How to Organize Your Writing Drafts With inspiration from Marie Kondo

Poets who have been writing for several years end up with lots of unfinished drafts and notes. As a freelance editor, I often work with clients who have tons of old drafts and no clue how to process them. For myself, I often write 100+ poems in a year, resulting in a massive amount of poem clutter.

After all, you don’t want to abandon those poems that are older, because they feel like your babies. But it is necessary to sort through them, to choose poems for publication or to just decide how to categorize them. As Paul Valery said, “No poem is ever ended, every poem is merely abandoned.” Poems that don’t work now might work later. Poems that aren’t published in a journal or magazine might make it into the later draft of a book.

As I was thinking about this process, I wished there was a good method for sorting through old drafts. Then I remembered one of my favorite Netflix shows and a woman named Marie Kondo.

Read the full article here . . .