on getting over the fear of making sucky art (+ a few thoughts on revision, etc.)

thoughts on a 30/30 (pt. 4)

Like all lovers and sad people, I am a poet. (c. summer 2016)

So far, this is my year of putting stuff out into the world without worrying too much about whether it’s ‘good’ or not. First I started the mini-zine project, where I have to write at least one mini-zine a month, and then in April, I did the 30/30. The zine thing gives me a little time to revise and ‘perfect’ it—I have a whole month, as opposed to around 24 hours. (Except, of course, I had nowhere near 24 hours per poem. Partly because of everything else I have to do on any given day. Partly because of the way I work. We’ll get back to that later.)

Back in the day, I had a much easier time writing stuff fast, doing minimal revisions, and then putting it out into the world without worrying too much about the quality. I used to make whole zines over the course of 24 hours (meaning: I wrote, revised, and did the layout over the course of 24 hours), print them, and make them available to the world. And it’s not that I was half-assing it, or putting out crap. I worked hard on them, and some of the 24-hour zines I did once upon contain stuff I still think is pretty damn good. I don’t know what changed, or when exactly it happened—but sometime in the past fifteen years, I started overthinking my writing a lot more. Revision can be a great thing, but overthink is not. Overthink is the art-killer. Which is part of the reason I decided to do both the mini-zine project and the 30/30 this year. To force myself into situations where I have to write fast, and I have to put it out into the world without overthinking it.

So, here are some notes on my writing process as it relates to a 30/30, some thoughts on getting over the fear of putting out shitty art, and some thoughts on revision:

My writing process works like this: I get an idea for a piece or project, and think on it for a while before sitting down to write a draft. Sometimes I jot down copious notes, do a lot of research, etc. Other times my note is a few words long. On rare occasions, I make no notes and the piece lives in my head until I write the first draft. But that pretty much only works if I write the first draft the day I get the idea, because boy oh boy do those Great Ideas(TM) have a way of disappearing if I don’t document them.

Under normal circumstances, I start making notes for/thinking about a piece weeks, or even months ahead of when I write that first draft. But when I’m doing something like a 30/30 (or a 24-hour zine), it doesn’t quite work like that. Some of the poems I wrote in April were ones I had thought about/written bits of/written notes about before the start of the month, but for a good, oh, 90% of them, that was not the case. In fact, I had notes for some poems I was going to write in April, only to discover, when I sat down to write them, that they weren’t ready yet, and I had to redirect.

And remember how I said above that I didn’t have 24 hours per poem? There are the obvious reasons—I’m in bed for at least six of those hours, plus there’s dayjob stuff, and my other art, and my children, and chores, and and… But there’s also the fact that, except for the handful poems I’d already jotted down notes for prior to April…I work better if I wait until the 11th hour. Maybe it’s the ADHD (none of my Executives are Functioning). Or maybe it’s that, for something like a 30/30, when I have to write a poem every day and can’t afford to overthink—the less time I have to write something, the less time I have to overthink it. So, most days this April, after thinking about the poem for most of the day, I’d sit down to write it around 8 or 9 p.m.—usually after I’d had a drink or two, because being slightly buzzed helps me not overthink as much. (But it only works if I’m very mildly buzzed; anything beyond that and I can’t write at all. I have no idea how I did it in my twenties, when I wrote entire novels and long-form zines while wasted drunk or high as a kite.)

As I mentioned in pt. 2 of “thoughts on a 30/30,” one of my main types of overthink when it comes to my poetry is the fear that I’m writing (about) the same thing over and over, and that people will tire of reading it. Waiting until later in the day to write that day’s poem helped with some of that, because, since I didn’t have time to overthink if I wanted to get something written and sent in, I had to go with what inspired me. And could I help it if what inspired me was one of the fifteen things that always inspires me? I could not! So, instead of trying to avoid my own personal poetry tropes during April, I ended up doubling down on some of them.

