Using Your Creative Spine

I wrote in July about finding the poem’s skeleton—the bones that shape its movement across the page. I’m revising some longer projects this month and I’m finding it useful to focus on one part of the skeleton in particular: the spine.

This is a concept I’ve borrowed from Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit (my all-time favorite book about creativity!) and played with in lots of different contexts. She puts it this way:

“The spine is the statement you make to yourself outlining your intentions for the work. You intend to tell this story. You intend to explore this theme. You intend to employ this structure. The audience may infer it or not. But if you stick to your spine, the piece will work.”

Just like a skeletal spine, the spine of a creative project has to be strong enough to carry the weight of the work and hold it. And it has to connect the project’s body (its structure and movements) and its brain (its ideas). Ideally, the spine is flexible enough to stretch and twist in different directions while still maintaining its integrity.

I can use the spine to revise a single poem by asking myself: what’s the central tension here? where are signals running in opposite directions? Once I find the spine, I can tune the poem to it by trimming lines that don’t connect to the spine or refining word choice to make the spine more visible to the reader.

I can also scale up the concept of spine to work with a longer project. Each poem in a manuscript is a vertebra in its spine. When I was working on my chapbook Automotive, I decided that my spine was “automobile=self-moving” and realized that every poem had to feature a self in motion, not just a car. This meant asking what it meant for a self to be in motion; making discoveries, I decided, transforming, or making decisions. Then it meant cutting poems that weren’t about a self in motion. But it also meant I could add a poem (even though technically there wasn’t a car in it) about going to the DMV for a new license because it was about moving forward through the world as a self, as a car-driving citizen.  Finding the spine took the project from a stack of poems about cars to a manuscript that explores how owning and traveling in a car reshapes a driver’s sense of self.

What I love most about the spine is how versatile it is.  I can use it revise a single poem, to discern which poems belong together in a manuscript, or to outline an essay. You could use it to structure your memoir or arrange a music album or put together a dinner menu. Maybe even to plan a road trip. I hope you’ll put it to good use this August.

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