Duffy’s writing process for Survivor was very fascinating because most of the stanzas she began writing hardly look like the finished result. There were two stanzas that she completely eliminated for the final poem and it was the introduction and the concluding stanzas. The introduction stanza was questioned throughout her entire process after she initially wrote it. The final version of the eliminated stanza was “And will you write Be kind to the bearer of this? My understanding of time and space has collapsed. I am filled with a grief for all things gone”. This stanza is written in the tone of a type of disclaimer to the reader and a clear introduction and definition of the theme of the poem to follow. This is a kind of clarification we hadn’t seen throughout any of her poems in The Other Country. The fact that she doesn’t include it in her final version shows that she wants the reader to read the poem potentially more than once to fully understand the theme of the poem without it being too blatant.

The concluding stanza that she also eliminated was created later in her writing process and her initial completed version was “So I would like people to be kind where I am going. All of the harm. And to be allowed to sit alone in silence. All those days, nights. It is like an earthquake.” Duffy reduced this entire stanza to just the last line of her published poem “It is like an earthquake and no one to tell”. She deleted the part of the stanza where she explains what she desires from others and a potential solution to the sadness and yearning feeling she describes in the preceding stanzas. Perhaps Duffy did this because she wanted the solution to be left up to the reader’s imagination. In congruence with the introduction, by eliminating this stanza she is trying to reduce the blatancy of her message and theme in her poem.

Another interesting change to the poem, which wasn’t even answered in the notebook itself, is Leed’s gender. Throughout her pages on Survivor, she refers to Leeds as a girl when she says “I remember her now I can feel her wet young face in my hands”. These two lines came from Duffy’s last version of Survivor in her notebook. However, in the published collection Leeds is referred to as a “he”. This raises the question as to when this change was made and if it was made by her publishing company or by Duffy herself.