Cheyenne McGuire is a poet from rural Colorado who focuses on the interactions between the land, the individual, and the divine. She is a third-year student at the University of Iowa studying English Creative Writing and English Secondary Education. Her work has been featured in Amethyst Review, earthwords, and Fools, among other publications. This piece was in response to an assignment to describe her writing process in the course Honors Writing Fellows: Writing Theory and Practice.
How I Write
My writing process happens in phases, which I suspect is true of most people. I have always been a competent writer because I have always loved to read, but the more I enter the writing world, the more I learn that I have a lot to learn. Competence and perfection rarely keep the same company. I find that I struggle most when I expect perfection as a writer. However, I don’t know how to avoid demanding perfection of myself. This leads to a struggle to begin writing. I have learned to overcome this desire for perfection through various stages of my writing process, from initial organization to crappy first drafts, and eventually into the revision process.
The most arduous stage in the writing process for me is beginning. I don’t know how to buckle down and start. The problem is not that I don’t trust my writing; it’s that I don’t trust my ideas. With each new assignment or desire to write, I spend days to weeks generating and rejecting ideas for papers and poems. When I finally decide on an idea for an essay, I spend a couple more days agonizing over whether I can sufficiently support it in the space I’ve been assigned. When I finally decide on an idea for a poem, I write a first draft, then spend a couple days telling myself it’ll never say exactly what I want to convey. This failure to launch is the most frustrating part of my experience as a writer, and it holds me back. For example, I’m currently in the process of putting together a portfolio of poems to use in an application—and by “in the process,” I mean I’m fretting over which poems are good enough to include and how much revision they will need. I haven’t even looked at the poems yet. This is always how it starts, and I dread this point in the process. However, once I begin actually drafting, I start to let loose and enjoy myself.
In the formal writing process, the first step is always a sentence outline. I don’t know how to think without bullet points. In fact, I couldn’t even start this essay (which is informal) without first making a full outline. Why do I do this? It relieves a bit of pressure. Starting with a blank sheet of paper and paragraph format feels like I’m trying to write an essay. Starting with a skeletal outline feels like I am allowed to make mistakes. I can have good thoughts that aren’t quite cohesive yet. Another wonderful thing about a sentence outline is that it allows me an extra step of proofing. I can polish the draft a little bit more when I’ve read through it in sentence outline and rough draft form. Outlines help me to integrate the revision stage more fully into my writing process.
Sentence outlines are not helpful when I’m writing poems. Writing poems has taught me to embrace the crappy first draft. I am scared of imperfection, but with poems, perfection is impossible—especially in a first draft. I learn courage through poetry because I have to be intensely vulnerable and give my writer’s brain space to make mistakes. The key to allowing this vulnerability to be productive and not crippling is radical acceptance of the fact that first drafts are allowed to be unclear, shorter or longer than I intend, and unmusical. The line breaks don’t have to be perfect; the language doesn’t have to be precise. Even though I would love to write a perfect poem every time I turn to my notebook or my laptop to write, I have learned that an honest first draft is better than no first draft, or even a technically outstanding first draft. Technical excellence can come from revision.
Revision is my favorite part of the writing process in poetry and the most confusing stage of the writing process for essays. I know how to edit a solid essay into something slightly clearer and more academic than the first draft, but I don’t know how to shape an essay in the revision process. Poems are different. When I learned that poems are going to be bad on the first draft, I learned that revision is about more than just editing diction. It is a process which allows the spirit of the draft to guide changes. These changes bring clarification to the spirit, often revealing aspects of the draft’s spirit that even I did not see at first. I can then develop these aspects and make the themes even clearer than they were in the second, third, fourth, or eleventh draft.
Revision is easy in poetry because I know where to start; conversely, it is difficult in essays because I’m not quite sure what is important to follow. In poetry, I can follow sound through a piece and begin changing language to make each poem internally resonant. With each change, the draft takes a new shape because the words I choose have specific powers, and no word is exactly like another. Revision feels like creating a puzzle. In essays, which are less about sound and more about clarity, I struggle to begin revision. I can’t start with alliteration and assonance like I do in poems because these don’t affect the essay the way they affect poems. Lately, my starting places are transitions, making sure my topic sentences are in line with my thesis, and grammar. I still am not quite sure how to find the spirit of an academic argument.
The process of writing is usually fun for me, but I get nervous to start. This causes a lot of anxiety because there is no fear like the fear of something that doesn’t exist. I find it is easiest to put my mind at ease when I start with an unintimidating plan. Sentence outlines are my friend because they create a space where I am allowed to make mistakes, but the most helpful thing I do for my writing is trust that the revision process is coming, and that I don’t need to be perfect.