I always find the drafting process to be sort of like a rollercoaster. I start with a very specific idea of what I want the poem to look like, and by the end I get something wildly different. For this particular poem, I had been listening to Taylor Swift prior to sitting down to start it. So, before I had even began writing, I had an idea of the scene I wanted to set. Fall is my favorite season, so I wanted to write something that reminded me of that. I liked that the timeframe of this assignment pretty much required us to revise this poem every day. In the beginning of the drafting process, the changes were bigger and much more noticeable. From the first draft to the third, I had completely changed the entire second half of the poem. The later drafting stages had more subtle changes, such as changes in a word or phrase that changed the tone of the poem. From day three to day four, I made the change from “I remember” to “I can almost remember,” which I felt changed the meaning of the poem in a big way despite it being a small edit.
I found the bookmaking part of this process almost harder than writing the poem itself. I am not a particularly creative person, so the task of illustrating the front covers seemed daunting. Words are much easier to make mean something. I went with something that was simple and that I couldn’t mess up too terribly. The poem is about a sweater from a former lover, so I thought it would be interesting if I made the front and back covers resemble the front and back of a knit sweater. I used pencil to trace the design in pencil first and then outlined it in black pen because pens and mechanical pencils are the only tool I have. For the inside of the book, I thought it would be interesting to make a sort of map of the changes I’ve made as the drafts progressed. On the first page, I wrote the original draft in purple pen. For the drafts after, any changes I made that differed from the original were written in red pen. The idea was that by the end of the book, the final draft would reflect how much was kept from the original draft and how much had changed along the way.
