Self-censoring a First Draft

I offer two rules for this:
1. DON'T DO IT
2. DO IT
in that order.
First, as a beginning writer, an inexperienced writer at any age, it is essential that you not edit yourself as your write. Put it all down. Leave nothing out. The reason is simple: You are in the zone and don't want to miss out on anything, don't want to be limited. You will have plenty of time to revise, edit, censor later. Do not deviate from this.

Well, don't deviate until you have reached a more accomplished stage in your writing. At some point you may know and understand your own voice, may have worked in it enough so that you know what you are doing as you do it. At this point you may have read and learned enough about poetry so that you know what to cull on the fly. This is a much more efficient way to write than to write down all the claptrap you once needed to include and excise later when you could better make decisions. If you are not comfortable doing this, don't risk it. For my money you can't really get away with it during your first ten or so years of hard writing work. When you reach that point, don't bother any longer.

The Best Use of a Poetry Mentor, parts 1-2 or 3

This has two parts because my use of a mentor had two parts, actually three, that were distinct. I emphasize from the last entry that a long relationship with a single mentor can be really productive. Initially I submitted poems, we worked them over, I revised the poems, we worked them over again and repeated the process until the poems were as fully realized as they could be at the time. This was a grueling process and hugely educational. The more you learn about writing and the way you write the more you will eliminate bad writing from your drafts (more later about the notion that you shouldn't self-censor in the earliest stages of a draft). This phase of being mentored lasted several years and was indispensable. In the second phase I did much less revising and preferred to take what I was learning from my mentor (Baron Wormser) and apply it to my future poems. Keep in mind that at this time my poems were coming fairly rapidly and I felt that each new one was better than whatever came before. I rarely returned to the mentoring with the same poems again. The most recent stage came about both because I was evolving satisfactorily and because I was low on money. In this stage I worked with the mentor only occasionally, often less than once every six months, and usually with a batch of poems in which I had a specific interest. We have achieved a stage of marvelous mutual regard and friendship and there is nothing I won't show him or that he won't say about my poems-- good, bad or ugly. It has taken more than a decade to arrive at this.

In the next post I will discuss the pros and cons of self-censoring an initial draft.
So long for now.