Thanks for your reply. Yes, permission to write drafts is vital for writing.

Hey, I can’t get your blog link to work. I’d love to stop by your blog if you have one.

DA

Adults were also relieved to see that most things don’t arrive perfectly formed on the page. It seemed to be a way for them to get permission to be bad and yet continue.

Even if only 10% are interesting enough to go back and edit into something decent, I’ll be happy with that!

Lyle, I always find it interesting to see how people work and create their poems, paintings, etc. I write a big mess of words and then go back and edit. For me, it’s important to get what I want to say onto the paper before I forget.

Nick, What do you mean by ‘under the radar’?

Debbie, Congratulations on your publication!

Leslie, That is a good idea. I think students often don’t realize how awful most writing is to start. When they do not write perfectly the first time, they can easily become frustrated. Did you do this with adults or children? I’m curious. Young children are more forgiving of themselves, and adults are harder on themselves.

Keeping the draft “alive” on the blog for a few hours forces me to accept these NaPoWriMo poems as mine, as well. Most prompt-writing, for me, get shut in a drawer the moment I’m done. I never go back and revise or publish, because I didn’t really consider them “my” poems to begin with.

I don’t really work in drafts — when I write a poem, I tend to work line by line from beginning to end, crossing out and rewriting as I go. Generally by the time I get to the end, the poem feels pretty much finished to me. So in that respect, I don’t really have drafts, as such, to post online or anywhere else.

(I write by hand in a stenographer’s notebook, the type that’s spiral-bound along the top. In the notebook the finished versions of poems sometimes have many lines crossed out and rewritten throughout the poems. It can be slightly a mess to read. I don’t type poems until they feel basically finished to me.)

I did post several poems in the Cafe Cafe group blog when I was active in it. The poems I put there were not “drafts,” they were finished poems, though usually very recently finished. Usually I posted the poems the same day I wrote them, or within a day or two.

What one of the other commenters mentioned — that some poetry magazine editors consider a poem to be previously published if it’s been posted anywhere online — is a consideration for me too. I’ve sometimes withheld posting poems online because I wanted to submit them to magazines and didn’t want previously publication, even on a blog or whatever, getting in the way.

I am, by the way, participating for the very first time in the NaPoMo challenge. But luckily I’m doing so “under the radar” so to speak. It’s a daunting task I must say for a writer who pumps out a couple of poems a month if I’m lucky. Should be fun!