Craft Tip: Assembling a Manuscript

And yes, I'll be taking on editorial projects again soon

Hi, Friend.

Earlier this year I spent a week at the Longleaf Writers Conference in Seaside, Florida. As a Visiting Writer, I gave a public reading and a craft talk, but most of my time was spent working on a new book, walking on the beach, and soaking up the readings and talks of other writers. Fine, I also had some mojitos and gelato. It was lovely—warm, relaxed, inspiring, fun—and if you have a chance to go, you should.

My craft talk was called “The Book Is a Poem: Assembling a Manuscript.” It was a version of a lecture I gave at Spalding University during an MFA residency there. I wanted to talk frankly about something practical, and one thing people ask me about a lot is how to put a book together. When you assemble a manuscript, you have craft choices to make just as you do when you write an individual poem. And just like the choices you make in an individual poem—line length, stanza shape, title, diction—the choices you make in your manuscript have effects on the reader.

In my experience, putting a book together is like assembling a puzzle piece by piece without knowing what the finished image will look like. The same 40 poems can be gathered into very different manuscripts based on the sequence of the poems; the poems you choose for the opening and closing; the use of sections, titles, and epigraphs; and the overall balance of material. I actually think it would be an interesting assignment: give students 40 poems by any poet, perhaps a published book, and have them arrange the poems into a manuscript. You would get completely different collections.

I’ve published four collections of poems, but I’ve never written a book of poems. I welcome each poem as it arrives, thankful it showed up, and I do my best with it. One by one, I file them away in a work-in-progress folder on my computer. As I’m writing individual poems, I’m not thinking of them in the context of a book. I don’t have a sequence or even a theme in mind.

At a certain point I realize I probably have enough poems for a book-length manuscript, so I print them all out and shuffle them together in my hands. It’s time to see what I have. This is one of the most exciting parts of the process for me. I print everything out and do an initial cold read of the stack, removing the poems that either don’t feel like a good fit thematically or tonally, or don’t quite rise to the quality of the poems around them. Sometimes this means pulling out a poem that was first published in a terrific journal—maybe even the “best” publication—because it doesn’t seem to be in clear conversation with the others. In this case, I set it aside and consider it fair game for another project—maybe the next book or chapbook.

Now what?

Once I whittle the large stack down to the stack of likely keepers, I begin the work of shuffling through the poems, seeing which ones seem to be in conversation, seeing what kinds of images and motifs repeat, and so on. Part of the joy of seeing all of the poems you’ve written over maybe years together is seeing the thematic ties.

Maybe you notice you have multiple poems about illness, poems about motherhood, poems about place: you might try letting them live in close proximity, and you might also experiment with letting them be a breadcrumb trail in the manuscript. The pro of letting like poems cluster together is emphasizing these themes. What’s the con of having like poems live together? Monotony. And losing a reader’s interest.

Once, in a classroom of writers, Dean Young was asked how he put together his books. He described how he took his most recent poems and looked solely at how the ending of one poem led into the beginning of another. Over and over, he considered the individual links the last lines made with following first line to create the order of the poems in his books. I do this, too, first thing.

I suggest this: Read the ending of one poem—take in the tone, the imagery, the utterance—and then search through the stack, testing out the openings of other poems to find the most natural (or thrilling) transition. What feels right? Which poems seem to want to live adjacent to one another? Which poems gain power by being in close proximity to one another? Which poems need to come earlier than others, perhaps, because of an unfolding narrative? Which poems are heavier vs. lighter, and how will that impact placement?

As an editor of other poets’ manuscripts, I’ve worked on dozens and dozens of books, and I’ve served as a contest judge many times, in addition to working on my own collections. There are so many ways to assemble a manuscript—to build a book—and there is no right answer. There is no definitive order. There are various choices, all of them valid, and at a certain point you feel satisfied and let it go. (It’s the same with a poem! There is no “perfecting” it, there is only getting it to a place where you are satisfied it’s doing the work it came to do.)

There’s so much more to say on this topic. What about titles? What about epigraphs? What about sections? What about the “outliers”—those poems that don’t seem to want to live alongside the others? Yes, I do talk about all of these things and more in Dear Writer.

For years I regularly edited other poets’ full-length and chapbook-lengths manuscripts, and it was my favorite work outside of my own writing. I love receiving a collection of poems, spending quality time with it, and working with the writer to make it even stronger. I pulled back on editorial projects while working intensively on You Could Make This Place Beautiful and Dear Writer, but I’m looking forward to opening my books this winter and taking on select poetry and prose projects again. I’ll make an announcement here first, for subscribers, and will post information on my website, too.

Sending all my best from my writing room to yours.

Love,
Maggie