“I like that my passions change. If nothing else, it gives me more to write about.”

“Everyone has heard the expression, ‘Give a man a fish, he eats for a day; teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime.’ If you don’t learn to critique, you will always be dependent on others to help you instead of being able to do it by yourself.”

“Art changes how we view the surface of the world to reveal truth or beauty—or both—underneath.”

September 28, 2008

`SparrowSong joined deviantART in August 2004 and has steadily become one of the lit community’s most respected members. I don’t say that merely because she is a senior, or because she is one of my favourite poets (which she is), but because her writing is beautifully crafted and always a joy to read. Moreover, she is an excellent critic, and in February, judged the Lit Crit Contest along with *diamondie. You can also find her at the literature forum, where she is active participant in the discussions.

In this interview, she talks about her writing process in detail and offers advice about how to improve your critique skills. I have learnt much from `SparrowSong over the past few years and I always look forward to her opinion. I hope you will find her answers to my questions as insightful as I do.



^lovetodeviate: How long have you been writing and how have you grown as a writer?

`SparrowSong: I count my starting point at about March 2005 because that was when I started to look outside myself for subject matter. Before that, I didn’t take writing very seriously, and I wrote a lot of clichéd rhymed-and-metered poems about my feelings. In order to break free of that, I would set challenges for myself, involving subject matter and/or literary devices or forms. Nowadays, I write predominantly free verse, with the occasional rhyming piece to keep up practice, and I don’t often write directly about my own life.

LTD: Former US Poet Laureate, Ted Kooser, used to say that a poem needs to be put away in drawers for a few years until the writer is able to approach it like a stranger. Only then will s/he be able to revise the poem properly. Is this something you ascribe to as well? How would you describe your writing process from start to finish?

SS: I do think some time needs to pass in order to properly revise a piece, but when I go through old notebooks from years past, I find I have little interest in improving the pieces. Part of this is because most of them are horrible beyond repair, but part of this is because what inspired me to write back then isn’t often the same thing as what is inspiring me now, and so I have no real motivation to correct the poems; the idea or image or emotion which excited me then is dulled after a couple years. Instead, when I come by a years-old poem, I glean any decent ideas or imagery from the old pieces to save in my Poem Ideas folder and leave the original pieces alone. Or shred them, depending on how bad they are.

My writing process varies from poem to poem, everything from planning out the story of a poem in my head before trying to fit it into words, to pouring out my heart, to staring at the screen until I get the germ of an idea and winging it, to starting with a word or phrase and then tinkering with the piece for weeks at a time. One thing that always remains constant, no matter what the original process, is revision. Revision is especially important when writing about emotional events, because while emotion may be natural, poetry is not. Certainly there can—and should—be an organic element to it, but poetry needs to demonstrate human composition to be art. Art is a human construct; art is artifice. That doesn’t mean that the core messages or ideas or emotions in art are less true than in reality, only that art is refined and fictionalized on the surface in order to convey those core ideas and emotions more effectively and deeply. If the purpose of art was to capture everything with perfect realism, then photography would have meant the death of painting, but it didn’t and it won’t. Art changes how we view the surface of the world to reveal truth or beauty—or both—underneath.

LTD: Looking through your Daily Deviations, I realised that you are a very versatile writer. The Tygger is a hilarious parody of William Blake’s The Tyger; Mistmaker is an ekphrastic poem that evokes the relationship of a father and his child; Silvered Strokes, Golden Field demonstrates excellent metrical skill and an eye for detail in nature. From where do you get your material? Does poetry come to you like “leaves to a tree” (Keats) or is there some hard work involved?

SS: I get material from everywhere: mythology, art, science, literary theory, nature, what I see in my day to day life, a phrase I heard that day, etc. Two of the pieces you mention were sparked by replies in the literature forum here on dA. Anything can be a poem, though whether or not it should be is up to the poet’s discretion. Most of what I write does have some autobiographical element, whether an underlying idea, emotion, or attitude somewhere in the piece, and my own memories and experiences do make it into poems.

I’d love it if poetry came more easily; it’s not always a struggle, but there’s usually an amount of tussling involved. Most of the structured pieces I’ve written have been easier and felt more natural to write than the unstructured pieces, because having some sort of form gives me confidence about line breaks and diction. You can tell when a structured poem fits together well, whereas it’s more difficult to pare down your options when you have unlimited choices. That doesn’t mean all my structured pieces were easy to write; Silvered Strokes, Golden Field took a month and a half of planning and drafting. I was writing almost every day, making list after list of potential rhyming words, and erased phrases so often my drafts have holes in them.

Whether a piece is easy to write or difficult, I’m a big fan of revision, so an amount of hard work goes into each poem. Certain poems require more than others, but all require some.

