Manuscript construction

Someone asked me recently about putting together a manuscript. I realized it's been a different process for each of my collections, but there are some common threads that I think are important principles.

Revised and updated... because the train of thought continued on past the station!

Ultimately, the selection and order of the poems in a manuscript is a matter of feeling. This should not mean it’s mysterious and inexplicable, nor that it’s random or unimportant. Most of this post will be about how a poet can train, or develop, informed feelings about the order of poems in a manuscript.

Largely this happens through play. Play with your poems and get as familiar as possible with them, as individual poems and as a group. Be particularly aware of how it feels to read each poem after just having read the (tentatively) previous poem. Did the previous poem “leave a taste in your mouth,” and if so, does that taste clash or meld nicely with the taste of the current poem? Neither is wrong! As long as you recognize that interaction, you can decide whether it serves the purpose of your manuscript.

Here are some helpful steps:

Have an idea of your target length. If you’re planning to submit to a particular publisher, check their guidelines. In general, a full-length collection is expected to be between 60 – 100 pages of poetry, which does not include title page, table of contents, section title pages, dedications or acknowledgements. Chapbooks are shorter, usually at least 15-20 pages. Check the guidelines before you submit, as the above are very variable.

Remember that your length guideline will usually be number of pages, not number of poems. (Double-check.) Typically, every poem gets at least a page to itself. Longer poems may occupy more than one page. Standard paperback pages (the format in which most poetry books are published) are narrower than an 8 ½ x 11 Word document page, so some poems that appear to fit on one page in this format may run over when published. For these reasons, your page count will generally be equal to or larger than your poem count, and you may not be able to tell exactly what it is.

Word allows you to create documents that have approximately the same proportions as a paperback page, which can help you check some of your longer poems and see if they run over. If you’d like to try this, go to Page Setup and use the settings below:

 

 

Print out the candidate poems: a necessary step for most of us. I’m as opposed to killing trees as most people, but I simply have not found a way to manage this process on screen—and I have a big monitor and a laptop screen to work with. Print out more poems than you expect to include: I suggest anywhere from a third to a half again as many (if you plan to include 60 poems, a third again as many would be 80, half again would be 90). If you do have multiple-page poems among your candidates, you may want to staple them together so that the pages don’t get scattered as you move piles around.

Start strong and end strong. Put a knockout poem up front and a knockout at the end. This applies both to the collection as a whole, and to sections within the manuscript if there are any.

The first poem or first few poems are important to get the reader hooked. But I actually believe the last poem, or perhaps the last few poems, are more important than the first few. Because that's what the reader will remember. They may or may not remember the actual poems, but the feeling they have when they close the book, that ahhh... Nail that, and you've nailed the reader.

Put your poems into categories. The point is not necessarily that you would present the poems grouped by these categories. You might choose to. Or you might decide you should not let poems in the same category “sit together.” Or you may feel a certain category is unimportant. Here are some examples of categories:

• ·         Structural elements: formal vs. free verse, long vs. short, long lines vs. short lines.
• ·         Emotional content: happy vs. sad (that’s extremely simplistic: most poems are more complex).
• ·         Type of imagery: I at one time grouped a significant number of poems into “burning” poems that incorporated vivid desert and fire imagery vs. “quenching” poems that included a lot of water, rain, and wind imagery.
• ·         Goal orientation: poems that aim to convince, poems that simply narrate, poems that depict a moment or express a feeling.
• ·         Narrative poems vs. lyric poems (full disclosure: I’ve never been able to arrive at a definition of lyric poetry that makes sense to me).
• ·         Anything else you can think of!

Note that characteristics like length are not binary categories but spectrums. You could end up thinking in terms of long, medium, and short poems. You might order all your poems from longest to shortest, like the Suras of the Koran.

You may want to write on each poem, in a corner or on the back, what categories it belongs to.

As you put your poems into different stacks, you’ll observe ways that the categories reinforce each other, or cut across each other. You might find that almost all your long poems are lyric and almost all your short poems are narrative. That could make the one short lyric poem into a real standout.

Look for an arc. Arcs are likely to arise naturally from playing with categories. Again, just because there’s an arc, a natural progression, doesn’t mean you’re obliged to follow it. You might set up an arc, create the expectation that it will be followed, then deliberately disrupt it. This is the kind of surprise that we love in an individual poem – it can be created at a manuscript level as well. Here are some examples of arcs:

• ·         Narrative: Poems might be arranged as a group of related events— not necessarily in chronological order. Consider arranging a group of events in reverse chronological order, like the movie Memento. Or consider if there is a key event that was the cause of many other events – is it more effectively presented as a flashback within a series of poems?
• ·         Emotional progression: A collection that follows an emotional arc tells an emotional story, even if the poems may be about unrelated things or events. Consider the sequence of moods through which the reader will move as they read the poems is different orders.
• ·         Pace: Poem length and line length can make a reading experience feel “faster” or “slower.” Short lines tend to slow a poem down, because the brain has to pause to process each line break. (The physical rate at which readers intake words may actually be higher, though, because the eye doesn’t have to scan back and forth as much.) Poets understand this well within poems, using long lines to create momentum and short lines to interrupt the flow and catch the reader’s attention. Consider how the literal change of pace between poems affects the reader.

As your manuscript begins to take shape, start manually numbering the pages. Use pencil, or use different colored pens and note which color goes with which revision. This way, if your stack gets scattered by accident, you won’t lose the work you’ve done. Renumber the pages when you’ve changed the order.

Random shuffle. If all else fails, throw the whole stack in the air and pick them up without looking.

Be prepared to revise poems. This is where all the playing that you’ve already done can really pay off. If you have a poem that seems strong on its own, but just doesn’t fit where you’re trying to put it in the manuscript, think about its place in a developing arc, or its category characteristics. That may give you ideas for a poem revision that will better suit the manuscript. If you do an extensive revision, you may want to print a fresh copy for your stack.

I’m not suggesting you should rewrite all your best poems to fit into some standard you’ve established for a manuscript. But you may end up having to make a choice between including a poem that sits really awkwardly with its neighbors, revising it, or…

Be prepared to discard poems. This is not “kill your darlings” advice. As an arc, manuscript, or section takes shape, it may not accommodate some poems that are, in your judgement, better than other poems. These poems may find a home in another part of the manuscript, or in a different manuscript. This is why you want to start with more poems in your heap than you expect to put in the manuscript.

If you haven’t guessed by now…

Most of the above is just to get you to spend a lot of time handling your poems, reading your poems, and thinking about your poems. This is how you develop awareness of your poems as a group, not just as individual poems. A manuscript, whether book-length or chapbook length, is an aggregate entity with emergent properties. Your readers will experience these properties, over and above their experience of individual poems. This aspect of the reader’s experience is yours to control, as much as any aspect of a single poem is.

Books Available
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside