Artists are always coming up with little tricks to generate or revise our work. Some artists say their best work is done when they first wake up, or as they’re falling asleep. I had a friend who exclusively wrote in public spaces because they claimed it felt like less pressure than if they were in their studio apartment alone staring at a flashing cursor. To all these tricks, I say, “Whatever works!”
My partner, also an artist, and I lovingly call these tricks “first-person/third-person” for when you (first person) transmute your relationship to the work such that it seems like it is made by someone else (third person). It’s so much easier to write or revise the poem, painting, or song when it wasn’t you that created it, it was that groggy person who writes as they fall asleep.
Below is a list of first-person/third-person tricks for your perusal:
- Pretend you’re someone else viewing your art.
- Listen/read/view your art peripherally. Do some busy work while you passively engage with your art (cook dinner while you listen to your song, read your writing while you’re answering emails, look at your painting while you fold laundry).
- Cut up and rearrange! Move things around.
- Take your art out on a date. Don’t bring anything else but your poem to the coffee shop, to dinner, to the park, and see if you’re still in love.
- Set a time limit. Revise for only 15 minutes, 10 minutes, or 5 minutes a day. See what time interval feels best and do this every day for a week or two.
- Does this poem need an anchor to bring it back down to real life, or does it need some wings to soar?
- Revise your poem as your five-year-old self would revise it.
- Tell a joke with your poem.
- Tell a story.
- Give advice with your poem.
- Confess something you’ve always wanted to confess inside the poem.
- Change a serious poem into a joke, change a joke into a poem of great weight and gravitas.
- Make your poem meaningless.
- Make your poem important.
- Blend the two.
- Put your poems on the wall and revise them only while you’re standing up.
- Ask someone you look up to read your poem out loud to you.
- Ask your enemy to read your poem out loud to you (or imagine them reading it if you despise them too much to ask).
- Send different versions to a friend or sweetheart via email or snail mail and see which one felt the best to send.
- If your poem were a room, would you stay? Revise according to the answer you want.
- Revise as if you despise this poem.
- Revise as if you think this might be your best poem yet.
- Let the poem breathe. Let it go on vacation. Come back to it when it has returned from its voyage.
- Think of your art as having agency outside of you the author:
- Think of your art like a river—where does it flow free and where do you have boulders blocking the way?
- If you could take your art out to lunch, what personality would your art have? What would your art talk about?
- What personality/character would your art be at a party? How can you let this poem be more itself?
- What would your art say your art is usually about?
- What kind of art would your art be into? Revise your art as if your art is the art critic reviewing it.
Sophie Daws (she/her) is a poet, performer and musician born and raised in Tucson, Arizona. Sophie's creative work is often conceptual and concerned with process, death/destruction, self-improvement, and self-effacement. She performs live in Tucson as a front woman, in a noise/improvisational duo, and as a poet. She believes building community is an act of resistance and cultivates mutual aid and trust in her reading series Last Night a Poet Saved My Life and in her work as a teaching artist in K-12 schools across Tucson.