quotation in the first section with the metaphor of the birds, and the sense
of movement is also projected in the second stanza through a different
series of metaphors. My passage is in a quite different genre and style to
Anne’s passage, but it is strongly dependent on ideas generated in hers
(which in turn ‘dialogue’ with de Certeau). In this case the order of the sec-
tions reflects the sequence in which they were written. However, in many
other places we reordered the sections.
Collaboration is an area in which it is sometimes difficult to find good
models and examples. Although there were some early surrealist experi-
ments in collaborative writing near the beginning of the twentieth
century, and despite the fact that collaboration has grown in popularity, it
is still relatively rare amongst writers. However, Zoo by John Kinsella and
Coral Hull (2000), Sight by Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino (2000), and
Frances Presley and Elizabeth James’s Neither the One nor the Other (1999)
are three good examples of the collaborative form.
So far I have only talked about collaborating with writers, but collabo-
ration can also involve work with artists and musicians, where there is the
excitement of working across different media. These kinds of collabora-
tion will be addressed as part of Chapters 10 and 11.
CONCLUSION
In this chapter we have seen how dialogue is fundamental to language as
social interaction and have explored ways in which it relates to issues of
power. We have also seen how dialogue is not genre-specific: it can be part
of poems as well as plays and fictions. But dialoguing is a broad concept
useful for thinking about writing in general. A challenging text would tend
to converse with itself, to open up ambiguities and contradictions in the
form of different stances, registers or points of view. You may find dia-
loguing to be a creative stance which you want to adopt in a more general
way, and this may encourage you to write beyond the confines of your own
individual point of view. Collaborating with another person may also help
to make you more aware of how you can dialogue with yourself.
This chapter relates to the fictional strategies outlined in Chapters 5
and 7, but it has also taken us into the area of performance which will
be explored more fully in Chapter 10. And it has prepared us for cross-
genre forms (discussed in Chapter 9), in particular fictocriticism, which
dialogues between critical and creative work.
128 The Writing Experiment