Special guest question: Do you have any writing-related quirks or superstitions? – Neha*

SS: When writing in notebooks, I always leave the first page blank, and rarely write on the backside of pages. I try to keep lines in a stanza about the same length; I don’t like it when words seem ‘stranded’ to the right of the main body of lines. I like to keep subjects separate and so I never wrote poems in my math or science notebooks. I don’t ever use ampersands or abbreviate ‘with’ or ‘without’ to w/ or w/o. If I mistype a word and get one letter wrong, I retype the whole thing instead of correcting the one letter. I try not to end pieces with the letter ‘s.’ I don’t writing out quotations.

LTD: Who would you say are your influences?

SS: I tend to like individual poems more than the works of any one writer, so it’s hard to say. I’m probably most influenced by writers on dA, because they’re the ones that deliver their writings to my message center every day.

Though not conscious influences, I suspect nursery rhymes and Dr. Seuss have forever made their impression, whether positive or negative, on my senses of rhythm, rhyme, and meter. Robert Frost was one of my first loves, though I’ve grown away from him, and I always find something inspiring in Cummings. Lately, I’ve been reading some Anglo-Saxon poems (in translation to modern English), and a lot by Robert Pack from twenty-five years ago. Pack’s poetry from that time isn’t to my taste, but he does a lot of experimenting, and I enjoy reading experiments. He has ideas about the use of repetition that I wouldn’t have thought of myself.

I don’t write much prose, but I do try to keep Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory** in mind when I do.

LTD: Do you have a favourite prose piece online that we can read? Tell us about it and how it came to be.

SS: Dust is probably my favorite so far. I wrote it after I read an environmental article online. Even though I knew the author was scaremongering and the earth is probably not going to be an uninhabitable wasteland in twenty years, it still disturbed me for several hours. Finally, to get rid of my unease, I sat down and typed out what I thought would be a blurb, or two paragraphs at most. A couple hours later, I had written Dust. I still have revision to do, but it’s the longest piece of prose I’ve written and the one that tells the best story.



LTD: You are known for your critiquing skills on deviantART. Can you tell us why you think it important to critique?

SS: I have so many reasons! Here are a few:

Everyone has heard the expression, ‘Give a man a fish, he eats for a day; teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime.’ If you don’t learn to critique, you will always be dependent on others to help you instead of being able to do it by yourself. You will not have the self-sufficiency necessary to revise your own work if you can’t critique the works of others.

If you get two conflicting critiques, one that says a line is fantastic and the other that says the same line is horrible, you need to be able to re-evaluate your own piece and decide which critique is the most valid for the piece.

When you try to get published, publishers won’t pick a piece out of the hundreds or thousands of submissions they receive and say, “This will be great once we get our editors to shape it up.” Publishers want a piece that they can tell has already been polished, and you can’t count on others to help you, especially if you’re not in the habit of helping others.

Critiquing also helps make you a more critical reader (which, again, makes you a better writer). Once you start picking out patterns out of sound, symbols, and figurative language in writing, it becomes much easier to do the same with published literature. Once you can figure out how one of the ‘masters’ achieves an effect, you can apply that same technique to your own writing. As an added bonus, writing that you think is difficult will become much easier to read.

You also get the joy of actively teaching yourself instead of passively being critiqued and waiting around for help. On one of my early critique attempts, I remember picking out the patterns of assonance and consonance in a piece involving trains, and as I repeated the poem aloud listening for the sounds, I suddenly realized why the poet had arranged the sounds the way he had—I could hear the rhythm of the train in the rhythm of the piece! I had known the definitions of assonance and consonance, but I had never understood that they could work like that until that moment, and I felt like dancing around the room because I had figured this out for myself. That’s what critiquing does—it helps you figure out the hows and whys of a piece. It teaches you to think like a writer.

In short, critiquing is much more helpful than receiving critique. If you want to be a good writer, it is much better to give than to receive.

LTD: What skills do you need to be a good critic? I’m sure many would like to learn a few tips on critiquing.

SS: The only skills you need to be a good critic are patience, carefulness, and a bit of logic and knowledge, all of which can be learned or developed.

A lot of people tell me they don’t know how to critique, and that’s nonsense, an excuse for laziness. We critique on a daily, even hourly, basis. When you say that you liked Casablanca because the acting is perfect and the story is told so well, you’re making a critical statement about the movie, saying that you liked the movie and why you liked it. When you say you didn’t like dinner because the vegetables were overcooked, you’re making a critical evaluation of the dinner, saying dinner was bad and why you didn’t care for it. Just as you don’t need to be an expert film critic to be critical about a movie, and you don’t need to be a gourmet to be critical about food, you don’t need to be an expert literary critic to leave a critique on dA.

