You have one voicemail. It will make you cry.

If I thought I had a demanding work schedule, Charlie Jordan’s puts me to shame. I’m driving up and down the country to various engagements but she’s up at 4am most mornings, broadcasting from Smooth FM at an hour when most of us can barely speak. In spite of that, she is still putting the time aside to write new material based on her residency at West Bromwich Albion FC. The piece she’s working on is a kind of anthem, combining West Brom’s history with her family’s own landmark experiences at the club.

We haven’t been able to meet up lately and voicemail is not the best way to deliver a sensitive critique – ‘Hi Charlie, sorry to miss you. Your poem is far too long. Why not butcher it savagely, put the last verse at the top, put the top verse at the bottom, insert a section based on Land of Hope and Glory and cut out the 24 lines which (as far as I know) are the whole point of the poem for you?’

So when Charlie sent me a couple of drafts – with an email which essentially read IT’S A DRAFT, OKAY? IT’S NOT A FINISHED POEM. IT’S A DRAFT – I did something that I usually avoid. To save time and to avoid going through the finer points one by one, I rewrote it Jo Bell-stylee, just to illustrate how a different pen might approach the same subject.

Charlie knows that I’m not saying ‘your poem is rubbish – write it like this, you oaf!’ I’m saying ‘IF this poem were mine, this is the part I would expand – these are the lines I would bin – these are the phrases that could be tightened to give them a better rhythm, a stronger sound. But it’s not mine. What do you think?’

Charlie can pick and choose from my comments, and might well reject them all. After all, she has to decide what story she wants to tell and she has to tell it in her own voice. But critiquing makes it possible to look at your own work through fresh eyes. I hope it’s helpful for her – it certainly was for me. Mentoring Charlie makes me think about how I write too. I ran a workshop yesterday and was reminded that looking closely at published work is a great way to examine your own strengths and weaknesses. Likewise, seeing Charlie’s work in progress is a rare privilege, giving behind-the-scenes access to another person’s writing process.