The Metaphysics of First Drafts
Creative approach vs. creative intention, implicit limitations, and poetics as encryption and quantum computing
The first method I found that allowed me a relatively consistent and fruitful writing practice for drafting poems was to always be capturing random blurts and out-of-context thoughts as lines in my Notes App and letting them pile up for months (years, for some lines), but dipping in pretty regularly to grab 10-15 lines that seemed to go together, throw them in a doc and shuffle them around without much focus on rhythm or order—mostly focusing on each line individually and on creating a general shape.
My first drafts have lines that are rearranged but basically not edited at all, with the exception of changing the tense of a verb to agree grammatically with a line I wanted below it, adding or removing a “that” or “the” here and there, etc. Once I have a first draft assembled, I knowingly slap a bad or imprecise title on it and date it. If I have lines I want to cut entirely, I’ll paste them at the very very bottom of the same doc (since they’re still loosely related to the poem and in case I change my mind later), also making sure I still have them in my Notes App as well (in case I find the lines aren’t actually related, and so they can mix with the other fragments in there, to maybe be used in a different poem).
After letting a draft rest for a while to get some distance, I’ll move into editing while trying to be very intentional about not “losing recipes” (particularly when working digitally, which I am basically always doing). To do this, I open the draft doc, select and copy the whole draft, add a page break below it, and paste it in again, giving it a new date. I’ll edit that version freely while keeping the version before it entirely intact, rinsing and repeating every time I edit the poem and noting the date each time.
When the time came to show work, I would usually send version 2 or 3 of a poem, but I would rarely send a true first draft to workshop—but in 2025, I’ve been thinking about how this approach might unconsciously be shaping my output, and how I might change it. While I think continuously capturing lines in a notes app as they come to you is a great practice for anyone in basically any context, I also think the cadence I have of 80-90% accumulation to 10-20% filtration is starting to plateau, leading to diminishing returns.
There are pros and cons to this way of recording blurts, with some of the pros mentioned above. There are also some neutral features of this method: it tends to yield poems (or speakers/personae in poems) that have a kind of mosaic quality, where each line can be very punchy and distinct. Another is that it can lead the writer to a very clear picture of their own inner world over a relatively long expanse of time, and the longer they do this 80-20 method, the more they get a sense of their own fascinations and fixations, their general emotional baseline, and so on. It’s a very grounded way of putting poems together (also neutral).
There are cons, though. A potentially big one is that it results in holding onto—clinging to, you could say—thoughts that are actually very old, which can lead to circularity and recursion and feel stifling or inauthentic. Another is that this method will inherently slow the pace at which the things you put into the world can evolve. In many different creative practices, it’s often good to slow down so you can pay more and closer attention to things, but it works a lot better for things you and others can observe externally rather than things that happen internally and are harder to tease apart.
This relates to a meta-practice I have in all of this, which is to not think of the things I write down as “my” thoughts necessarily, and to let myself be a little woo-woo about about how I think of them.1 We often think of each of our thoughts as discrete and originating from our own brain, and we often feel a sense of ownership or responsibility for the quality or tone of each one, which is an extremely “classical” view. Looking at it more closely, the way thinking (my thinking, anyway) often works is that a random thought will seem to “pop in” from somewhere, about which we’ll have a string of related or additional thoughts in quick succession. This implies that these might be two distinct kinds of thought—the first one random and thus somehow outside our usual matrix of self, and those that follow in reaction (which are more “our own”). These primary thoughts are mixed in with our own secondary and reactionary thoughts—our own presuppositions and judgments—and this process of thinking happens so fast and is so subtle that it’s understandably hard to distinguish between the two.
My thinking on this is influenced by poet Ariana Reines’ approach to language and “channeling”, whose ideas I’ll try to paraphrase and synthesize somewhat here (two interviews here to get the original flavor). Essentially, the world is made of waves of energy on spectra measured in frequencies. The main ones we tend to care about in writing are visible and invisible light (electromagnetic waves2), sound (mechanical waves), and the nature of matter (not typically thought of as made of “matter waves”, though quantum physicists do conceptualize it this way). Classical physics says that electromagnetics and sound are both basically waves and that matter is basically particles—whereas in quantum physics, sound, light, and matter all behave as both particles and waves, depending on how/when they are observed.
Regardless (and for my purposes, most importantly), all of the above are material media that information must pass through in order for us to absorb it. Drawing more on Reines’ view (and getting more quantum, here), even the most scientific picture of reality3 remains incomplete, even if we should not deny it entirely. This is partly a result of not knowing everything there is to know, but also partly because humans can only perceive a very thin slice of the electromagnetic spectrum—the same spectrum and medium through which thought must pass.4 Given that our perceptive abilities can’t accurately capture or model how these energetic spectra work in their entirety, we can’t necessarily say with 100% confidence that we “think” our original thoughts. It may be more accurate to say that we receive some of them before contributing to them ourselves—in which case, where/what/who are we receiving them from? Have any of them been sent to us? Do any of them have a specific or discrete sender? Are the senders conscious or unconscious? Discrete beings or continuous fields of energy?5
Your answers are as good as mine—but to get back on topic:
Now that I have a more regular and prolific writing practice, I’m thinking of adjusting my method for creating first drafts by:
Being way more disciplined about not editing inside my Notes App at all.