When I critique, I read the piece a few times, and if it’s a poem, I read it out loud and pay attention to sounds and how easy or difficult it is to say. I try to figure out what the main plotline is if it’s a story, or what the main idea or narrative is if it’s a poem, and any themes or symbols I see. If these are unclear, I write down that they’re unclear and if that works for or against the story. Then I go through and look at individual phrases. If they help the piece, I write down that they work and why, and if they don’t, I write down that they don’t work and why. Then I summarize what I’ve said, highlighting the main points. If I miss something, I miss something. A critique doesn’t have to be perfect. I also try to be polite or at least civil, and I try to make sure that the first and last things I say about the piece are positive ones. If I can’t say something nice about the piece, I don’t critique it at all.

One of the things that helped me when starting out was to read pieces that had been critiqued by people much better at it than I was, and then decide if I agreed with the comments the piece had received. This gave me ideas of what I could look for in my own critiques, ideas on how to organize my own critiques, and introduced me to new perspectives.

Learning to critique does take practice, but don’t be too afraid of what the writer will think—they’re asking for critique, after all, so you have every right to give it to them (unless they have critique discouraged). A critique from someone starting out is as valuable and may be as valid as a critique from an experienced critiquer, and length isn’t as important as quality.



LTD: You have a strong and positive presence at the lit forums. Do you find this culture of discussion and/or argument beneficial to the writer?

SS: I definitely find discussion or argument beneficial on the forums, as long as it doesn’t devolve into insults. Some German and Russian philosophy believes that you don’t fully understand an idea until you struggle with it, and discussion on the forums provides that struggle. Repeating an idea you heard in an English class or read in a book is easy, but having to defend that idea requires you to develop a deeper understanding.

‘What is good writing’ is a very important question to writers, but one which isn’t often discussed in English classes, at least not in the several dozen that I took. I developed ideas on literature in the writers’ forum here, and sometimes I got my tail kicked and sometimes I ‘won,’ but both ways I learned a lot, even if I didn’t agree with the other person in the end or they didn’t agree with me. Agreement doesn’t matter, but learning does.

I’m also much more confident discussing literature in the real world because I’ve spent so much time arguing about it online. I know that I can debate people without insulting them, and that some of my opinions have strong enough foundations to survive scrutiny by intelligent people, and I couldn’t have developed that confidence if I hadn’t taken part in debate. Challenging others and being challenged is daunting, but it’s worth the risk.

LTD: Who do you read on dA?

SS: That’s not a short answer. I watch 120 people, read every poem that comes through my inbox, and try to at least skim the prose. I don’t mean to slight anyone by not mentioning them, so I’m going to toss out a few names of people whose writing makes me think about writing.

`PoeticWar ~panika *salshep ^lovetodeviate (not trying to kiss up; it’s true) *tightwhitepants and back when they posted, !inziladun =tearstone and *Ryandake.



Special guest question: “What are your professional plans for the future, especially with regard to becoming a professional critic and/or a higher-education professor?” – `GeneratingHype

SS: I don’t have professional plans at the moment.

To be a critic I would need better qualifications or experience, and to be a professor I’d need to go to grad school, which is out of the question at the moment, and be a better public speaker. I wouldn’t mind doing either, but I feel the odds are against me both ways.

Special guest question: “What is your passion?” – `GeneratingHype

SS: I don’t have a singular passion. As a child, my interests changed every few weeks, from craft projects to astronomy to animals to crafts to writing, and that hasn’t changed much. I’ll write poetry for awhile, then spend a week or two learning how to crochet, then walk around taking pictures for a few weeks, and so on. I do have a few overarching interests, which I suspect tie into a vague aesthetic: a love of light and color theory, of harmony and balance, of patterns, of puzzles, of space and boundaries, of movement, of certain aspects of nature. I also love travel (and everything that goes with it except unpacking), museums, books, reading, bits of science, and of course the arts. Identifying myself as a writer on dA was strange at first, because I’d always been a jill of all trades and mistress of none. Admittedly, I’m better at writing than I am at most things.

I like that my passions change. If nothing else, it gives me more to write about.

_{*Neha does not have a dA account, but wanted to ask a question all the same.
** In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway outlined his "theory of omission" or "iceberg principle." He states: "If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of the iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. The writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing." Source: [link]}

Thank you for being part of my interview series! Good luck with all that you plan to do.

Helpful links

SparrowSong’s deviantART gallery
What makes critique good by *diamondie and `SparrowSong

Thank you

I’d like to thank the following people for contributing questions to my interviews so far: *apocathary, *batousaijin, *BerylAlexandros, =Deep-Emerald, `dudewithbraces, `GeneratingHype and Neha.

Up next

In October I will be interviewing ~wordworks, so if you have any questions for her, please send them to me in a note. Which guest questions get asked is up to me, but for the most part, I welcome any sort of question pertaining to the interviewee’s writing and lit-related activities.

Cheers all!

— ^lovetodeviate