The Writing Experiment by Hazel Smith

One way to do this is to create three texts which start with a different
colour, and use word association as a means of development. The three
passages will consequently be similar in style and focus, but will all be dif-
ferent in the way they evoke and contextualise a particular colour. When
you have written the three passages you can join them together into a
seamless web, or keep them separate: an advantage of keeping them apart
is that the structure—what the building blocks are and how they are
arranged—will be strongly apparent. In this chapter I am laying the mech-
anism bare, but in practice writers often cover over the joins in the
structure so that they are not so apparent.
You can see that this is a more complex structure than just one word
association on its own, because the reader is being asked to consider the
relationship between the separate blocks of text. Similarly, you could build
a structure on three different persons-in-action:

Example 3.5

a) person a in action

b) person b in action

c) person c in action

Another type of variation, one which is evident in both the macrostruc-
ture and the microdetail of the poem, can be seen in ‘Poem: ‘‘In the stump
of the old tree.. .’’’ by British poet Hugh Sykes Davies:

Example 3.6

In the stump of the old tree, where the heart has rotted

out,/there is a hole the length of a man’s arm, and a dank pool at

the/bottom of it where the rain gathers, and the old leaves turn

into/lacy skeletons. But do not put your hand down to see, because

in the stumps of old trees, where the hearts have rotted

out,/there are holes the length of a man’s arm, and dank pools at

the/bottom where the rain gathers and old leaves turn to lace, and

the/beak of a dead bird gapes like a trap. But do not put your/hand

down to see, because

in the stumps of old trees with rotten hearts, where the

rain/gathers and the laced leaves and the dead bird like a trap,

there/are holes the length of a man’s arm, and in every crevice of

the/rotten wood grow weasel’s eyes like molluscs, their lids

open/and shut with the tide. But do not put your hand down to see,

because

Working out with structures 53