The Writing Experiment by Hazel Smith

An example of a multilayered structure would be:

Example 3.9

Text A: word association (a)

Text B: person-in-action (a)

Text C: referent-based text (a)

Text A: word association (b)

Text B: person-in-action (b)

Text C: referent-based text (b)

Text A: word association (c)

Text B: person-in-action (c)

Text C: referent-based text (c)

A multilayered structure is rather like a multidecker sandwich in which
there is a layer of bread, a layer of tomato, a layer of bread, then a layer
of egg, a layer of bread, a layer of tomato again, and then another layer of
bread. So a multilayered structure alternates contrasting kinds of text, over
and over again, though with some variation. In Example 3.9 three distinct
types of text alternate, but each time the material comes back it will have
developed further. A structure can be multilayered in many different ways,
it can alternate stories or images or themes. This type of structure is often
used by novelists when they want to narrate several stories at once, or
poets when they wish to create complex relationships between different
sets of ideas or themes. A good example of a multilayered text is T.S. Eliot’s
‘The Waste Land’ (1963) which interconnects by this means a wealth of
historical and literary allusion. But multilayered structures are also
popular in TV soap operas, where the action often cuts backwards and
forwards between two or three different storylines.

Number

Numerical structures are built on an arithmetical count or limit, and this is
the focus of Exercise 1f. The number can be the basis of the sections in a text,
or the lines in a stanza, or the words or syllables in a line. For example, you
might decide to create a poem in which the first stanza is three lines long, the
second five lines, the third seven, and so on. Or you might decide to create a
poem which had twelve sections, each composed of twelve sentences. One
example might be increasing numbers of words per line in each stanza:

Example 3.10

stanza one: 3 lines and 3 words each line

stanza two: 5 lines and 5 words each line

Working out with structures 57