It’s no wonder that “its” and “it’s” are mistaken for one another. Both are spelled with the same letters and look similar in appearance except for the all-important apostrophe. The misuse usually is due to hasty proofreading; spellcheck and grammar check often are of no avail when trying to find the mistaken “its” or “it’s.”
Write First. Edit Later.
Numerous years of writing academic papers, essays, poems, blog posts, white papers, et cetera, have taught an important lesson: write first and edit later. The initial words must flow. They cannot and should be stopped. They should not be weeded or burned before they come to fruition. They and their weedy counterparts have to go a little wild at first so that the right and good words can be discerned and put to use.
Raisins and Ideas
I have nothing against raisins. I like them. They’re wonderful in a number of things such as granola, salads, and oatmeal raisin cookies. They aren’t nearly as delicious when they’ve turned rock hard due to neglect. They’re a bit like ideas left to shrivel and die. They no longer serve any purpose. What once were plump grapes have been reduced, not to still-good raisins, but to pellets one could throw at the blue jay that terrorizes the backyard.
How to be a Better Editor of Your Own Work
But the greatest trauma, the necessary wounding that any poet must undergo, is the detachment from her own work. The beginning after the beginning. We must cut ourselves out and off to move toward a sophisticated sense of the art beyond our sense of self, to develop a historical sense, to see that we write in dialogue with the poetry of the past, to see poems as things, material to be manipulated. This is the big divide, what must be stressed again and again and not just in undergraduate workshops. We must risk a loss of passionate connection to distance ourselves from our work, to grow a little cold to it in order to revise, in order to look at a poem as a series of decisions. Why this and not that? We must develop an ability to read our work skeptically. – Dean Young, The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction
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Thoughts on Poetry for Poetry at Work Day
…a poem freshens the world. – Ted Kooser
The first story I wrote was about my grandmother who had fallen into a lake. My first poem, fittingly or disturbingly, used the same experience. The incident, something I knew and with which I was familiar, propelled me into the unknown. At first, it was the world of unknown letters and words – I wrote my first story when I was six or seven. The second was an unfamiliar world, but it turned out to be the world I needed.
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My Blogging Secret: A Well-Stocked Pantry
When it comes to publishing content regularly and consistently on this site, I have a secret: I have a stockpile of content. I probably have enough content – if I were to work through all the drafts sitting in my folder – to last two months. I know this, but I don’t stop writing. I don’t quit stocking the pantry. I keep it full.
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