Waiting until the 11th hour to write the drafts helped stop some of my overthink, but it didn’t stop all of it. As I mentioned in the first installment of “thoughts on a 30/30,” every day in April I’d think I couldn’t write another poem, and then I would write one, and then as soon as I sent it in, I’d find a hundred faults in it and decide it was the worst poem ever written. And then I’d remind myself of certain things:

• It’s not the worst poem ever written. It’s not the best poem ever written, either. Besides, “best” and “worst” are subjective. And, to paraphrase something my pal Brent Mitchell once said: “Don’t waste your time trying to write the best poem anyone has ever written. Try to write the best Jessie Lynn McMains poem.”

• So what if it is a terrible, throwaway poem? No one has ever died from writing a bad poem. Or from reading one. You can’t get to the great ones without writing some shit in the process.

• By the same token: I am not always the best judge of my own work. Sometimes people respond most strongly to the pieces I think of as throwaways.

• They’re drafts, not finished versions. They’ll get taken down after a couple months, and then I’m free to revise them as I please.

Speaking of revision: when I was younger, I was very much into that whole “first thought best thought” Beat ethos. As I got older, I realized that the Beats actually revised the hell out of their work, so it was kind of a myth anyway. I also realized that sometimes you have to revise in order to return to the first thought, in order to uncover the spark that ignited the poem (or story, etc.) to begin with. Because, often, something gets lost in the translation from your brain to the page, and you have to translate it again via revision to get it to express its core truth. Earlier this year, I took a writing class with Selah Saterstrom at Four Queens (I highly recommend taking a class with her if you have the means; it was an amazing experience), and she talked a lot about revision. She said she thinks of revision with emphasis on the vision, as a literal re-imagining of the work—a new way of seeing it. And I love that. I try not to think of revision as ‘fixing’ a piece or making it ‘better’ (because that’s way too nebulous, anyway), but rather re-imagining.

And, it’s true, some of the poems I wrote in April will end up being throwaways, in that I won’t revise them, or publish them. Perhaps bits of some of them will end up in other poems or pieces in the future, perhaps not. And that’s okay, too. It can feel like a waste of time to write something that you don’t do anything with, but I don’t think it’s ever a waste of time to write. On that note, I’ll leave you with a quote from Erin Bow:

No writing is wasted. Did you know that sourdough from San Francisco is leavened partly by a bacteria called lactobacillus sanfrancisensis? It is native to the soil there, and does not do well elsewhere. But any kitchen can become an ecosystem. If you bake a lot, your kitchen will become a happy home to wild yeasts, and all your bread will taste better. Even a failed loaf is not wasted. Likewise, cheese makers wash the dairy floor with whey. Tomato gardeners compost with rotten tomatoes. No writing is wasted: the words you can’t put in your book can wash the floor, live in the soil, lurk around in the air. They will make the next words better.

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Endnotes:

• Although I have written a lot about writer’s block in this series, one thing I will not ever do is use AI to get past it. And I don’t want my writing training AI, either. If you feel the same way, and also publish on Substack, you can block AI from using your publication to train data models. (Thanks to

  ocean capewell
  for the heads up.)

• Though the poems I wrote in April are no longer available to read, my fundraising page will remain up indefinitely. Please consider donating (check out the cool perks!) so Tupelo Press can keep the 30/30 program going.

• I finally finished the mini-zines for April & May, and those will be going out to subscribers soon, along with the perks for those who have already donated to the fundraiser.

• To celebrate the fifth anniversary of their publication, I recently made the .pdf versions of my chapbooks forget the fuck away from me and The Girl With the Most Cake: Poems About Courtney Love available for pay-what-you-want, starting at $0. I’ve also made digital versions of the annotations for each chapbook, and they’re free to download. (You can find ftafm’s here and TGWTMC’s here.)

• If you missed the online open mic feature I did in April, you can watch it here. (I read several of my 30/30 poems, as well as some older work.)

• In other recent news: my poem “Name Me, River” was published in Stone Circle Review, an audio version of my poem “Ode to Awesome” appears on Hello America’s 2024 Spring Collection, and my poem “Deathrock for Dirty Ruby” appears in Paper & Ink #18 (just released today!).