Most times I am writing about my own experience or a poem based on myth or fairy tale, so I start out with some idea of what I want to say about it. I may come up with related ideas as I go along. But sometimes a line comes to me very strongly all by itself and I may wind up heading in a different direction than I originally thought it would lead. I was quite upset once to hear that a neighbor was divorcing his sweet and rather helpless wife for a younger woman. As I thought about it, I came up with the line, "The prince is a frog. He doesn't want to change." But as I thought about it more, I realized that no one wants to change. And as I developed the idea of the frog prince, I wound up writing more and more about the man I live with and not about the neighbor at all, ending up with the line "The frog is a prince."
Susan
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