Notes on writing process

I'm happy to report that I've now finished a clean draft of CWKB Book XIII, and I'm forging ahead into XIV.

sarantine sent an ask on cohost about how much I think about the poem as something heard:

considering its inspirations, is what it might sound like read aloud something in your head at all when writing CWKB?

Here's how I answered.

How things'll sound certainly kicks around in my head while I'm writing, though not always at a conscious level!

For context, it might help to know the rough stages through which most of the material goes. And for context to that context, it's probably worth knowing that my hands don't work especially well, and cope better with writing by hand than with sustained typing. (I also wrote this post by dictation.)

1. I write first drafts by hand in a notebook, mostly at home and when I'm on the bus.
2. I dictate those drafts from the notebook into a text editor.
3. I copy-paste the new material into the base Word file that I treat as the poem's definitive form.
4. When a book nears completion, I print it out and edit it on paper.
5. Before a book is released, I print it out again, and read it through aloud, and make more edits.
6. When a book is released, I read it aloud on Twitch.

So, some parts of that process deliberately engage with how things sound aloud. Those're habits of editing that I picked up long ago in my professional work: I have to publish articles and books, and I've learned that reading out loud offers one of the best ways to comb through my writing for some (but not all) kinds of error.

In the time periods that interest me most, people heard poetry much more than they saw it. More broadly than that, even, I have a sneaking suspicion that spoken language is far more fundamental than writing. We grafted the decidedly odd technology of writing only recently on top of the much older basis of speech.

And of course I try to write to please the ear because I don't want to embarrass myself too much on Twitch!

But also, less consciously, I think the forms I've chosen also drive attention to hearing. Composing the alliterative-verse passages, for instance, has made me listen harder and harder to myself, because it's the only way to get confident about which syllables will alliterate: just the other day, spoken language had to remind me that while triumph alliterates on tr, triumphant alliterates on vowels.

As for the rest of it, meanwhile, attempting verse with a regular beat pattern and syllable count has been an education in which words in my own idiolect are syllable-flexible, slurring between different counts, and in which words have surprising and/or useful natural stress patterns.