12.20.2023

THINKING ABOUT CRAFT & PROCESS

Today at Diary Poems we’re pleased to feature a guest post from Janie Braverman, who takes an elliptical approach to riffing on differences and similarities between writing as craft and writing as process. Feel free to add your own thoughts in the comments. —X. P.

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CRAFT

/kraft/

• An activity involving skill in making things, often by hand

• A skill used in deceiving others

• Any vehicle designed for travel across or through water bodies, air &/or space

• Tools used by poets & other writers

Used in a paragraph

What’s in your toolbox? Scene, sentence, scansion? Rhythm, repetition, & slant or straight rhyme? The line, the list, & the lament? Are you equally careful of white space, image, & text, of font, format, & form? Do you play with brackets, braces, ellipses, & semicolons?

PROCESS

/ˈpräˌses/

• A series of steps or actions taken to achieve a particular end

• A summons or writ requiring a person to appear in court

• Verb: To perform a series of mechanical or chemical operations on something to change or preserve it

Used in four paragraphs

1. Where do you sit when you open your toolbox? Home or coffee shop? Do silence & solitude feed you or stifle you? Pen or laptop or desktop with dual monitors? Scrivener or Word? Are you a lark or an owl? Coffee or tea?

2. Where do you start? Image or prompt or experience, or language itself? Does a character arrive, speaking in your head? Does a line arrive whole, waiting for what comes before & then after? Does the form announce itself or do you impose it yourself? What have I forgotten to mention? What has never occurred to me?

3. Drafts: How do you distinguish one from the next? Is it enough to move (or remove) a comma? Eliminate an entire stanza or chapter or character? How do you organize your drafts—on paper &/or electronically? Have you ever lost one forever? Do you revise as you write? & if you do, how many drafts dance on the head of your pen?

4. Interruptions: What causes them, how do you deal with them . . .

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. . . wait, where was I?

Ah, yes. I remember.

Are you a poet, a painter, a writer of prose? Yes is a complete & acceptable answer.

When & what do you think about genre—or do you? Is that question about craft or about process? Here, too, you may want to say yes.

Is this post built of hermit crab essays or hermit crab poems? (Yes is my answer.)

HERMIT CRAB

/ˈhərmət/ /krab/

• An anomuran (that is, irregular in the character of the tail or abdomen) decapod crustacean of the superfamily Paguroidea that has adapted to occupy empty scavenged mollusk shells to protect its fragile exoskeleton

• A genre-bending tool

• The result of a writer adopting an existing form to contain new writing

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JANIE BRAVERMAN is a poet, memoirist, and collage maker. Her work, including excerpts from her experimental memoir manuscript, has appeared in Persimmon Tree, Medical Literary Messenger, Poetry in Public (Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature), and elsewhere.

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