What's your style?

[Ghoulish Delight]

So how do you all write poetry? Are you a steam of conscience type? Highly structured? Do you have an idea in mind when you sit down? Do you prefer structure or no? Do you edit a lot, a little, or not at all?

I definitely have to have an idea, some subject I'm thinking about. I can't just sit down and start writing. 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. I think the first two lines were the only ones that remained in tact for more than a fleeting moment.

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.

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. Not interesting enough to change it, because I'm never happy until I've sufficiently tweaked it. Of course, contrast this to my "normal" posts where I usually just hit submit and end up proof reading it while the page is loading again