how poet and essayist Emily Mohn-Slate thinks like an archeologist to pull drafts out of her notebooks

using kind eyes and a rigorous process to turn freewriting into polished drafts

Today I’m excited to share another entry in the new tending section, which will be a mix of essays and interviews about creative practice that do a deeper dive into a particular craft element or process question.

Today’s newsletter features the wisdom of writer Emily Mohn-Slate, on a topic I think will resonate with lots of folks: if you’ve been piecing together little snippets of writing sessions across a busy season of life and then find yourself with full notebooks and a little bit of time to process them, what do you do? What I love about Emily’s essay and exercise is that it shows how even if you’re someone who doesn’t have hours upon hours every day for deep writing (and who does?) you can still be deeply engaged in your writing and do really good work. You can find Emily on Instagram and Facebook, and if the approach she shares today works for you, you’ll definitely want to sign up for her new newsletter, Be Where You Are.

I’d love your suggestions of other writers and artists to feature in this series, so feel free to email me with ideas. You can just hit “reply” to this newsletter.

I first got to know Emily, as I’ve shared before, when I read a poem of hers, “Feed,” that I really loved and I just had to tell her. When she posted at the beginning of the summer about her plan to work through her notebooks during her break, I had to hear more about what she was doing. (Surely I’m not the only one with notebooks full of possibly-good ideas and lines and images . . . and no real organized method for doing anything with them?) I invited her to write about her process for the newsletter, and I’m so happy to get to share her wisdom today.

📸to Nico Slate

Emily, on writing in a seasonal rhythm

It’s a week after my Alice Cooper “School’s Out” moment. I’m sitting at a desk alone for the first time in a looong time. The early morning air is crisp. A pile of notebooks lie on the desk. I pick one up and start to page through. 

I’m a high school and community-based writing teacher, a parent of two young children, and a writer. During the school year, my own writing has always taken a backseat. Last summer, my frustration with not writing during the academic year had reached a fever pitch. My colleague, Chris Olfshefski, a literacy and education scholar, suggested that a solution might be to write every prompt that I gave to my students. I tried it and it worked.  By writing during breakfast most days and when my students were writing, I managed to fill four notebooks. 

For many people, the imperative to write every day in a sustained way is impossible and you have to find another way. Maybe  you’ve eked out a pile of rough drafts through prompts from Write More (thank you, Nancy!) or a poem-a-day challenge or your morning pages. Or, you’ve tried audio drafting or writing in a tiny notebook at your kids’ soccer practice. Now you’re finally in a season in which you have more time, staring down a pile of messy, awkward, drafts, some so old, that they feel like some distant alien figure must have written them. What now? 

The process I’ve followed starts with me taking out a notebook and paging through it in chronological order. I imagine myself as an archaeologist, digging through the words on the page. I work to extract the pieces that shine, the pieces that feel important even if they seem a bit dull at first, those that call out to me in some way to make it to the next stage of the process. I breathe and feel my own bodily response as I ask: Does it feel in my gut like it matters? Like it knows more than I do? 

As Anne Lamott says, “You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering mind.” For me, it’s easier to access my intuition with a draft when it’s less fresh. And, the typical “put it in a drawer and wait to revise until you’re less sentimental about it” advice is baked into this seasonal model of writing. 

One small, helpful strategy: months before, in the rush of finishing up a prompt before moving on in class, I had added some sticky notes to drafts that felt strong or exciting (“come back!” or “chapbook!” or “essay start”). Those are helpful as I keep digging. 

As I return, I can see that a fair amount of these drafts were written to get my muscles loose, or to take me to the real poem or essay. Not wasted, no, but also not a “real draft.” What remains in the notebook won’t be lost fully; I can come back to those pieces later if I want to. At this point, I’m focusing on looking with kind eyes in order to see potential. It might simply be a line that sounds good or that feels like it has heat, or a line or draft that feels connected to a theme or question I’m exploring in my writing these days. If I’m looking only for perfection, I miss the point. 

When I find a draft with potential (either a full draft or a few lines), I type it up in the Notes section of my manuscript in Scrivener. I’m currently working on two different manuscripts: one poetry and one prose. So I have to make a determination about where it belongs. This is a question I could easily get lost in, and as a serial procrastinator, I have to plug my ears to that siren song. If a draft seems to live in between, I force myself to make a quick, gut-level decision, knowing I can meditate on this question in more depth as I move forward. 

