Joshua_Tree3 Jul 2005

Dovina - ...it should all be 'A' material.

Me - We'd love to have our best work come out everytime we put pen to paper, but that is unfortunately not so.

zodiac - Nobody's said that. Probably everybody here knows... that they'll end up simply throwing away 99%...

We're probably like 3 blind people describing an elephant. We should be doing our best to write 'A' material. We don't always do as well as we'd like to do. Most of our efforts will end up in the can. That would be the trunk, leg and (umm) tail of the matter.

I threw out almost all of what I wrote in highschool, but I regreted it so much that I've kept everything since then. Editing what I've already written is how I prepare my mind to write more - like priming a pump. A small amount of it probably should be thrown away, but almost everything I write becomes pretty good eventually. By 'eventually' I mean 3 to 10 years. After that amount of time, I know how much I like spending time with the poem, which gives me some idea of how others might respond.

If I was writing full time then things would obviously go faster. The poems would mature much more quickly. I would have more in the "pipeline." I would probably also learn how to write directly into the computer rather than writing on paper and typing it in afterward. I think that I'll turn on "revision tracking" in Word and see how much it messes me up. I certainly write enough prose and essay-like material in worse text editors.