What's your style?

[Cadaverous Pallor]

Psst. It's "stream of consciousness", not conscience.

Originally Posted by Ghoulish Delight

Sometimes I write very structured, such as Idle Hands. In that case, I edited heavily through the whole process to get the rhyming scheme to work.
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More often, I go for more prose-style with little to no structure. In those cases, I do a lot less editing while initially composing it, though I stop short of pure stream of conscience, struggling for better wording on some lines. And then I can't leave it alone. Once I'm done, I go back and edit for word choice, tweak the meter, and clean up puncuation, which I invariable use completely inconsistently the first time through.

This, I think, is Poetry Writing Standard Procedure. Unless you're someone that ALWAYS writes in one exact style, switching things up means that when you do a less structured work you have to go back and fix punctuation/line breaks/capitalization/etc. High structure means you don't continue unless the line you just wrote fits in.

Many times I'll write a poem just because I'll get a line in my head and I'll build a poem around that. Building up the rest of it to match the one idea is interesting to me. Sometimes the one line stands out too much, sometimes I want it to stand out, sometimes I can actually bury it in a poem with lines of equal power and no one would know which was the original. The latter can be the most rewarding. It's as if I created my own "writing assignment" and did well on it.

So for me, it's rare, if not never, that anyone sees an untouched piece exactly as I initially wrote it. I find that interesting.

Heh, I know for you this is a big deal (I remember that discussion-turned-argument after watching Dead Poets Society) but for me, showing someone an untouched piece is like watching an unedited movie or wearing a dress without a hem.