The Incendiary Lit Heroic Crown Affair Day 9- Revising!
By day nine you should have seven sonnets written, or six sonnets and a couple free-verse ‘base poems’ so it’s time to revise. Any poems that are in sequential order and are already written, go through and look for little things that can tie the poems together, an image set or perhaps even a little phrase that a key figure in the event your heroic crown revolves around says a lot, something short though, and maybe in the different poems have two different perspectives on the phrasing, or the person even. Check the verbs and nouns, make sure there is something concrete in most lines if possible. Having actual objects is so very important to keeping the reader reading. If they get too lost in abstractions without the firm footing of concrete details you’ll never get them back for a whole crown. Readers are impatient (I know I am) and are practically looking for an excuse to stop reading your poem (in the beginning few poems at least) so try to keep everything streamlined, avoiding any double stating, like “He got into bed and lay down.” If you get “into” bed it can be assumed you’re not standing, because into actually implies that you’re laying between the sheets, or at least under a blanket. Saying “lay down” in this example, is redundant wording, and wastes your very limited and therefore valuable space. Go through all your poems and check for any rhymes that feel a little forced and look at alternate paths for that endword. Try to include some surprising descriptions, out of the ordinary. Go through all of your poems today and sharpen them. Streamline the imagery so it has some sort of connection to the other images in the individual poem. And have fun with it too. Try to include a couple dryly ironic descriptions, because readers love a little laugh in a sea of seriousness. Or a lot of laughs and a bit of seriousness. The point is, brief spots of levity helps to ease tension enough for the reader to breathe a moment without breaking the tension, so the reader’s right back where they were after the chuckle.