I see this as level two, a kind of staging ground for what can become “real drafts”—drafts that will fight to make their way into my revision to do list, and eventually, maybe, into the world in published form. 

From the notes page, I can read through and see which drafts or fragments seem good enough to move into their own distinct draft with a working title listed in my manuscript doc. Those rough drafts will live in the bottom of my list of individual poems and essays, waiting to be revised. When they are revised (which I do in a painstakingly slow manner), they bump up higher in the list with “finished” drafts ready to be submitted. 

The last part of this process is something I started doing periodically in my notebook: I step back and meditate on the big ideas and questions of my manuscript-in-progress. I draw out on a single page these macro ideas to make a kind of “heat map.” I take this from a central question Major Jackson would ask of each poem in one of my MFA workshops: “Where is the heat?” This mapping exercise helps me to actually  see where the heat is. Erica Berry calls this “mind-mapping” and says in this brilliant Write More interview: “The act of mapping is generative in itself.”  Ada Limón does this with listing, saying in this Lit Hub piece, that this helps give her a “sense, a mood, a world in which the work is living in.” 

From this point on, as I keep revising and cobbling together the manuscript, I can add to my illustration and extend into another page or two as needed. 

a recent map of my developing poetry manuscript

This process is one I developed through doing it. My key guiding principles were to look with kind eyes, follow my intuition, and to see this work as creative in itself, not muck I was trudging through to get to the more valuable part of the process. To see it as a process that might yield something compelling as I read from one season back through time, then wend my way forward to now. 

if you’d like to try it out . . .

1. Once you have a pile of drafts, imagine yourself as an archaeologist, digging through the sentences, phrases, and words. Work to extract the pieces that shine. Or, simply the pieces that feel important—those that call out to you in some way to make it to the next stage of the process. Look with kind eyes in order to see potential. Breathe, put on a song you love that gets you into a creative space, and feel your own bodily response to it. Does it feel in your gut like it matters? Like it knows more than you do? 

2. Once you have a draft (full draft or a few lines) with potential, type it up in a doc that you can use as a staging ground for “real” drafts. These are your level two drafts, a kind of staging ground for what can become “real drafts” (drafts that will fight to make their way into your revision to do list, and eventually, maybe, into the world in published form). You can house these in a Google doc that you name “first rough drafts,” the notes section of your Scrivener doc, or somewhere else that makes sense for you. 

3. Then, take a pause at some point to read through the typed-up drafts/fragments and move ones that seem ready to be revised into their own distinct draft with a working title listed in your manuscript doc, or just on your desktop. 

4. Finally, now that you’ve been steeped in these various threads of language and ideas, step back to the macro vision with a visual exercise. Draw out on a single page the big ideas and questions that strike you from the drafts you’ve just typed up. Meditate on and jot down their themes and questions and draw or list them on a page, making a visual heat map in a way that makes sense for your brain. You might engage this process a few times—moving from the micro to macro and back again.

Emily Mohn-Slate is the author of THE FALLS, winner of the 2019 New American Poetry Prize (New American Press, 2020) and FEED, winner of the 2018 Keystone Chapbook Prize (Seven Kitchens Press). She teaches high school English, and she teaches community workshops for Pittsburgh’s Madwomen in the Attic. (You should check them out! The Madwomen are an incredible force in Pittsburgh’s vibrant poetry scene.) She’s written essays for Romper and elsewhere, and you can read recent poems in AGNI and The New Ohio Review.

For more writing prompts and encouragement that focus on mindfulness as part of the writing process, subscribe to Emily’s newly-launched newsletter, Be Where You Are. (I especially like her recent post “how short bursts of writing build to something more, or writing for people who can’t go write in an isolated castle,” which is full of great tips for actually doing your writing in a busy time. It’s a great companion piece to Emily’s exercise here.)

Write More, Be Less Careful is a newsletter about why writing is hard & how to do it anyway. You can find my books here and read other recent writing here. If you’d like occasional dog photos, glimpses of my walks around town, and writing process snapshots, find me on instagram. 

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