Sometimes I will ‘finish’ a poem, but I won’t be totally satisfied with the result. Something feels off. Incomplete. Forced. Contrived. Or just not ‘me’. When this happens, I sleep on it – literally. I will save the poem and return to it the next day and take another go at it…

There is a concept in writers circles known as ‘voice’. This is an almost ethereal, hard to pin down sound that established writers seem to have. Pick a random paragraph from one of the greats and you can just tell that they wrote it without ever knowing it was from them. Perhaps their poetry all has as similar feel, or maybe their pieces have a consistent style. You know how each song from your favourite musician is unique but somehow still sounds like them in a way that you cannot quite explain, yet you nonetheless know when another artist is desperately trying, and failing, to emulate it?…

Good writing involves two versions of yourself working on the one piece of work: Artist-You and Editor-You. These two versions of you, must work alone as it is almost impossible to write and edit at the same time.

Firstly, Artist-You gets into the zone, isolates themselves from the world, drinks copious amounts of coffee, does a five-minute headstand, prays to the gods, then does the myriad of other things they feel is necessary for them to get the words going goodly. They write until spent, then they put the piece aside and write something else.…