can also see a few lines crossed out – they never made it into the final version.

Here’s an early draft of ‘Cake’ (p. 62)

Sorry for the poor quality of the image, but this is a scan and the writing was rather faint to begin with. Anyhoo, here you can see how I rewrote the poem on the same page, which I don’t usually do.  It’s easy to see the changes I made from the first draft to the second.  I also like to do a few doodles or sketches just for fun.  When I do these doodles, I’m kind of taking a break from writing and ‘changing gears’ for a moment without leaving the page – and I’m having fun! The ‘Rhode Island’ state got changed to ‘Alabama’ (sorry, Rhode Islanders!)

After a few hand-written rewrites, I’ll move to the computer.
The poem has to be put on the computer at some point, so this is a good time to do it.  I’ll print it, then make more changes – by hand!

I ‘bounce’ back and forth between the computer and working by hand until I have the poem as perfect as I think it can be.  Let me stress that it’s as perfect as “I” think it can be!  This is where ‘copy editors’ get involved… these are people who look over the writing and make comments about corrections that need to be made and the overall ‘meter’, ‘rhythm’ or ‘beat’ of the sentences, etc.  They might point out things that don’t seem clear or whatever…

‘Quiet Little Molly and the Great Big Hot Tamale’ (p. 40)  Here they’re using a red pen, a blue pen and a pencil.  Red = Stuff I really need to pay attention to.  Blue = A recommendation, their thoughts.  Pencil = Doesn’t have to be related to the writing structure or grammar, but just a comment or something I should think about or a question they might have.  They don’t see the drawings so they might have some questions about what’s going on.

And here’s ‘Hocus Pocus’ (p. 8).  As you can see, even though I thought I had it perfect, there were still some things that I missed!  Oh, no!  Do you see that!?  I misspelled ‘ice-cream’… I hate it when that happens!  Editors to the rescue!

The comment [2 cases of 'NR'] means there are two places in the poem that are a ‘Near Rhyme’ (not an exact rhyme).  Can you find them?  HINT: Look at the editor’s marks! Check out the finished poem in the book – you can see what my final decision was!

If you’re having trouble reading the red and pencil comments, this is what it says:

Meter = OK
(at 4 beats per line)
(but reader must take care or
some lines may have 5 beats per line!)
Wonderful!
Lots of fun!

So, now that the editors have looked over the poems and made their comments, I will decide on which adjustments to make, then combine the poem with the illustration and the page is done!
If there are 140+ poems in a book, then this process gets repeated 140+ times!

I hope this was interesting and helpful!  Don’t forget that all this is a normal part of the writing process!  Have fun writing AND rewriting YOUR COOL POEM!