The Never-Finished Manuscript

Is all of that effort improving your poetry manuscript—or is it just churn?

Photo by Srinivas JD on Unsplash

Today I wanted to address a challenge so many of us poets struggle with: How to know when a manuscript is “done.” After years of writing poems and building out a book, we wonder: Should I keep going on this or move on to the next work? Keep adding and subtracting poems or start a new manuscript altogether? 

For the record, I agree with Ocean Vuong: “It’s never done. If I had a chance now with every book I wrote, every page would be a little different.” So what’s wrong with a project that is continually evolving? Nothing, except that too often we are not evolving the work—we’re simply stuck in a psychic Sisyphean struggle to make the work better.

The Problem with Iteration

Iteration is everything. We must iterate. (If you haven’t spent more than a few years on a manuscript, then the following might not apply.) But if you’ve been rearranging and revising the same manuscript for many years, iteration may be masking a counterproductive perfectionist mindset. Allowing yourself to stop revising and write in a new direction might be best. 

We tend to live in a linear fallacy, thinking that our work progresses from one stage to the next, from one project to the next. It does not. Writing is anything but linear. So we don’t have to finish one thing before moving on to the next. This might sound obvious, but it seems poets have a hard time thinking of anything but the one perfect manuscript. I know I have.

Consider this: Writers are natural “polymaths” as Victoria Chang says in this recent interview. We write because we’re curious. And if we let curiosity drive our work, we will naturally explore many topics in search of new territory. The inner perfectionist blocks that. 

We can’t all be poet Cyrus Cassells, who completed three books over one summer, but it’s freeing to let go of expecting one project and one project only to succeed. The most successful fiction and nonfiction writers I know are always working on multiple obsessions, projects, ideas—multiple books. Although they’re naturally disappointed when a manuscript doesn’t work out, they shift focus to another idea or project.

Signs You’re Ready to Start Fresh

1. You’re starting to resent the work. You don’t want to do it anymore. It feels unrewarding. The focus has shifted too far from, “What do I think of this work?” to “What will others think of this?” You’ve stopped doing the work for yourself and are only doing it for an imaginary editor or contest judge.

2. You are losing touch with the circumstances/the mindset/the person you were that generated the poems. The urgency you once felt around the language, images, ideas, forms, etc. is gone.  

3. You’re writing new material that excites you, that is worlds away in content or form from the majority of work in your manuscript.

4. You’re satisfied with how enough of the work is being received in the world—by your readers, mentors, editors, etc.

5. The manuscript feels whole. Even though you could make changes, you’re satisfied with the effort you’ve put into the poems. I don’t know how to explain “whole” except that it’s how you feel when you read completed work by others, so I think we can begin to recognize it in our own.  

But Sometimes Long Iteration Works 

I took ten years to write my first book. I was working full time and raising young kids during those years, too. I kept producing new work, adding and subtracting poems from “the book.” The numerous iterations had different titles, different structures, different poems, and put me in line as a finalist for a number of poetry book prizes. 

Eventually I wrote myself into thematic poems that became the heart of the book that was published. And I knew it was the final form; it was cohesive. If not “perfect”—never perfect!—at least the book felt whole. And I’m still fairly pleased with its final iteration.

Have you moved on from a manuscript? Or are you embracing iteration?