How do I put together a collection of essays or creative nonfiction?
That's what my Creative Writing thesis advisee this year asks.
The requirement is to put together a collection of at least seven (7) essays/creative nonfiction pieces, of publishable quality, organized around a particular theme or themes. My thesis advisee has some idea what she'll do, but we still have to see if it can pass muster. So we agreed that she submit one piece each week until we have all seven. Then we review the pieces if they will hang together. So far I have four pieces with me, with another coming along this week (due 21 July 2011). To be continued How do I put together a collection of poems?
That's what my Creative Writing thesis advisee last school year (2010-2011) asked.
The requirement was to put together a collection of at least 15 poems (of average length), of publishable quality, organized around a particular theme or themes. Easier said than done, J the student exclaimed. But I think we're in the right track. J latched on to an idea about what sort of poems he wanted to write. I think that was about 50% of the problem solved. Unless one is putting together poems already written and published in journals and anthologies, thinking about what a collection should be about is a great hurdle. One does not just cobble sundry pieces into a book; the poems must cohere and present some idea or aesthetic.
Now J had written drafts of about 10 works, and had started on several other pieces. Being the young and ambitious writer, he planned to publish more than the required 15 poems. My task, of course, was to rein in his enthusiasm to a more realistic pace and to make sure the 15 or so pieces really made a collection worthy of publication.  Soon as we had a more or less stable number of pieces to start with, we got to work on revising the individual pieces (this is another entry, I think). With the draft of 10 poems at hand, we tentatively organized them into clusters.
What I mean by a cluster is a group of poems that exhibit more or less similar images/settings/situations. We grouped these pieces together and found out how one poem "converses" with another work, or how several pieces somehow cohered. Judgment was mainly instinctual at this point. Here's a blog site I found that may prove helpful for this latter task, Jeffrey Levine's Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Poetry Manuscript: Some Ideas on Creation and Order, particularly his section on "The Zen of the Manuscript." Coming soon is Revision I, particularly how to re-envision our drafts.  | TopicsLinks Collection is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.  |
