The Writing Experiment by Hazel Smith

use joining words such as ‘of ’ or ‘is’ which bind the words together into a
phrase, or employ the word ‘like’ to form a comparison. It often works well
if you follow a noun with a verb but there are many alternatives:

Example 1.22: Combinations from the word pool

time squats

sense wails

sense vomits

blood words

the clock’s drift

words fidget

time’s excrement

As you move through these language-based exercises, you may find that a
poem, or piece of prose, is emerging which leads you off on a tangent from
the exercise. By all means do submit to this process as it may lead towards
a really committed piece of writing. But also try, in other pieces, sticking
strictly to the exercise, so that you develop expertise with that technique.
You may also want to combine two of the exercises, such as word asso-
ciation and phrase permutation. Again begin by keeping them separate,
and then mix them if you wish.

RUNNING WITH THE REFERENT

So far we have been exploring language-based strategies, but sometimes
you will want to start with a specific idea, or event, as the basis of your
creative text. This is what I call a referent-based strategy (see Exercise 2).
Referent here means the object or event to which the text refers. The ref-
erent for a creative text can be an object, event or mood on which the text
is based. So if you write a poem about your unhappy love affair, you are
using the love affair as a referent. Some different types of referent are:

• object


• event


• idea


• emotion


• political issue.

You can see from this that anything can be a referent, even the most
mundane object. Once you realise this, it is very liberating because it
means that anything, however ordinary, can form the basis for your

18 The Writing Experiment