Creating my true first draft on paper by transferring things whole from Notes App.
Toying with how I edit that physical first draft (maybe editing it and rewriting it once on paper before moving that version into a digital doc).
Relatedly, I’m also going to push myself to be more disciplined about the pace of accumulation vs. filtration. Once I capture a thought, I may slow down in that moment to try and capture a stream of “original” thoughts that I’ll keep grouped together without separating. I’m also going to try to adjust how “raw” the average draft I send to workshop is, both to up the stakes of intimacy/vulnerability and to get even more objective distance from the thoughts I receive (doubling down on the idea that these are only “my thoughts” in a very loose sense). My intention of doing all of this is to increase the chances that I open my creative practice to the influences of greater forces that may be outside of my own conscious control.
However procedural or granular this all may seem, I think it’s important to reflect on how the how is invisibly affecting the what as you get more creative experience, especially if your practice is starting to feel limiting or unsatisfying. Just like thinking, we tend to imagine that we are using our creativity when we are being creative, but it may be more accurate to say that the force of creativity is using us. To get woo-woo again for a second, it reminds me of the new-age idea that we are “creators of our own reality” in both the mental and the physical sense simultaneously. The way a lot of online influencers tend to put it gets capitalistic or egotistical—that we can “manifest” wealth, better sex, or whatever else—but it’s a good jumping off point for the the better thought that we are “co-creators of reality”, both with one another and with “God” or “the universal mind” or however you choose to conceptualize all the real and potential information and material in the universe.
For all the deconstruction of physical and mental reality above, I find it much harder to account for how all the intricacies of emotional and spiritual reality work, which is deeply alchemical work that poetry seems to be uniquely good at accomplishing. Poetic techniques can synthesize so many different levels of existence at once, partly by having a much more infinite set6 of stylistic tools and techniques at hand to do so than certain other forms of writing. As a method or genre of writing, poetry feels more and more attractive and untouchable as AI inevitably cannibalizes and reduces other forms. There is not a huge market for poetry, so there is less demand to reduce it or extract value from it. Poetry also has a far more amorphous canon of texts, with fewer, incomplete corpuses for algorithms to scrape. As a result, it will likely be a much more anti-fragile method of receiving original insight in the future, one that will be harder to replace or force into extinction. In other words: we may be arriving at a tipping point where a lot of poetry’s so-called weaknesses (within a techno-capitalist economy) reveal themselves as built-in, self-preservational strengths.
As co-creators who are interested in preserving our reflections on humanity in-and-of-itself, poetry will likely be one of the securest ways to “download” and store insights and information in a way that can still be shared safely online with others—and without significantly empowering or contributing to the corruption of language by whatever powers-that-may-be.7
To draw a parallel: as soon as blockchain technology emerged as a cybersecurity and infotech breakthrough, quantum computing rolled out alongside it to crack it open again. Meanwhile, there are poems thousands of years old read by millions of people that still feel like they have not fully been “cracked.” But my whole poetry-as-spiritual-cryptography metaphor remains a little incomplete. Yes, poems are relatively safe repositories for humanity’s spiritual discoveries and insights—but the same poems are also quantum computers in themselves when we read them. They are portals that can lead us deeper into ourselves, into others, and into god-knows-where. Where each one takes us when we step into it depends entirely on our individual humanity: our time, our place, and our own experience in all of its relative, random infinity.
Also worth saying that taking extreme, non-discerning ownership of one’s thoughts and potentially recriminating over them is, at best, not the most creatively productive way of processing them; at worst, it can be oblivious, irresponsible, and potentially dangerous. It seems reasonable to say that we can (and maybe should) allow ourselves to receive our thoughts without judgment and then decide what we do with those thoughts, rather than shooting ourselves first and asking questions later.
Radio waves, microwaves, visible and invisible light, etc.
That matter, light, and sound are all waves bouncing off one another; matter is essentially and sub-atomically “the same”; separation is an illusion in a world that is actually a giant soup of atoms, energy, radiation, etc.
Just 0.0035%! We can probably assume that’s a generous figure, as it’s complicated by the fact that individually, each person has different perceptive and sensory capabilities and limitations—some people are synesthetic while most aren’t, for example.
If we say “yes” to a few of these postulates, we can presume that at least some sender(s) are in some sense conscious or intelligent. We can further assume that they are “non-human”, for lack of a better word—whether we believe in human extrasensory abilities or not, we probably agree that if humans can or do have these abilities, they have some fairly strict limitations.
Worth highlighting: infinity does not equal any other infinity, as not all infinities are the same size.
If you tell AI to write a poem like Robert Frost, it only has so many Robert Frost poems to digest and distill to create a new one. It has a limited corpus from which to create a simulation of Frost, so it will always come in at a lower and lower “resolution” over time (because Frost is dead; there are no more Frost poems coming).